To Bring You My Love

I remember specifically the first time I heard To Bring You My Love twenty-five years ago. I was visiting an ex-roommate’s new apartment. We had spent years building a friendship based on comic books and music, something that has never changed. We were hanging out in his room. He had just picked up the CD and knew I would want to hear it.

It wasn’t the first time I had heard PJ Harvey, of course. When we lived together he had purchased all three of her prior albums, and I had seen the few videos that MTV played on 120 Minutes. While I liked Dry and Rid of Me neither had really captured me as a fan at that time. But something about To Bring You My Love resonated immediately. The sound grabbed my ear in a way her previous efforts had not. I probably couldn’t have told you that day that this would become one of my desert island albums, but I knew I was instantly in love.

I don’t have the language to describe it in musical terms, and I realize that so much of what I love about it is personal and subjective. The word that comes to mind for much of the album is resonant. Polly’s voice is deep and echoing, vulnerable and powerful at the same time. The rhythms that underlie this album, on guitar as well as the drums, feel disjointed to me with emphasis in unusual places. I want to say syncopated, but my musician friends may disagree. The bass notes rumble with distortion, reverberating in the chest like a broken heart.

But for me it is not just the sonic qualities that make the album special. Through her lyrics and imagery PJ creates a mythic landscape worthy of Faulkner and O’Connor, gothic and rural in texture. Depending on the song Polly embodies the wronged woman, or maybe an angel working for God, or maybe a woman imbued with magic who you believe has her voodoo working. There is mourning: for lost relationships, lost children, and a loss of faith. She begins the album by telling us she has laid with the devil and by the end you not only believe her, you realize it’s the devil who is in trouble. There is righteous power in her voice, a feminine power, that of the goddess. When she says ‟I think I’m a mother,” I hear her stating not a biological fact (though that is certainly implied), but invoking the Mother who is the matrix of creativity, as well as destruction.

On that first listen at my friend’s apartment I remember saying to him, ‟I think she’s been listening to a lot of Nick Cave.” That wasn’t meant as a criticism or complaint. In addition to there being a sonic resemblance Cave, at that point in his career, had spent a lot of time creating music in a similar narrative world. For whatever reasons, this is a world that speaks to me. Some of it is, no doubt, just the movies and books I’ve been exposed to. Some of it is having grown up in a northern Appalachian home with our own folk tales of love and murder and angels and devils. It’s a world I feel in my bones.

Not long after this PJ and Nick recorded a duet version of the classic folk tune Henry Lee as part of his Murder Ballads album (the internet tells me Henry Lee, like many traditional ballads, has many different versions, and is based on a tune called Young Hunting). In the video PJ and Nick are dressed in matching black suits, emphasizing their shared traits. The video fairly sizzles with sexual tension and not long after they engaged in a brief love affair in real life. Nick managed to get a lot of songs out of it for his next album, The Boatman’s Call (well worth your time to listen to), while Polly, like with most things in her personal life, simply never talked about it.

This was also a period where PJ was experimenting with her stage persona. During Dry and Rid of Me she typically performed wearing basic black jeans and leather jackets, with her hair pulled back severely and very little makeup. To Bring You My Love was kind of her Glam period, in dress if not in content. On the album cover and in the video for Down By the Water she has big hair and bright red lipstick that matches her shimmery ballgown. In concert she would sometimes wear gold catsuits, or a bright pink bodysuit and gaudy fake eyelashes. Anyone who knows me knows I’m a sucker for stage costumes, as my love of Bowie and Alice Cooper and Adam Ant, among many others, attest to. The live clips from this era are some of my favorites of hers.

From Hooligan Magazine

I’m sorry to say I didn’t get to see PJ on that tour. If my research is correct she has only ever played the Pittsburgh area twice in her thirty year career: once supporting Live at Star Lake (or whatever it was being called at the time), and once supporting U2 at Mellon Arena. I have seen her several times since then in Washington DC. My first time was for her next album, Is This Desire?, at the 9:30 Club. I saw her twice when she was touring for Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, shows which bookended her jaunt with U2. The first of these ranks among my top concert experiences ever. In late 2000 PJ knew she was going to be touring with U2. She wanted to break in a new live band. Rather than mount a major solo tour she played a few, small, and relatively unannounced shows at small venues. I was on a PJ mailing list at the time and found out about a show at the Black Cat in DC, and somehow manged to score tickets. The Black Cat, while having a history of some pretty amazing shows, is essentially a small bar. I stood about three feet from the stage and about five feet from PJ. She brought me, and everyone else in the room, her love that night.

The next time I saw her was about ten months later with the same band at the 9:30 Club the night before 9/11. I remember reading a statement from her at the time that she had been awakened in her hotel room by what turned out to be a plane crashing into the Pentagon.

A trait PJ shares with some of my other favorite artists, most notably David Bowie and Nick Cave, is her willingness to experiment and never stand still with her music. Her career has been a constant change of sound, ideas, and presentation. This keeps an artist from getting stale, but also runs the risk of losing fans if they veer too far from made you love them in the first place. While I am still interested in PJ’s career, and will no doubt own whatever she releases next on the day it comes out, I do fully admit I have not been a big fan of her last few albums. She hasn’t done anything to just drive me away, but her output has not spoken to me in the same way as in the past. I’m a different person now, and so is she. The next album may be my favorite thing ever. Or not. I’ll still be there with her in some capacity.

While I have not been as enamored of her later work she has recently been giving new life to some of her old. This summer saw the release of the Demo versions of her first album, Dry. These were recorded by Polly on a 4-track recorder in her home studio, I believe before she had a recording contract. They are sparse, and bring a new experience to these seminal and formative songs. This not the first time we have heard her demos. My memory tells me that she was, ultimately, not happy with the production of her second album Rid of Me and not long after its release she also released and album entitled simply 4-Track Demos, featuring her own recordings of most of the album (plus a couple of extras that didn’t make the cut.

This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of To Bring You My Love, and a couple of weeks ago she released the demo version. What struck me most upon listening to it was just how fully formed it was in this early raw version. For many of the tracks, most of them actually, the differences between this and the official release are incredibly subtle. I can tell these are different vocal tracks, but mainly because this is one of the albums I’ve listened to most in my life. The guitars and drums are nearly identical. The biggest difference is on the final song of the album, The Dancer. On the demo version the guitar has a Spanish Flamenco tone and rhythm, which was replaced by a more droning, quickly strummed electric guitar. What was weird when I heard this though was that I had to actually go back and check to make sure I wasn’t imagining this. The Flamenco guitar was indeed not present on the version I was familiar with, but somehow it had been implied by the rest of the song to such a degree that I imagined hearing it, so uch so that the Demo version, while different, still sounded like something my brain already knew. Now, by this point of her career Polly had access to better equipment and had more studio experience than with demos for Dry, and that probably accounts for a lot of the fidelity of this project, but I think a lot of it was simply the strength of her vision of what this album was meant to be from very early on.

