This will be a list in parts. It won't be a "best of" list so much as a soundtrack of the first twenty five years of my life. This is a tenuous project-- and a slightly misleading one since the first five years of my life are a bit fuzzy. However, I have devoted a considerable amount of thought to this list (still thinking, that is).
This is my life with music.
I say this isn't a "best albums" list because even the haze of nostalgia can't mask the embarrassment of a Dokken or Stryper album. However, there is no doubt in my mind that the albums presented here merit rumination. Like the memory of my father sprawled out on the living room floor with a stack of lps perched above the record player needle, these albums are pieces of my life.
I am not ashamed.
Before I launch into my first selection, I'll add that I don't intend to share these in chronological order. Much like a smell can trigger long forgotten memories, these will be fragments as I find them.
Here we go.
25. Blood Sugar Sex Magik - Red Hot Chili Peppers
My senior year of high school isn't memorable in the ways that are typically associated with the "best years of our lives." I've never thought kindly of high school.
That year spanned 1991 and 1992, and it was marked primarily by Fifth Wheel, Wayne's World, C.S. Lewis, a rejection letter from NC State, and the chicken pox.
I remember the onset of the chicken pox pretty vividly because I'd driven without my parents to a swim meet in my father's white Silverado pick-up truck. A team mate went with me and we both shared a room with our coach, Ray, an interesting character whom I will probably write about at some later date.
I swam fine the first day, but started feeling a little feverish that evening. We went to see Wayne's World that night and I started getting hard core shivers. I barely remember watching the movie (I'd already seen it, anyway). I was too busy trying to stop my whole body from shaking. On the way back to the hotel, the shivering became uncontrollable. I'd never had a fever like it before. I didn't sleep well that night, but didn't tell anyone I was feeling badly.
The next morning at the pool, I noticed a spot or two on my stomach. My coach asked me if I'd ever had chicken pox and I said I thought so. I thought I had. I made a collect call to my parents and when I asked about having had chicken pox, my father simply said, "No. Why don't you go ahead and come on home."
I spent one horrible week in pain, trying everything to stop the itching, freaking out at the horror that was me covered in nasty little blisters. At one point, my mother gave me a Percocet leftover from when my brother had his wisdom teeth pulled. Fever, horror, and the drugs mixed with my reading of C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and induced some heady delusions.
The pain, fever and spots turned to scabs and embarrassment. I stayed home for another week.
What does any of this have to do with the Red Hot Chili Peppers? It was the soundtrack for my trip down to and back from the swim meet. My brother had introduced me to it a few weeks before, but I'd only recently bought my own copy of it. It bears mentioning that my first copy of Blood Sugar Sex Magik was a cassette tape. And even though it bore the Parental Advisory - Explicit Lyrics badge, I had no problems purchasing it at the now defunct Record Exchange in Greensboro.
1991 and 1992 were good years for me, musically speaking. Though Blood Sugar was released in '91, it didn't get heavy rotation until the spring of '92. I'll add that it figured prominently in my first year of college as well.
In a lot of ways, Blood Sugar represents a pretty significant shift in my musical tastes. Until this point, I'd been listening mostly to the other "big albums" of the early '90s-- specifically, Pearl Jam's Ten and Nirvana's Nevermind. I was also enamored with The Replacements and Drivn n' Cryin'. So the funk/rock fusion of the Chili Peppers was quite a departure. That could be why I loved it so much. It was new and different. Powerful, raw, funky, and dirty. There was something quite innocent about a 17 year old virgin belting out the lines of "Sir Psycho Sexy" with passion and longing.
The world at large latched onto the softer tracks from the album. Do you remember the really silly video for "Under the Bridge"? I do. But I also remember the hard beats and crunchy guitar of "Suck My Kiss," the anthemic pulse of "The Power of Equality," and the strut and jive of "Apache Rose Peacock." It wasn't until years later that I got down to New Orleans, but it was already familiar-- filtered through Anthony Kiedis's visceral imagery.
For the bulk of my late teens and early twenties, this album remained high on my list of all time favorites. And any time I pondered a "desert island top five," it would always be there. In fact, when I began listing albums for this project, it was the first one that came to mind. This is an album that I can always go back to and enjoy. It not only represents a time in my life, it remains an all around great, cohesive collection of tunes.
