I like to read my brother's blog. He is a really great writer. It's a response blog to our friend Cathy's blog, which is a blog of lists. Cathy is really good at making lists. Her lists - though they are lists, in the sense of a collection of items within a related topic - can be poetic. Some of them, I think, are mysteries. There may be some written yet that are even science fiction. But, as lists, they are most amazing in their concise nature. In the fact that each item on the list says what it needs to say. There is no associated commentary or anecdote. Very little in the way of parenthesis. I would say, most of the time, Cathy's individual items are bulleted, and rarely, if ever, do they extend beyond the length of one line of text.
As you might guess in that we are related, my brother's blog is rarely concise. That's not to say that he can't be concise if he needs to. We both have the ability to edit, to trim down, to eliminate the unnecessary. But I know I take some liberty in enjoying the stream of consciousness nature of a blog, and I think he does too. Recently, he wrote a response to the
"Top N" note occurence on Facebook, submitting an amazingly low value for n with the "Top 5 Albums of the 90s." It's a great read about some great albums from that long ago decade. You might want to read it. http://regressiveresponse.wordpress.com/. I really enjoyed it, and well, I'm blushing, he mentioned me. After reading the blog, I wrote a comment. I meant to keep it short. Instead, I am including it here along with his response, as a part of the beginning of this entry:
ME: "This is way more fun than on Facebook. I’m gonna see if I can’t do some sort of aggressive response to your regressive response on my blog. To start:
I am always glad you found joy in albums that I left behind - Soul Coughing, Skarmaggedon, The Weakerthans. Awesome because some were not important enough to me to bring along, some were forgotten, but to you the neglected music became treasures. As the line from the Grateful Dead goes (and I don’t expect that you would know this one, except for it’s popularity) “One man gathers what another one spills.”
My 90s were spent in HS and college. That is gonna be too tough for me to list only five, I think. I may have to try to do a HS list, and a college list. Yeah. Here’s the rough draft outline spontaneously decided on:
HS Top 5:
1. Sonic Youth - Dirty
2. REM - Out of Time
3. Nirvana - Nevermind
4. The Beastie Boys - Check Your Head
5. Primus - Sailing the Seas of Cheese
Okay. That was too easy. There must be some sneaky albums hiding that maybe aren’t as apparent…Red Hot Chili Peppers = Blood Sugar Sex Magic. U2 - Zoo TV. Matthew Sweet - Girlfriend. The Violent Femmes - self titled.
College
1. Sebadoh - Bubble and Scrape
2. Superchunk - Foolish
3. Pavement - Crooked Rain Crooked Rain. Yeah, thanks Shannon.
4. Yo la Tengo - Painful
5. Built to Spill - There’s Nothing Wrong With Love
Alright. Greg, I can’t believe you narrowed a list down to 5. I mean, okay, maybe I should jut focus on the HS days. It’s too much, when I think about college. Overwhelming amounts of great music, rocking out, and of course, lots of things that cause most of those memories to be one messy borderless blur of good times and classes."
MY BRO: "Yeah, Brother, there are like 50 different phrases that crossed my mind for me to be able to narrow it down to 5. I think I’ve just so many top 5 lists and then gotten hung up on the This Is Too Hard that I decided I’m just gonna make some decisions. Anyway, yeah, this is really more like Top 5 post-grunge, not super-popular, maybe slipped through the cracks, albums of the 90s that I listened to…and so on. And even with those, I think it would be a more interesting list if I found two more like the first three to replace the two indie ones that everyone likes. Maybe I should be thinking of it as “Top 5 90s albums that you won’t find anything like today” or “that are especially 90s” or something like that. The Scofflaws, GLB, and Soul Coughing albums are perfect for me like that; albums that are 90s to me, but still hold up. Clearly BtS and Pavement hold up, but so much so that they are hugely influential and still playing, more or less. From their myspace page, it sounds like the Scofflaws still play gigs in Long Island, but only Sammy Brooks is still in the band; Grant-Lee Phillips has a solo career that I can’t comment on except to say that the two albums of his I have (”Ladies Love Oracle” and “Mobilize” don’t sound like GLB), and Soul Coughing’s Mike Doughty has some solo albums but as far as I’m concerned, you can’t reproduce Soul Coughing. Okay, you probably got the point before I went and elaborated all that.
Anyway, yes, brother, picking from the flood of music would (is going to be?) much, much more difficult. I think your equivalent list would be from high school. Thanks for the comments!"