In some ways I’m disappointed with the Demos version. I was expecting something more raw, or something in a more formative state. It’s so close to the studio album that only someone really, really familiar with it can really hear the differences. I guess I am that person, and digging through the subtleties of this has been rewarding, just in a different way than what I expected. It is insight into the process of one of my favorite artists, and taking it along with the demo versions of PJ’s first two albums it’s fascinating to see how quickly she grew, as a songwriter and musician as well as in confidence and skill.

To Bring You My Love was a critical success, if not a giant financial one. At the end of that year it was celebrated as the ‟Best Album of the Year” by the majority of the music press. I remember seeing PJ on many music magazine covers (remember those?).  MTV, who I’m sure played the video for Down by the Water at least twice nominated it for ‟Best Female Video” at their annual awards show. But that was the year of Alanis Morrisette and Jagged Little Pill and no one else stood a chance to get that little astronaut statue.

Twenty-five years later it's still an album that is lodged in my heart and brain. Like all of the music we claim as our own, the music that defines portions of our lives, my thoughts and feelings about it are wrapped up in things beyond the songs. It became a part of the soundtrack of my life at that, simply because I played it so much. It still reminds me of specific people and places and events. Playing now involves a little bit of time travel to a special time.

Thanks, Polly.

To Bring You My Love on Spotify

1001 Albums

This past week I finished a personal project that I have been working on since June, 2014. It has been a long but rewarding journey. I don’t have a finished product to share with the world, just a lot of thoughts and insights about the process.

In 2014 a friend told me about a book called 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, edited by Robert Dimery. As a fan of all kinds of music, that sounded like a challenge. I began the process with an online list available at https://www.discogs.com/lists/1001-Albums-You-Must-Hear-Before-You-Die/18222. For some reason, there are albums left off the chronological Discogs list. For some reason it also ends with #975. I ended up buying the 2010 edition of the book (it has been updated with new entries since then).

Many of the albums are ones I have heard many, many times. There were others that were completely new to me, some by artists I had never heard of. Most fell someplace in the middle, artists and albums I knew about but had never heard in their entirety. I listened to them through my own collection, via Spotify (and yes, I’m aware of some of the problems with Spotify and what artists make from it), and in a few rare instances, through YouTube. Even with all of this there were some, a very small percentage, that were simply not readily available that I have not heard (considering the ‟before you die caveat”, maybe I’m better off not actually hearing all 1001).

So I embarked, starting with In The Wee Small Hours by Frank Sinatra in 1955 and ending with It’s Blitz by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in 2009. I listened in order and gave everything at least two listens (with a couple of exceptions for things that I really, really didn’t like... I’m looking at you, Cannibal Corpse). I didn’t stop listening to other albums, new stuff as it came out or as I discovered it outside the confines of the list, or old favorites as the whim occurred. But every week I would create a playlist of whatever the next few of the 1001 albums came next.

The introduction to the book gives some of their rationale, but of course any list like this is open to debate and disagreement. Soundtracks with multiple artists were left off, so Saturday Night Fever, one of the best-selling albums of all time was not included. Purple Rain was allowed because it is essentially a Prince album. It was not just popular chart-toppers. The Velvet Underground and The Stooges are everyone’s top examples of bands that influenced everyone but sold no records when they were actually together, so they were rightfully on the list.

It was a list that included many genres, though Rock and it’s relatives were the most represented. There were a few Jazz classics included. Bitches Brew by Miles Davis was there, of course. Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, and Duke Ellington are there, among a few others. Country seems to be underrepresented to me, with a couple of live Johnny Cash, two of Willie Nelson’s 70s records, a Merle Haggard and a Loretta Lynn and very little else. Hair Metal was huge in the 80s and most of it is completely ignored. Disco, considering how omnipresent it was in the 70s, felt fairly absent with only two albums by Chic really representing the genre. Nile Rogers went on to be a major force in many contexts, so Chic is understandable, but no Donna Summer? Maybe it’s because Disco was such a singles oriented movement that there simply weren’t any whole albums that met whatever criteria they used.

Rap and Hip Hop were pretty well-represented and my ears are much more ready for it now than at the time, so I’m glad for the opportunity to listen to it with a more open mind than I originally had (and some thanks for that goes to Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree graphic novel series for giving a social context I simply didn’t have before). Public Enemy speaks of an experience I will never have but they gave voice to that experience in ways that are important for me to hear. Ice T spoke truths about society that are still true. Tribe Called Quest and Missy Elliot made me want to groove. Ice Cube did nothing for me at all.

I was surprised at how many classic albums I had never heard in their entirety. Records and CDs are expensive and until the advent of streaming music services it just wasn’t possible. I’m familiar with the hits of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but until this project I had never listened to a full album. The same was true for Simon and Garfunkel, and The Band, and many, many others. I consider myself a huge music fan, but these are incredible gaps in my experience.

Listening to it in order was fascinating. I could hear the various eras of music and the sounds they encapsulated. I could also hear the slow changes as they came about. The Stooges are usually mentioned as an early influence on Punk, but I could hear how Glam led there as well. Then the first album by The Dictators showed up and there was an ear-opening moment of recognition of that being where a lot of the later sound came from. It was also interesting to realize the very different things that were happening at the same time and hearing them juxtaposed gave a much larger picture of any given moment in music history. One of the clearest examples of this for me was listening to Thriller by Michael Jackson followed immediately by Junkyard by the the Birthday Party (one of Nick Cave’s early bands), both released in 1982. I have both of these on my Ipod and am familiar with both, but I can’t think of too many more dissimilar examples to show up back-to-back on the list.

Some artists feel over-represented. The Beatles, obviously, though I am a fan and understand this. Both Elton John and Stevie Wonder have a raft of their 70s releases on the list, though it’s difficult to argue with any of them. David Bowie is also well-represented, which is no surprise.

