There’s a thing going around my corner of Facebook right now when people are “giving the task” to each each other to list ten albums from the vinyl era that had influenced their taste in music. This comes with the added conditions of “no explanations, no reviews, just covers.” Well, screw that. I’ll list my ten albums here because I’m not doing another one of these Facebook tag games that will fill up my page with album covers if I don’t get to say anything about them.
But what about this other condition, “the vinyl era?” There are no specific starting and stopping years to define when this was. It could be argued the vinyl era started when records existed, which went back into the 1800s. I think the easiest definition would be the years between the 1950s and 1980s when records were the primary way to buy commercial music.
For me, the vinyl era stopped in the summer of 1986, as I was getting ready to move to college. I believe the last records I bought were “Please” by the Pet Shop Boys, and “Fahrenheit” by Toto, both of which I picked up during a trip to Musicland at the Northtown Mall just weeks before moving into my dorm. Because of that, no album on my list is more recent than that. Not to mention that my musical tastes were pretty much cemented by the time I finished high school, so anything coming after that wouldn’t be appropriate.
I began leaning more toward cassettes once I started driving, since they were readily portable and lent themselves to the creation of actual mix tapes, of which I made so many my parents should have invested in Memorex stock. I still own one mix tape called “Summer of 87” which is pretty great. It was about this time that brought in the different forms of Walkman personal cassette players we loved desperately since they let us bring our music everywhere. Because of my experience with Walkmans and the many cheap generic knock-offs I’ve owned in my day, I’ll occasionally feel half a beat of nostalgia when I hold a pair of AA batteries in my hand.
Anyway, here’s my list. As always, even though the blog has been on life support for a number of months, the rule of listing things in no particular order still stands:
*REO Speedwagon: Hi Infidelity
The biggest album in the world when I entered junior high, which was about the time I first began discovering music on my own. A great pop-influenced rock album which I argue still holds up today.
*Styx: The Grand Illusion
My first exposure to Styx was when my mother bought Paradise Theater because of that pretty “The Best of Times” song. “The Grand Illusion” had more songs on classic rock radio than any other Styx album, so that was one of my earlier purchases. Close to forty years later, I will still turn up “Come Sail Away” when it comes on the radio.
*AC/DC: Back in Black
My first rebellious album, since my parents were convinced there was something at least mildly satanic about the band. (Granted, they did name an album “Highway to Hell.”) My introduction to hard rock.
Asia: self-titled
This was where I learned what a supergroup was. The members were all formers from major prog bands of the 70s, which automatically gave the band a respectable pedigree. It was much more of a pop album than a prog album, but it was my first touchstone of progressive music.
Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run
The record that helped me figure out so much about life. The “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” of rock albums.
Def Leppard: Pyromania
It’s impossible to explain to people who weren’t following music in the early 1980s what a cultural behemoth of an album this was, especially to the junior high/high school crowd, right down to the urban myths about what was really being said in the foreign-language four-count at the opening of “Rock of Ages.”
Rush: Moving Pictures
The first modern progressive album I owned. “Asia” was a bunch of prog dudes who didn’t get along that well trying to cash in on their names and reputations. Rush was pure.
John Mellencamp: Scarecrow
I grew up in a rural bubble surrounding the outer ring of Minneapolis suburbs, which was just rootsy enough to relate to the sensibility and sound of this. I’m not saying it would hold when measured against something like “Born to Run,” but it fell into the same straightforward, storytelling rock sound.
Journey: Escape
Another record initially bought by my mother, this time for that pretty “Open Arms” song. I loved “Don’t Stop Believin’” before it was a national treasure. I loved “Stone in Love” even more, because it rocked so much harder. I thought “Still They Ride” was the superior ballad on the album by far. And the title song was just the anthem someone fighting his way through junior high needed in his corner.
Queen: Live Killers
I actually didn’t own this on vinyl, but had the cassette. It was perfect: a double live album with what amounted to a separate LP on each side of the tape. This was my frequent Walkman companion, drowning out the surrounding idiocy of a thousand school bus rides, and providing me with the first epiphanic moment of my life, when I really, really heard Brian May’s layered “Brighton Rock” guitar solo during a high school football game.
So there you have it. If you’ve ever had questions about where and how my lifelong music obsessions began, those ten albums had no small role.
I was introduced to most of my music through peer pressure. I went from spending 6th grade at a tiny Catholic school to 7th grade in the public junior high, and quickly learned that much of your status came from the bands you liked. When I figured out the music the junior high hallways taught me I should be listening to, I worked to catch up. I began listening to classic rock radio. I joined the Columbia House Record and Tape Club more times than I can remember. I drew album covers on the brown paper bag covers wrapped around my textbooks.