24. Outlandos D'Amour - The Police
The memory is one I cherish-- mainly because it is one of the few that I can still call to mind from that long ago. I don't even remember how old I was at the time. The time frame is somewhere between the release date of this album (1978) and 1984, the year the Kapicas moved to North Carolina.
That puts me somewhere between four and nine…
Here's the memory:
Some neighbors from across the street were having a yard sale. I think maybe they were moving. We went over to peruse the junk and found great treasure: two reel-to-reel tape recorders. One was larger than the other. The smaller of the two was "portable" because it had a black plastic strap by which it could be lugged around. My parents bought both of them, one for me and one for my brother.
My brother, Jon, took the larger of the two. I think because he thought it the better of the two. Even at that age (between seven and twelve) he had a knack for all things with wires. He'd already broken a screwdriver in an electrical socket trying to "rewire" the basement. Years later, he spent hours in the music studio at Weaver Education Center in Greensboro recording local bands, as well as his own.…
Anyway, at the time of our tape recorder acquisition, Jon had already started borrowing albums from a friend's cool older brothers. This is where The Police come in. Jon had borrowed Outlandos D'Amour. It was already on heavy rotation in the Kapica household.
Keeping everything ultra hi-fi, I recorded Outlandos onto my new tape recorder from our record player's speaker.
The highlight of the memory:
With my tape recorder, I would close myself in the closet and listen to The Police. My favorite song was "Be My Girl (Sally)." I would listen to this song over and over again, repeating as best I could the spoken word part-- British accent and all.
So there I was, a small boy in a closet singing a song about a man who finds love with a blow-up doll.
Episodes like this convince me that Tipper Gore's tirade against indecent lyrics was time misspent. Not only didn't my parents care, but I don't think I actually understood the lyrics until I was in my late teens…
*****
Jon bought his first cd player in 1987. This was long before cd players became household items and cd purchases eclipsed tape sales. Hell, this was long before they did away with the long box (do you remember the long box?). Cds were still expensive-- a good five to ten bucks more than tapes-- and since I didn't have a job, I had little room for such extravagancies.
So, after a particularly good, cash-filled birthday, I made my way over to the now defunct Peaches on High Point Road in Greensboro and bought two cds-- the first two I ever bought. One of those cds was Outlandos D'Amour.
I still have that cd, though the case is cracked and scratched.
Like my first entry on this list (Blood Sugar Sex Magic), Outlandos D'Amour is an album that I have no trouble going back to. Every time I listen to this gem of late seventies ground-breaking reggae-infused punk, I feel like a kid again. In fact, whenever I teach William Carlos Williams poem, "The Danse Russe," I mention Outlandos. The poem is essentially about those moments of joy (and horror) that we experience when there's no one else around. Williams writes of enjoying some alone time in the wee hours of the morning ("Who shall say I am not / the happy genius of my household?"). Whenever I listen to Outlandos-- alone at home, really loud-- I dance like a bloody fool. And it feels good, and right.
Outlandos is full of great tracks; the pace is set with the opener "Next to You," and it rarely slows from this point on. This is not a bad thing.
A majority of the songs deal with typical rock themes of unrequited and spurned love, but there's also the red light classic "Roxanne." And dare I suggest that "Be My Girl (Sally)" smacks of a modern Pygmalion? Sting, the school teacher turned rocker, was always more literate (and pompous) than the usual bounty of rocker-wanna-be-poets (take that lizard king!). I am particularly fond of "Born in the 50s." True, it speaks of a different generation (for my generation, think Fruit Bats's "Born in the 70s"), but I have always been encouraged by Sting's assertion "We were the class they couldn't teach / Because we knew better."
Having said that… What the hell is a "Masoko Tango"?! Well, frankly, I don't care. Sometimes all a song needs is some incomprehensible yelling. Or rather, sometimes all I need is to do some incomprehensible yelling (and dancing…
I'll add this as well: I'm getting too old to dogmatically remember every song lyric of every album I purchase, but there was a time when this was simply the norm. Outlandos? Yeah, I can sing-a-long to every lyric on this album-- while waving my shirt 'round my head nonetheless!