I was happy to see some of my personal favorite but more obscure artists show up. Lloyd Cole and The Commotions Rattlesnakes is an all time top favorite of mine and it was there (no other Lloyd Cole made the list though he has released many, many albums). Japan has a single entry with Quiet Life (the one I would have chosen). It’s interesting to note that KISS, a much more successful and well known band, than Lloyd Cole and Japan (and my favorite band as a teen), also has only one album on the list with Destroyer (also the one I would have chosen).

Some choices seemed strange to me, based on personal taste and my own knowledge of music. Could a Nine Inch Nails fan explain to me why The Downward Spiral is here instead of Pretty Hate Machine? As a huge fan of PJ Harvey I was happy to see Dry, Rid of Me, and Stories From the City Stories From the Sea on the list. All great albums, but for me To Bring You My Love is the record where she branched out and really established herself as a creative force (like Rattlesnakes, this is a desert island disc for me, so maybe I can’t see it clearly). Nick Cave is on the list a couple of times, as he should be, but I can name at least five of his releases that aren’t represented that are better than the Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus​ double album. Alice Cooper only made the list in the context of the full lineup of the original Alice Cooper Group and his solo work was ignored. With the exception of Welcome to my Nightmare that’s probably how it should be.

Then, of course there are the artists who hold a special meaning to me that aren’t on the list, and as much as I might love them I understand why they’re not here. The Sweet had thirteen top ten hits in England and Europe, but other than Ballroom Blitz and Fox on the Run they’re fairly unknown in the States. They were mostly a singles band anyway, so even though Give Us a Wink was a seminal album in my youth, I can’t say I’m surprised they didn’t make the cut. Likewise bands like The Nails (who really should be known for more than their one 80s hit 88 Lines About 44 Women), and The Vapors (Turning Japanese), and The Jazz Butcher, and The Epoxies, all of whom I love, but even I can’t really make an argument for inclusion.

As may be expected, even though I listen to music from a lot of eras and styles, I did find my interest in the list waning in the 90s and 00s. While I am open to new things I recognize that very little is going to move me in the same way that my earliest experiences of becoming a fan did. The mid-70s up through the late 80s was my prime period of discovery and it is the sounds of that time that resonate with me most strongly. There are exceptions, of course. Both Nick Cave and PJ Harvey are primarily 90s phenomenons for me, and they are easily in my all time fave list. I really got into the White Stripes for about three albums. But, in general, I didn’t discover a lot of new stuff from the later era that moved me. This is not me saying that new music sucks. I’m sure someone fifteen to twenty years younger than me would have a very different experience with this list. Or fifteen to twenty years older.

There is so much more to this experience... Artists and genres I haven’t mentioned. New-to-me things I loved, things I didn’t like at all. Being reminded of stuff I used to like and had forgotten about. Putting together the pieces and following the influences and drawing the connections between. Finding new musical trails to follow. Delving deeper into an artist’s catalog than just the one or two albums represented here. Insights I had about the world and myself in relation to the music.

The biggest problem is now that I’m done I’m at a bit of a loss as to what to listen to next. I’ve grown used to having my weekly listening chosen for me.

Music is so personal that there is no right or wrong or definitive ‟Best Of” list. Certain sounds move you, or they don’t. They speak your language, or they don’t. Part of my reason for working my way through this was to expose myself to new languages and see what I could learn. A lot of it moved me. A lot of it didn’t. But I am richer for the experience. I have more music in my soul.

And that is never a bad thing.

Wanna live better days

‟When did music become so important?” Don Draper asked in the first episode of Season 5 of Mad Men (“A Little Kiss”). His young wife Megan responds, ‟It’s always been important.”

By this episode the show was set in the mid 1960s, so this spoke to an obvious generation gap. Both characters are right, in their context. Music has always been important. It just wasn’t until the 50s and 60s that it became a dominant cultural force that informed and influenced millions of people. Radio and records and other advancements of technology, as well as the vast expansion of youth culture, made this possible in ways that people of Don Draper’s generation just couldn’t quite comprehend.

This has been true for fiftyish years, with The Beatles appearance on Ed Sullivan as the hundredth monkey tipping point that changed the world in this regard. I’m sure a quick Google perusal of the internet will turn up thousands of articles about the larger cultural ramifications of this. The point has also been made that this is something that is specific to this moment in time and that in many ways we have already moved past it.

That isn’t meant as a ‟Rock is Dead!” declaration. It’s an acknowledgement that the world has kept on moving and that the cultural forces that led to this are no longer present. The internet has changed the way we consume music and interact with those who make it. For all the success of a Lady Gaga or a Justin Bieber it just doesn’t seem like any of the current batch of stars have the social relevance or staying power of the artists who preceded them. I know how much that sounds like an old guy decrying ‟Back in my day!!!” but that’s truly not my intention. I want new artists to succeed. More importantly I want young people to have the same kinds of joyous experiences with music, live and otherwise, that I have had. I don’t know if that’s possible anymore, for much larger reasons than the cliched and wrong-headed opinion that they ‟just don’t make good music anymore.” I just don’t think there is the same kind of infrastructure that will allow for a David Bowie, or a Madonna, or a U2 or an REM to emerge, let alone enjoy the longevity and social relevence of these and many other artists. I hope I’m wrong.

I’m currently reading a book of essays by Chuck Klosterman called ‟But What if We’re Wrong?” that addresses the idea that in the future everything we think we know about the present will be wrong. The things we think are important now will be seen through the eyes of history and retrospect with a much wider perspective than we are currently capable of. As proof of this he reminds us of the way we interpret history now. Van Gogh and Kafka were failures in their lives but now one is the most famous artist ever and the other has joined the very framework of our language as an adjective. Custer was once seen as an American hero. Now he’s thought of as a genocidal maniac. Try convincing a farmer in the Dark Ages that we live in a heliocentric universe. The world keeps turning and our reality keeps changing around us and for the most part, in our limited time here and limited sense of perspective, we just don’t notice. We assume things will always be the way they are until they aren’t. I can’t imagine a world without pop music and the music industry in it, but then one hundred years ago people couldn’t imagine a world with instantaneous global communication. Or one without polio.

So Rock and Roll, and all of the variations of popular music associated with it, for all of its importance to those of us who care, may be a minor blip in the course of history, generating little more than a footnote in whatever passes for a college textbook in the year 2112.

To quote Jeff Albertson, the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, ‟Oh, I’ve wasted my life.”

The thing is, this is true for pretty much everything we currently engage in. No matter how much we love something, no matter how much we think it is an essential part of our culture, no matter how much it defines our lives (I’m looking at you, sports fans), history says it not only won’t last but will probably be marginalized and misunderstood by future scholars.