Back then in early, early 80s, AC/DC was the apex predator in the hallways and boom boxes, with other now classic rock staples like Foreigner, Journey, Styx, REO Speedwagon, and even Billy Squier earning what seemed to be permanent spots in the Ring of Honor. Another band with an unquestionably deserved spot on the list of our musical titans was Rush.
I learned about Rush mostly from the radio, since they had a good number of songs deep in rotation from previous albums. They weren’t the kind of band you’d dance around to while playing air guitar in your bedroom, but the kind you’d actively listen to. All of that complicated music was coming from only three guys — Alex Lifeson, playing insane guitar lines, Geddy Lee, playing bass with his hands and using foot pedals to operate keyboards while singing at the same time, and Neil Peart, a drummer who clearly was not human and played like he had nine arms. Being a drummer in the junior high and later the high school band, I was drawn in to Neil Peart’s playing. I knew to ever play like him was beyond my capabilities, but there were still things there to try and learn.
In our microcosm of the world, Rush was mostly known back then for the song “Tom Sawyer,” and primarily for the drum solo. I recently told a colleague that every music fan from my generation had air-drummed to “Tom Sawyer” at least once, and I feel confident that’s a truth. The song, and the solo, were that important to the time.
Rush has been one of my bands for decades. No matter which musical era of the band an album represents or what influences were on display in the music, I could always find something about it to like. For the longest time they were mostly just present and reliable, resurfacing every year or two with an album of new songs or one of their many live recordings. After a few decades, you come to realize you’ve connected with them more deeply than you have with you most of your other favorite artists.
They are still the only band I’ve seen twice on the same tour, once at the Minnesota State Fair and nearly a year later at The Gorge in Washington state. My friend Erik and I would amuse ourselves during marching band practice, dancing with our drums the same way Geddy Lee danced with his bass guitar in the video for “Distant Early Warning.” When I drove out of the city after presenting the summary paper for my Master’s Degree, hearing the song “Marathon” come up on my car stereo was the moment it sank in that I was actually done. The song that ran through my head in the days surrounding the birth of my first nephew was “Manhattan Project,” mostly for the lyric, “All the powers that be / and the course of history / would be changed forever more.” It seemed appropriate then for the first baby born into my family, and it was. When I had to think up a four-digit passcode on my first smartphone, I used 2112. While talking with my friend Staci at an after school happy hour, I mentioned the only thing I wanted for my birthday was Rush’s newest album, “Vapor Trails,” and I didn’t think anyone in my family was going to buy it for me. She did instead. I played through it for the first time in my classroom. Years later, when Rush released a Blu-Ray concert of the final show of their final tour before retiring from touring, that same first nephew, now an adult, gave it to me for Christmas. It came packaged with a keychain — a small Gumby figure, wearing a Rush t-shirt. I still keep it with my keys today.
It was bittersweet when the band announced their retirement, because you know they meant it. Neil Peart had been drumming at a level of virtuosity that had him widely recognized as the best drummer in popular music for four decades, and his body was wearing out. I couldn’t blame any of them for retiring, and respected them for making it an all-or-nothing decision: If one guy was ready to be done, they were all done. The way I saw it, they deserved it after giving the fans so much music for so many years. The word was that Neil was ready to spend more time writing — he had been the primary lyricist for the band throughout their career, and already had a few books to his name as it was.
The artists who produce your favorite songs become companions for you, communicating with you through the ideas and perspectives they’ve shared through their art, and the opportunities they’ve given you to interpret these ideas, either literally or through any number of degrees of metaphor. Sometimes you’ll find something buried in a song you can apply to your own life and beliefs, and sometimes, and just as importantly, you’ll find a soundtrack for the key events of your life, even elevating events from the mundane to significant by the addition of their music. Their songs become a language of shared experience with other fans; you only need to drop a song title like “Red Barchetta” for another Rush fan to know how that song affected you.
Now that I’m in the back half of middle age (at best), I’ve reached a time when the musical heroes of the generation ahead of me are becoming the ones we lose and miss. When I first heard that Neil Peart had died earlier this month, after a mostly private struggle with brain cancer, a shadow crossed my heart (to quote the man himself). I had not been as strongly affected by the loss of a musician I admire (I won’t say hero, knowing how Neil would have bristled at that term) since Freddie Mercury died in 1991. And I named my dog after that guy.
The weekend after his passing, I watched “Beyond the Lighted Stage,” a documentary about the band that I’ve seen a double-digit number of times. The movie ends with a scene of Alex, Geddy, and Neil getting together for a “business meeting” at a nice restaurant in a private room, which amounted to little more than the three of them joking and laughing like the friends they were. When I think about losing Neil now, one of the first things I think of is how hard it has to be for those other two guys as they miss their longtime friend.
The relationship the fans like me had with Neil was nothing like that, but it was just as real. Knowing that he’s gone now, that we’ve lost someone who worked so consistently hard to be as perfect as he could at what he did, leaves the world feeling a little less pure.