*****
Last week's Entertainment Weekly printed a sidebar about upcoming (rumored) reunions and I was surprised to see The Police listed. I guess I shouldn't have been that surprised (to quote Bruce Hornsby, "that's just the way it is"), but I have read about The Police-- and watched the Behind the Music. I know that these guys didn't exactly part on good terms. They made great music because they all had such strong personalities-- and because they never really agreed on what their sound should be. Sting was the pop and cheese. Stewart was the reggae and rhythm. And Andy was… well, just weird. Together they rocked. But they also fought. And so, only a handful of years after Outlandos, they broke up. Even their short-lived reunion was, well, short-lived.
But if they do decide to join the ranks of the reunions? I will definitely be there.
I'll end this second installment with this:
Outlandos D'Amour is one of those rare musical finds that will always reduce me to a singin' and dancin' fool.
23. Small Change - Tom Waits
My transition from boy to not-quite-man is probably most marked by my introduction to Tom Waits. While I can claim an easy handful of life influences ranging from all walks of art, music, and literature, Tom Waits helped move my mind and writing from adolescent fascination with fantasy and science fiction (oh, the poems, oh the horror) to a floundering adult life--- drinking, staying up late, smoking cigars, and identifying with the "beats" as reflected in Waits's travelogues and jazz balladry.
I can thank my good friend Michael McDonald for introducing me to T. Waits. I first borrowed his cassette of the Asylum Years (now out of print in the U.S.) when I was a senior in high school. This borrowing soon led to Nighthawks at the Diner and Rain Dogs. I listened to all with growing interest. But it was "Tom Traubert's Blues," collected on Asylum Years, that haunted me. When it came time to make my first CD Waits purchase, I hunted down and bought Small Change.
Anyway. I was a freshman in college. Glad to be there, but a bit disoriented. The usual freshman bonding experiences eluded me. My orientation wasn't entirely orienting. I didn't connect to my floor mates. And, true to form, I snuck out of my "orientation" activities early--- to go to Lollapalooza (I still have my Pearl Jam tee-shirt). My father drove me back up the mountain early in the morning (NPR and Bojangles biscuits) and dropped me off just in time to make my very first (and only) eight o'clock class. Was it Freshman Composition? I can't remember.
Anyway, it didn't take long to settle into the rhythm of my college dorm life. Soon I was ordering pizza from ASU food services, swiping my ID card in the soda machines, and gaining weight by the week.
This eventually led to late night card games on the hall. I wasn't out there at first. I was shy. Actually, I was in love with some blonde tart from back home and spent a lot of my time pining in my room alone, listening to The Cure on my Sony Discman and playing Solitaire and Mine Sweeper on my amber-screened PC.
When I joined the din in the hall common room (an alcove by the elevators, a couple couches and chairs), the "boys" were playing spoons with taped up plastic-wear from the cafeteria. These teenage boy-men, left to their own devices, had been playing so hard that they kept breaking the plastic spoons.
It is with some pride that I admit my influence on the lot of them: I suggested that, instead of taping up cheap spoons, we play Spades. After that, the spoons disappeared and the Spades tournaments began.
I took as my partner a loveable lug named Tim Mead. He didn't make it past that first year. I bought his GT mountain bike before he packed up and went back home, and he gave me my third Tom Waits disc, Closing Time (I've since replaced the album three times).
Where was I? Okay. So I settled into dorm life, college life, etc. I wound up bombing two classes that fall because of irresponsibility and Spades, but I spent a lot of time listening to Tom Waits. I quickly went from Small Change to Bone Machine (an odd jump that shows, I think, a deep resonance with the Waits-meister's entire catalog), then to Foreign Affairs. I distinctly remember Tim telling me, after I'd made him a copy of Foreign Affairs, that listening to "A Sight For Sore Eyes" helped calm him down while battling it out with his parents. He found Tom's line about "palookas" particularly comforting.