So, if we accept this nihilistic point of view, why get really into anything other than the mechanics of survival? I’ll get back to that.

I am certainly part of the generation that was born into a world where music has always been a defining cultural artifact, and I’m very aware of how this has shaped and influenced my way of interacting with the world. For me, like Megan said, music has always been important. And by important I mean in ways that go well beyond simply liking a song. I am admittedly a music hobbyist who engages with it in a less-than-casual fashion. I continually look for new music. I get obsessive over musicians and want to know about them as personalities, looking into their lives and biographies much deeper than most people do. Music has always been a soundtrack to my day-to-day that went beyond just being in the background.

I grew up in an incredibly rural area. My parents were in their early 40s when I was born. My paternal grandmother, who lived with us, was born in 1884. I was surrounded by adults who had grown to adulthood in a very different world than the one I would come to inhabit. Until I was twelve I lived in a small two-story six-room house of bare, unpainted wood with a tin roof. We did not have running water. There was a hand-dug water well with a hand pump in the front yard and an outhouse in the back yard. I’m not complaining here. I actually have very good memories of growing up there and I believe those circumstances taught me valuable life lessons. But something in me yearned for more.

Comic books and music were the twin explosions of color in my sepia-toned Appalachian youth, and they have always had a natural association in my mind. Comics took me to cities and other countries and other planets and other dimensions. The colorfully costumed heroes taught me to dream bigger dreams and to imagine a world beyond the confines of the hollow I grew up in.

Music was always present in my home. Dad had played guitar and mandolin in a Hillbilly band with his uncle and cousins when he was young. His mother played piano and the accordion. That whole side of the family had musical talent, but because of age I never really had the opportunity to experience it first-hand. But there was always a radio in the house, usually tuned to WWVA from Wheeling, West Virginia, home of country music. I remember latching onto songs like Tiger by the Tail by Buck Owens, and Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash, and Counting Flowers on the Wall by the Statler Brothers (probably because they name-checked Captain Kangaroo, who I was big fan of when I was four). These are overt memories for me. I was into songs.

The British Invasion and the Beatles and the whole eruption of the music industry in the 60s began to be woven into the fabric of everything aimed at youth. I saw ads for Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in comic books. The image of the T.Rex album The Slider stands out as an image that stared at me from the double page ads for record clubs I saw in every comic.

The Beatles had a Saturday morning cartoon. So did the Jackson 5. The Monkees were a weekly live action pastiche of Beatles inspired frenzy. The Banana Splits, Josie and the Pussycats and the Groovie Ghoulies had weekly music videos interspersed with every episode. The cartoon version of the Archies had the #1 hit song in 1969 with Sugar Sugar. This hit launched Bubblegum Pop which led directly to a lot of what became the Glam Rock movement in Great Britain. David Bowie and Elton John were singing about Spacemen. Alice Cooper was a horror comic come to life and KISS were simply superheroes from the first time I saw them.

I engaged in fannish activities well before I could afford to seriously begin collecting albums. On our trips into town I not only bought comics (always), but I also started to pick up copies of teenybopper music mags like Tiger Beat and 16. I read the articles and hung the posters that came with the mags on my bedroom wall. The Osmonds and the Jackson 5 and David Cassidy and probably many others (hands up... who remembers Tony DeFranco and the DeFranco Family and their ‟big” hit, Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat?). I think I was trying to identify with the larger than life qualities of these performers more than having crushes on them. I never entered a ‟Win a Date With...” contest. I would run around outside pretending I was a superhero from the comics, and lip sync in front of mirror pretending I was a young pop star.

I started buying the singles I heard on the AM radio stations. Over time I moved on to FM radio and much better music. Without the guidance of an older sibling I missed the glory days of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and many others of that period. The truth is I think Sabbath would have simply weirded me out back then. I’m also very aware of how the bands I ended up really getting into had that extra element of the visual. Superheroes and Rock and Roll. Deep Purple was an awesome band, but they were a bunch of dudes with long hair and blue jeans. I could see that anywhere. Did you see what Elton John was wearing?

That’s a trend that has never really gone away for me, not completely. F-f-f-Fashion! My musical tastes now span a pretty wide cross-section of genres and styles, but I always come back to the performance and glamour. The Sweet, Queen, and Cheap Trick all fell into this category for me as the 70s roared on. Adam Ant, wearing Indian warpaint, a colonial greatcloak and a tri-corner hat caught my eye on Solid Gold and I was hooked. I wasn’t aware of Bauhaus until years later but if I had seen the videos of their live performances in 1979 I would have been all over that.

Strangely the Hair Metal of the 80s didn’t grab me at the time, in spite of the over-the-top costuming and makeup. I think once KISS took the makeup off I just felt done with that style. This coincided with a general malaise I was feeling at the time for the styles of music I had been listening to. It’s no surprise to me now that this is when I first discovered Bowie’s Berlin period through Heroes and started down a path of Punk and New Wave and College Rock.

I discovered lots of new bands I loved; The Replacements, The Pixies, Love and Rockets, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Jazz Butcher, PJ Harvey, and many, many more over the next thirty years. I bought a lot of vinyl and then replaced most of it on CD. I went on obscure tangents to the extent that an awful lot of the popular music of the 90s remains pretty peripheral to my life. I go back and reclaim things I lost and go back and discover things I missed.

But it seems I’m always looking for that new, favorite band. Something new I can get into with the same enthusiasm I used to, though that seems increasingly difficult. Age and jaded tastes and feeling like I’ve heard it all before gets in the way. I have moments of this, still. I was crazy into the White Stripes, but then lost interest pretty quickly. I was pretty obsessed with PJ Harvey but I now admit that her last few projects just haven’t resonated with me. Call me fickle, but she’s an old love now, one I can go back to for comfort and familiarity. But I crave the excitement of the new.

I have a new favorite band that, at least right now, are hitting all of the marks.

TheStruts are a modern Glam Power Pop band from Derby. The band features Adam Slack on guitar, Jed Elliot on bass, Gethin Davies on drums and Luke Spiller on vocals. Now I want to say upfront that they’re probably not doing anything very new, but they are doing it very, very well. The songs are fun, hook-laden, and anthemic. Pretty much every song on their recent debut album, Everybody Wants, is a catchy, earworm singalong. That’s not a complaint. The album simply fills me with energy and makes me happy. Their image, specifically as embodied by Spiller, is full-on Glam Rock. I saw them on The Late Show with Steven Colbert and then watched a couple of videos and knew immediately that I was hooked.

As luck would have it I turned on to them about a week after they played a show in Pittsburgh. I figured it would be ages before I had an opportunity to see them. A few weeks after that they announced a show at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. That’s two-hour drive from here, and believe it or not I had never been to the Hall of Fame. So I decided to make a day of it. On their website, when they announced the show, they also announced a contest for a VIP Meet and Greet as well as tickets to the show. I never enter online contests but I thought, why not?

And I won.

The trip to Cleveland was amazing, a pilgrimage to both of my primary hobbies; The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the original homes of the two creators of Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (though that’s mostly a separate story from the one I’m telling). The Hall of Fame was enormous, full of artifacts to a cultural phenomenon that, if Chuck Klosterman is right, won’t matter in a couple of hundred years. But for right now, for those of us who have been formed by this phenomenon, it was a building filled with objects of history and power. John Lennon’s glasses and Ringo’s drum kit. Elvis Presley’s gold lame’ suit. David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust jumpsuit. Michael Jackson’s glove. The guitar played by Odetta Holmes on the day Mahalia Jackson encouraged Martin Luther King to, ‟Tell ‛em about the Dream, Martin!”

History. Power.

Seeing the Struts in this venue, surrounded by this history, felt right to me. It’s difficult for me to say this without sounding like I am exaggerating, but I kind of feel like I had waited my whole life to see this show. The energy, the songs, the costumes and spectacle. It was simply one of the best concerts I have ever seen, and Luke spiller is genuinely one of the best and most engaging front men I’ve ever witnessed. I don’t say that lightly. I’ve seen a lot of concerts.

I’ll try to put it in perspective. What I want and expect out of a concert depends a lot on my expectations. I’ve seen Lloyd Cole perform, just him and a guitar, several times. I love his songs, I love his voice, and what I want out of his show is very different than what I want from a different kind of band, and I’ve never been disappointed in him. I’ve been lucky enough to see a lot of bands I really like in very small, intimate venues and have been privileged to meet many of them.

But deep down, where the kid who discovered Rock through School’s Out and Rebel, Rebel, and Rock and Roll All Night still lives, when I see one of these bands, I want to see a show. I’ve seen Alice Cooper... a lot. I’ve seen KISS a number of times. I saw David Bowie. I saw Queen in 1979. They were all amazing shows, including all of the music and spectacle I love. In every one of those cases though, I only saw them after they had become huge, in giant venues. For a few of them I was close to the stage, but for the most part they were always at a remove from the audience. For The Struts I felt like I was getting to see them early in their career. Early enough for it to be a much more intimate experience than I’ve ever had with these other bands I mentioned. It felt like I imagine it would have felt to see Queen in 1974, or Bowie right before Ziggy Stardust blew up, or Alice Cooper at the Whiskey in Los Angeles.

I can’t really say anything about Luke Spiller that hasn’t been said in the rock press. He looks the part of Glam Rock star, a visual cross between Freddie Mercury and a young Tim Curry. His voice has amazing power and range. You can hear elements of Mercury, as well as a touch of Noddy Holder from Slade (to my ears, anyway). He went through several costume changes over the course of the show, clothes, I discovered later, that were designed for him by Zandra Rhodes, who designed costumes for both Freddy Mercury and Brian May. He commanded the crowd, leading sing-alongs and cheers, making it impossible not to have a good time. For one of the encore songs, a nice ballad, he left the stage, waded into the audience, and convinced everyone to sit on the floor around him as he sang. He was the focal point, but the whole audience was the show.

Photo by Amy Lombard. New York Times.

Not that the rest of the band was forgotten. They were tight and on cue and every member got his moment in the spotlight. Not an easy task given their leader’s glowing charisma, but you walked away knowing that you had seen a band and not a solo performer and some backup musicians.

They've opened for The Rolling Stones and as I'm writing they're scheduled to open for Guns 'n' Roses, so they're getting the opportunity to find a huge audience. Will they last? Will they ever be as big as Queen or Madonna? Probably not. That’s a long shot under the best of circumstances, and as I’ve said I don’t think our current paradigm allows for that to happen anymore. Will they be remembered in the year 2112? Does it really matter?

I haven’t been this excited for a new band in many, many years. I want to hang posters of Luke and the rest of The Struts all over my walls. I want to smear gold makeup on my cheeks and lip sync in front of my mirror. It’s not just about recapturing my youth (though some of it undoubtedly is). It’s about living in the moment. Enjoying our time before it is lost to history. Engaging with the things that bring you joy (yes, even sports), because life is hard and the best thing we can leave the future is a life well lived. We have this moment and nothing more. The past is only nostalgia if you aren’t living now. The future will come and wipe it all away, but live and love and laugh because in this moment we are alive. Do you love it, right now? Then it matters, right now.

I wanna taste love and pain/Wanna feel pride and shame

I don’t wanna take my time/Don't wanna waste one line

I wanna live better days/Never look back and say

Could have been me/It could have been me

Wayne Hears a Who

For all the live concerts I’ve gone to in my life, and there are more than a few, I haven’t seen a lot of the big name classic rock bands. I spent a lot of years in smaller venues seeing smaller acts and actively skipped some big names. I have some regrets about this, but it’s where my head was at the time.

Until Wednesday, March 16 I had never seen The Who. If I was going to wait, I caught a good one. This is their 50 Years of the Who Greatest Hits Tour, though I think the anniversary was last year. This show was rescheduled from a cancelled date last fall.

My confession here is that I was really never that big of a fan of The Who. Now, before Who Heads jump all over me, let me explain. I never disliked them. I just never got really into them like I’m known to do with bands and artists. I’m not sure why. But they’ve been omnipresent for as long as I’ve listened to music, so it’s not like I’ve been unaware of their work. In the intervening years I’ve picked up most of their albums and become very familiar with them.

I was too young to have caught the earliest British Invasion era of The Who. I probably saw them on the Ed Sullivan Show when I was a kid. It was on pretty religiously when I was growing up and I have vague memories of seeing bands, but none that I specifically remember.

For some reason when I was a tween I bought a copy of a magazine about the movie version of the Who album Tommy. I had never heard the album at that time, and wouldn’t see the actual movie for another fifteen years or more. But for some reason, probably because of the amazingly weird visuals of that film, I was kind of obsessed with it for awhile.

Not my actual copy, but this is it.

I’m pretty sure it was because of Elton John. I was getting into Elton at the time, mainly because of the rock mag pictures I had seen of his outrageous costumes. I liked the singles I had heard by the that point as well and owned 45s of Rocket Man and Bennie and the Jets.