All of this is to say that Tom Waits infiltrated my adolescent mind (somewhere between high school and college) and helped me make it through my freshman year (and beyond). He helped me understand what it meant to be, not necessarily adult, but grown. True. I didn't have a life like his, or even like the lives he rhapsodized in his songs, but that was kind of the point. His drunken travelogues grounded me. All it took was bombing "Intro to Psych" and "Geology" to get my ass on track. I made the dean's list my second semester. My floor mates playing cards until four in the morning? Most of them were gone by the end of that first year.
Hell, I can only remember one from that floor who graduated on time with me.
My point? I figured some important things out that first year (things I now share with every class I teach), and I attribute some of my success in college to the "lessons" I learned from Tom Waits. His music offered an escape, and it was (still is) seductive. But, had I simply taken his words at face value (read: drink a lot and often), then I might have wound up a fixture in bars and degreeless. Instead, I spent so much time with Waits that I found more than a glorification of boozing and endless roaming: Life is messy. Everyone has problems. Drinking helps with life.
But drinking doesn't fix life's problems. And drinking too much creates more problems.
In this, then, I was able to separate myself from the self-destruction that permeated Tom Waits's songs--- and, in turn, I side-stepped the destruction waiting on the other side of my dorm room door.
Let's take this moment to segue into one of the key tracks from Small Change, "The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)." On the surface, this song plays on a simple conceit: The narrator performs a drunken piano ballad in which he tries to blame the piano for his own drunkenness--- while at the same time he criticizes everyone (and everything) in the bar. One can imagine a whiskey-soaked lounge singer lazily plodding through a simple melody while attempting to sing his failures into accusatory metaphors.
Any initiate into the world of Waits will quickly find parallels between the narrator of the song and Waits himself. He was a drunk and a self-styled beatnik. A piano player who played bars to more-or-less unaffected crowds. A musician who fully embraced the characters that he presented in his songs. As a result of this, the listening public pigeonholed him. He, in turn, milked it for all it was worth (which wasn't much, monetarily speaking). (Later, he scrapped the whole image and "style," got married, and proceeded to make some of the most inventive albums of the last three decades…)
But logic dictates more. Especially when you consider the breadth of Small Change. From its opener, the sweeping strings of "Tom Traubert's Blues," to the spoken word noir of the title track. From the booze soaked lilt of "Jitterbug Boy," to the swing of "I Can't Wait To Get Off Work," to the visceral, street-beat foot-stomping, lurid poetry of "Pasties and a G-String."
All of this adds up to a beautifully executed album, the kind we rarely get now that the limits of vinyl and CD have given way to mp3's and itunes. Small Change is a complete package. And it most certainly is not the simple ramblings of a drunken lounge singer. As I mentioned above, Waits's deep embrace of beatnik culture and his own artistic vision only served to perpetuate the myth of Tom Waits. But the album transcends that myth.
One need only look a little deeper, listen a little while longer.
I've been listening to Small Change for fifteen years now, and it still mystifies and entices me. It also reminds me of how young I was--- how stupid I was--- when I started college. It also reminds me of how much I got out of college.
I'll end with this: Tom Waits also inspired a significant portion of my early writing. I am going to include a hold over from that period, a poem entitled "Tom Traubert's Exit." It's not that good, but I think it does belong here.
Tom Traubert’s Exit
I felt like the opening bars of Ol’ 55.
Something about the combination
of notes,
of thoughts,
of feelings
cast into tense strings through
polished ivory.
And his voice,
an intense burning
turned to coals,
an ash dwindling
at the end of a cigarette, a somber
red mirrored in a swelled eye, diffused by
smoke filled light, glazed with knowledge
and motion.
Stars begin to fade like scattered headlights
and ‘Closed’ signs in
store front windows,
inviting contemplation of absence
and withered expectations,
like truckers welcome diners
and salesmen welcome empty rooms,
like poets fear the dark and paintings
of revolution.
But the piano keeps a steady rhythm in a
disheveled ear, warms a gut with simmering
affection and weathered
wisdom.
And then he was gone,
riding with lady luck on an empty
highway,
wishing he could stay
but knowing his ol’ 55 wouldn’t
let him.
* This blog contains three of the twenty-five albums. Future installments will be posted separately.
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