In the movie Elton played the part of the Pinball Wizard. I was hearing his version of the song on the radio. I was much more aware of Elton than The Who at this point, so much so that I don’t think I even realized it was a cover of someone else’s song. Dumb kid. I went out to buy the single, grabbed a copy of Pinball Wizard, brought it home and put it on my record player...

And it wasn’t Elton singing. It was some other version. When I looked I saw it was by The Who and I had picked up the wrong version by mistake. Okay, I can now say that I realize it was the right version, but at the time my disappointment may have played a part in my never getting more into them.

Not many years later I picked up a copy of Meaty, Beaty, Big, and Bouncy, which I now know was a Greatest Hits compilation of The Who’s early singles. I liked it a lot, but had trouble reconciling these songs with the radio hits I was hearing in the mid to late 70s. I think coming at the band from all of these different angles prevented them from gelling in my mind as a cohesive concept.

In 1979 there was a terrible tragedy at a Who concert in Cincinnati where eleven fans were killed and eight others hurt. It would be an overstatement to say I was almost at the show, but there was a short-lived possibility I could have been. My friend Howard and I had gone to number of concerts around that time, at least one of which was a spur of the moment, day of the show decision. I remember we discussed making a road trip to Cincinnati for the show. It was probably a less than fifteen minute fantasy because it was too far away at the time and it was winter and our parents would have lost their minds, and I only remember the conversation because of what happened, and my reaction when I saw it on the news the following day.

So, finally, thirty-seven years later, I finally saw The Who... half of the original band anyway. It was an amazing show. Roger Daltry’s voice is still really strong and very powerful. Pete Townsend was just consummate on guitar. I know, intellectually, how good he is, but to hear it live while watching him was something of a revelation.

The performance was strong and I enjoyed the songs and music a lot. But some of that was my awareness of the history represented on that stage. These two men are two of the architects of modern Rock and Roll. They helped invent the lexicon of the live rock show. When Townsend windmilled his arm I saw the entire history of The Who in that movement. The same thing when Daltry swung the microphone around by its cord. I’ve seen this a million times. It’s in the DNA of Rock and of Rock fans. These guys played at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. They stood on the stage at Woodstock. They have known all of the legends of Rock as friends and peers. Fifty years of being The Who, spanning most of the history of the art form and having stood on its spires. Fifty years of embodying a Pop Culture mythology. Enormous legends living in the fragile shells of human beings.

I want to take a moment to talk about the opening act, because I was really impressed. For the original date Joan Jett was listed as the the opener, which made me pretty excited. But, since the show had to be rescheduled, Jett wasn’t able to do the make-up dates. I was disappointed until I saw who was taking her place.

Tal Wilkenfeld is a 20-something bass guitar prodigy. I first saw her as Jeff Beck’s bass player on a televised concert. She kind of blew me away. I have a fondness for the bass anyway, and here was this obviously very young woman with a mass of curly red hair, playing the hell out of a bass guitar that was nearly bigger than she was, holding her own with one of the acknowledged guitar gods. She has racked up a pretty impressive resume. In addition to Beck she has played with Jackson Browne, Hrebie Hancock, and a bunch of other name artists.

Her first CD, Transformation, is an instrumental jazz album where her skills are evident. I don’t listen to a whole lot of jazz or instrumentals, but I kept coming back to this. At the concert I was surprised to hear her sing. She has a very strong voice, and while it seems she is moving away from the jazz stylings into a more singer/songwriter rock direction, her playing wasn’t in the least diminished or hidden in the mix.

I’ve included three videos below. There aren’t a whole lot of good ones of her singing out there yet (apparently this past November was her first show as a vocalist). The first is from an Australian TV show, so it’s a little weirdly formatted, but it’s a good example of her playing. The second is her from a recent Who show. The third is one of her singing Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel, which is a song I love, so I had to include it.

Classic Rock and brand new music. It was a good night to be a fan.

I'm Your Fan (mostly)

There are very few perfect albums. Even the definition of what that means varies from one person to another, based on taste, nostalgia, and when you first heard an album that spoke to your life. I have my list, which is of course debatable.

I want to talk about a near-miss for my perfect album list. I don’t very often use a public forum to complain about something. I would rather spend my energy celebrating the things I love rather than ripping apart things I don’t. For the most part this post is a celebration of something I love, with one really annoying exception.

I discovered the poet, singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen around 1990. Even though he had been around on albums since the late 1960s (and as a poet before that), I hadn’t been exposed to his work. I may have heard a couple of his more well-known songs at some point, but they didn’t penetrate my consciousness. He never got a lot of radio play on the stations I listened to, and none of my more musically savvy friends owned any of his albums. I found him the way I ended up discovering a lot of music, by following the recommendations of musicians I already liked.

Cohen is name-dropped in the song Speed Boat by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions on their album Rattlesnakes (which, coincidentally, is on my list of perfect albums). Nick Cave mentioned him in interviews. I’m pretty sure other artists did as well because somewhere in there I decided that if that many musicians I liked were fans of this Leonard Cohen guy, maybe I should check it out.

So I bought a vinyl copy of Songs of Leonard Cohen at Jim’s Records in Bloomfield not long after I first moved to Pittsburgh. At the time I had no idea this was his first album from 1967. Based on the title I think I assumed it was a greatest hits collection. I fell in love with it immediately. His voice, his inflection, his lyrics and songwriting... it all came together for me pretty quickly. I could see how the artists I already liked were influenced by him. I started picking up a lot of his work.

Which brings me to I’m Your Man, the album I want to talk about.

It was released in 1988. I bought the CD in 1992 or 1993. I have vivid memories of listening to it over and over again. At the time I was teaching a class on Comics For Kids through Community College of Allegheny County and on Saturday mornings I would drive to a community center in East McKeesport. I’m Your Man was my soundtrack for that drive every week. The album was full of amazing songs. First We Take Manhattan. I’m Your Man. The amazing poetry of Take This Waltz. I still have no idea what the lyrics of that song means, but the imagery and language reminds you that Cohen is a poet first. On my weekly trip I would sing along (yes, I occasionally sing... in the car, by myself, or in a crowd at a very loud concert), absorbing every song into my DNA.

Well, not every song. And that’s the problem. Six songs in, right after the sublime Take This Waltz, is the single worst song Leonard Cohen ever recorded. That’s a strong statement, but I really feel that way. It’s called Jazz Police, and apologies to those out there who like it, but it completely grates on my nerves. The lyrics are ridiculous, his voice is annoying, the entire presentation of the song is like finding a turd in your birthday cake.

It’s followed by I Can’t Forget and Tower of Song, both of which are brilliant, but man...

I’m pretty album oriented in my listening habits. I rarely make a playlist. I usually listen to an entire album by an artist, beginning to end. I tend to see them as whole pieces of work that need to be experienced as it was released. You wouldn’t pick up a novel and read chapters 1, 7, and 13 and skip the rest. Why would you skip songs on an album? Yes, I know there are lots of reasons and I’m not here to debate how anyone enjoys music. But, this is the way I listen. I think my brain searches for a narrative to an album, whether one was intended or not. They are not individual songs to me, but pieces of a whole that need to be evaluated not only as songs but in how they interact with each other on the album.

I only bring this up to illustrate what an enormity editing a song out of an album is for me, but I did it with Jazz Police. For my car trips I had a cassette player, and the tape version I made from my CD omitted this song. When I did play the CD I skipped it. Years later when I transferred my collection to an Ipod I eliminated the mp3 file completely. In my universe this song is simply not a part of I’m Your Man, which is now a perfect album.

For the last year or so I’ve been working on a personal music project. There is a book from 2006 called 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (edited by Robert Dimery and Michael Lydon). I haven’t read the book, but I have access to an online list (and I should have a separate blog entry about this experience). Needless to say any list like this is debatable. Anyway, thanks to the magic of Spotify I’ve been listening to these albums in order (most of them are available) to increase my experience as a self-proclaimed music nerd.

I’m Your Man is on the list, and you’ll get no arguments from me that it shouldn’t be included. So when it came up in my ongoing listening quest last week I thought, ‟Okay, I’ll sit through Jazz Police this time.” For Science, as a dear friend says.

Time and distance have not been kind. I still really disliked the song and felt it to be a horrible intrusion on my listening pleasure.

Sorry Leonard. I’m going to keep living in a universe where this song doesn’t exist.

Here’s a video of Take This Waltz.

And Lloyd Cole’s Speedboat where I first heard Cohen’s name, just because I really like it.

Riding in cars with 8-Tracks

I saw Peter Frampton live at Stage AE in Pittsburgh a couple of days ago. I feel like I've finally earned some kind of long delayed child-of-the-70's merit badge or something. Most of the evening was spent in a fog of nostalgia. I hadn't planned on going but tickets fell in my lap (thanks, Jami!). He played all of the hits you would expect, as well as some great surprises, including being joined onstage by Don Felder of the Eagles for a couple of numbers. I have to say I was really very surprised at how much I enjoyed the show.

Surprised because I wasn't really that big of a fan back in the 70's. Oh, I owned the record, of course. Everyone did. It was 1976 and I was fifteen years old, so it was kind of required. It's a little known fact that in the 70's there were certain albums that, if you were a teenager, government agents came to your house and made you buy them. Frampton Comes Alive was one of these albums. So was Rumours by Fleetwood Mac and the first eponymously titled album by Boston. I apparently wasn't home on the days that Hotel California and Bat Out of Hell came out, or I was above the cutoff age for record-buying compliance, because I never owned these. But Frampton... Oh yeah. That vinyl sat on my shelf.

In the spring of '76 you just couldn't avoid hearing cuts from this album if you listened to Rock Radio at all. I remember hearing about it for quite some time before I finally heard the whole thing. The first time was on an 8-Track tape at a cookout at Allen and Phillip's house (not their real names. I'm going to refer to them as Allen and Phillip in what is no doubt a failed attempt to conceal their identities since anyone who knew me back then will immediately know who I'm talking about. Some of the following may be incriminating, but I trust that the statute of limitations, for anything illegal as well as for my caring what anybody else thinks at this point, are well past). It was long and drawn out and other than the singles, kind of forgettable. I remember wondering what the fuss was about. At the time my favorite bands were KISS, Alice Cooper, Queen, and The Sweet, so Frampton simply didn't have enough makeup, costuming or sparkle to hold my attention for long. He was a guitar hero, not a superhero. But I bought it anyway.

Allen and Phillip's family ran a small farm. The raised some cattle and grew some crops. Compared to the giant farms in the midwest this was a really modest operation. It did provide me with some summer work as I helped them put up hay, milk cows, and repair fences. Every summer we would plant three acres of sweet corn and spend part of the summer picking and selling it from the back of a truck in nearby Waynesburg.

Phillip and I were the same age so ostensibly he was my best friend. Allen was three years older and honestly I had more in common with him. Phillip was more into sports than I ever was (and partially responsible for my one year on a Little League baseball team). He also had a lot more enthusiasm for Southern Rock and cows than I could muster. Allen didn't share my fondness for Glam, but in the long run his musical taste was more influential in molding my 70's Rock experience. We listened to a lot of radio together. In the Pittsburgh market that meant WPEZ and 13Q and WDVE, which by the way still plays the same songs today that it did then.

We all come to music fandom and music culture by our own routes, based on exposure and locale. All we had was the radio. There were no all-ages clubs in Greene County, or clubs at all for that matter. I'm sure jukebox hits were being played in the bars we couldn't get into, and probably even some live bands. These were all out of our reach. I read about that time period in other parts of the country and world and feel some sense of envy over scenes that I know would have completely blown my mind if I had been exposed to them. This was the era of CBGB's and Max's Kansas City, though I wouldn't have been old enough to get into them either. But there were places like Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco in Hollywood, and the Sugar Shack where people like Joan Jett and Cherie Currie of the Runaways would go and hang out and discover music (and alcohol and drugs and a certain level of fame). Those girls were only a couple of years older than I was. Allen was older than them and I hung out with him and his friends. Why wasn't there something that cool going on around me? All we could do was listen to the radio in our rooms, or cruise around the back roads with the radio cranked. Apparently life on the Hollywood strip was a lot different than life in rural southwestern Pennsylvania.

Who knew?

When Allen graduated high school in 1976 he got a car, a little red Chevy Nova with an 8-Track player. Now we drove around those back roads with full rock albums blaring from the speakers. Well, blaring as much as the sound system of a little red Chevy Nova could blare, with momentary silences as the player would switch between tracks, sometimes in the middle of a song if it was too long.

And it's this part of the story where I become a 70's cliché. You know that kid in the movie Dazed and Confused? Mitch, the fifteen year old who spent the movie riding around getting high with the older kids? Yeah, that was me. If you can picture the character of Hyde from That 70's Show you now have a pretty good picture of Wayne circa 1976-79.

I was just that much too young to have picked up those early albums by Led Zepplin and Deep Purple and Black Sabbath (and if I'm being honest here, Black Sabbath kind of weirded out my back woods Methodist upbringing). I heard the songs on the radio, of course. You couldn't grow up around here in the 70's without hearing Stairway to Heaven and Black Dog until you were sick of them. It took me a lot of years to be able to go back and listen to these bands with an unbiased ear.

So while I missed some of the earlier 70's Classic Rock albums there are perhaps a dozen or so 8-Tracks that are burned into my teenage brain in ways that no other music in my life is. Most of these... no, None of these would ever make a Favorite Albums of All Time list. But they are in my synapses, every note, every word, every guitar solo. Frampton Comes Alive was one of these. Others included the aforementioned Boston, Slow Hand by Eric Clapton, Leftoverture by Kansas, Bob Segar and the Silver Bullet Band's Stranger in Town, Sixteen Greatest Hits by the James Gang. A few years ago I picked up a used copy of Four Wheel Drive by Bachman Turner Overdrive and though I swear I hadn't heard the entirety of that album in nearly thirty years I knew every word.

Allen was also responsible for another significant aspect of my teen years. In addition to Rock and Roll, it was Allen who introduced me to those twin fears of parents everywhere, drugs and alcohol. Now let me go on record here and say that I never indulged in either of those two activities to the extreme extent that many people do, nor have they ever caused problems in my life. But, I was a teen in the 70's. There was a modicum of indulging that I seemed to have been more successful in covering up than many of my contemporaries.

Being eighteen was more significant then than it is now. The legal drinking age in Pennsylvania was twenty-one at the time, but in nearby West Virginia it was eighteen. There was a place just spitting distance over the state line in a small village called Rock Lick. I would hazard a guess that almost everyone from my home school district got their first legal taste of beer from Patty's Place. Not that I was legal yet.

But Allen was.

So one night we were camping out in the cornfield in a small canvas tent and Allen decided to sneak up to the farmhouse after his grandparents went to bed to go get beer. He “borrowed” their car, so this must have been before he got the Nova, so I'm thinking summer of '75. He made the twenty or so mile trip to Patty's Place and returned bearing a six-pack of something cheap. So, sitting around a campfire in a dark cornfield, I had my first beer. Can't say I was very impressed with it. Still not a fan, truth be told. Phillip and I, after our single beer apiece (Allen finished the rest), took a long walk in the middle of the night on a winding dirt road, both of us believing we were a lot more drunk than we actually were, freaking out that we were going to get caught. When the only car of the evening went by we jumped a barbed wire fence and hid in some bushes, giggling like the drunkards we weren't. The next morning we were tired from lack of sleep and Allen was probably a little hung over. We picked a truck load of fresh corn and sold it the next day at 90 cents a dozen.

Yeah, Rodney's English Disco it wasn't.

When Allen went away to college in the fall of '76 he discovered pot, and of course he had to come home and share it with us. I was far more hesitant to take this step than I had been with the beer, but peer pressure and curiosity won out. I was never a pothead the way some people were. I never bought it on my own or ever owned any that I brought home with me. But if Allen was around and had some I would indulge. We would pull our stash out of the little plastic bin we called the Toybox, shove the cartridge into the player, and by the time Frampton was asking everybody if they feel like he do, we did.

So in the Holy Trinity of Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll I was two for three. Meat Loaf would sing that two out of three ain't bad, but given the choices here I would gladly have given up the pot and bad wine for a little loving. The 8-track was never going to be the soundtrack of a love life for me. The first couple of girlfriends I had were simply into very different things than I was, so it would be years before I met anyone I truly shared this passion with.

Allen spent more and more time at college and Phillip and I drifted apart. I started hanging out with another pair of brothers and transferred a lot of the same behavior patterns to them. No 8-tracks were involved, but we played a lot of records. They shared my obsession with KISS and that proved the basis for a lot of our friendship at the time. We put on the KISS makeup and made pretty bad costumes for a community Halloween party. We skipped school together on the day we went all went to our first concert, KISS at the Civic Arena in January of '78. Later that spring we made much better versions of the costumes, donned the makeup and lip-synched our way through Firehouse and Black Diamond for a school talent show.

In the early 80's I had a used blue Ford Granada. It came equipped with an 8-track player. In spite of the years hanging with Allen I never actually owned any 8-tracks, and it was a dying technology by this point. Luckily for me the previous owner had left a copy of Heroes by David Bowie in the car. By this time I was hanging with a new friend who shared my interests in music and comics. Younger than me he was possessed of either more self-control or more fear when it came to illicit substances. The alcohol and pot pretty much left my life entirely while we were hanging out.

Bowie occupies a strange place in my music history. Today I am a huge fan. Rebel, Rebel and Fame were two of the earliest 45 singles I ever owned. With his makeup and costumes and sparkle you would think I would have been all over Bowie. But, the heyday of Ziggy Stardust was over by the time I was really getting into buying my own albums, and he wasn't getting a lot of coverage in the admittedly sparse music press I had access to. Though I was aware of Diamond Dogs when it came out, on my limited budget I somehow never picked it up. His Berlin years went by pretty much unnoticed by me and the radio stations I listened to.

So Heroes was a complete surprise when I slotted the cartridge. It was weird and challenging, but even though I quickly installed a cheap tape deck in my car instead of investing in more 8-tracks, I still listened to that one a lot, and it quickly led me to picking up a lot of his back catalog.

The car cassette player was a must from then on. In the 90's I bought adapters so that I could plug my portable CD player into my car stereo. Today my mp3 player is plugged directly into my car. I have a tough time driving anywhere without some tunes.

I blame the 8-track. Over the years I have picked up most of the albums that were seared into my brain (still don't have that Bob Segar record. So much for Old Time Rock and Roll). There have been other albums, many of them, that I like better than these, that mean more to me, that are the soundtrack to other parts of my life. But, if I really think about it, every era of my life has these kinds of albums. These are the ones that are important at the time, that provide a backdrop to life but that slip away over time. It can take years to be able to listen to them again and recognize their importance.

And some of them, in this case Frampton Comes Alive, continue to exert influence in ways I would never have expected. At the concert I stood near a couple of teenage boys. I was surprised to see them singing along with all the hits. At one point during Show Me the Way one of them lifted a lighter into the air. Not his cell phone... an old fashioned lighter. The songs are as burned into his brain they are in mine and this will be a part of his personal musical history.

Hope they blasted their car stereo on the way home.