So after all that, here's an attempt at narrowing it down. Making some decisions, sticking with them. With the same allotment for some runner-ups, as necesary. As I mentioned in the comment above, I just couldn't handle the Top 5 of the 90s. So I made two lists. One for High School, one for College. I think that this is going to have to be the way it stays for the 90s. I was born at that time when, well, my 90s decade was culturally split in half by my educational experiences. Four years of HS starting in 1990, in the relatively affluent suburbs of Baltimore, MD, and 4 years of college as a college radio DJ at a CMJ disciple indie rock formatted radio station in between DC and Chapel Hill. Plus two afterwards, in San Francisco. Shit changed for me in the 90s.
My HS Top 5:
REM - Out of Time. One of my best friends in high school, Bill, had an older sister who I remember having a crush on. This was the crush that taught me what a crush was. And she and a friend of hers were real hip, according to my perspective. I went to my first concert with them. And my second one, I think. The first one was U2, with Primus and the Disposable Heroes of Hipoprisy, opening, at a giant stadium near D.C. Amazing. The Zoo-TV tour. There were cars on cranes, being used as spotlights. There were all these giant TVs. It was a spectacle. Bono called President Bush for our benefit. I was blown away. But U2, I had heard during the 80s. I was that cool. I knew what was going on. I had Boy, and the Joshua Tree, and Rattle and Hum. I listened to the radio. I had tapes of great songs recorded off of B104.
But going to HS meant learning to listen to WHFS 99.1. They played REM. And going to HS meant having crushes. This crush pushed it over the top. Bill's sister and her friend were so cool. I mean, they took us to this extremely cool concert. And another one. The B-52's and the Violent Femmes (but that's another blog, like maybe "Top 5 First 5 Concerts Attended"). And they liked REM, too. A lot, if I remember right. And, well, Out of Time is a great album. But damn if "Losing My Religion" didn't speak to a high school boy who sat in confirmation classes at the catholic church he was getting tired of going to every Sunday. I mean, I am pretty damn sure now that the song wasn't actually about losing one's religion, in that sense anyway, but I sang along. And shit, was that KRS-1 teaming up with Michael Stipe on radio song? I didn' know at the time how cool that was. And yeah, I had a crush on Bill's sister. But I also had a crush on Kate Pierson from the B-52's. A buddy of mine definitely wanted to have her love-child.
Looking back now, I realize, with the wisdom that age brings, that Out of Time was a pop album. That I was really into pop music then. That the catchiness got to me, like it got to so many others. That I wanted to sing along. So I did.
Primus - Sailing the Seas of Cheese: Of course, thinking back, now, a lot of albums are coming flooding back. This one didn't even make the first list in the comment to my brother, until I looked at the draft and said to myself, "Wait. Hang on. I am pretty sure there is an album that I liked more than Pearl Jam's 'Ten' out there". And it's true. I am going to blame a random contest that I recently heard on the radio station KHUM for my choosing Ten first. And, no, I am not ashamed at having Ten on or near the list. Just saying. Claypool over Vedder. Not a hard choice. I'm not going to put a cage match of great 90s singers together here. My mind is wandering towards the question "What about Kurt Cobain? Would you choose him over Claypool?" But that's another Blog. One called Vs. The Greatest of All Time. A cage match of rock and roll influences.
Bill is here in this one too. He and I had played violin together in 5th grade. We continued to do so through middle school. And in high school. But in high school, we realized that violin wasn't very rock and roll. We decided we wanted to start a rock band. Bill had also been playing piano since he could move his fingers. He was rather good with the musical instruments, and he started playing the bass. I took classical guitar lessons from a friend of the family and, well, my rock and roll instrument playing took a little longer to evolve. He and some friends started a band, and they rocked. I went to their shows, rocked with them, and discovered my role as that guy who is friends with the bands and takes really good pictures of them. And I have fulfilled that role, many times over, for many bands, and I have no complaints. But hell, I still can't slap a bass like Bill could even in 10th grade. If I remember correctly, by the end of high school he was deducting the cost of his bass and amp from his income taxes. Or, maybe his parents were for him.
Bill and I were friends with a bunch of other great guys. We were all in the Boy Scouts together. We were in it, most of us, I think, to have a place to get together to do strange, crazy, fun, unexplainable things. Contrary to Baden Powell's original hopes, we learned to party and disrespect authority while in the Boy Scouts of America. I have since met many a fellow Eagle Scout under varying conditions of intoxication, and have discovered that many former scouts share the same themes in their boy scout experiences. Along with scouts, life in high school was crazy. We were learning about girls, and we were eager to drive, and we were gaining independence, and we were just really beginning to learn how to rock. Along with some of those more traditional high school revelations of puberty, anti-authority ideas, and rock and roll, came this desire on our part for nonsense that only made sense to us. And I think Primus was the theme music for this part of it. Just the idea of sailing seas made of cheese kind of speaks to what we were all about.
I never thought about it when I was younger, but the lyrics of "Jerry Was a Race Car Driver" sort of captured my position in the hierarchy of high school. "He never did win no checkered flags but he never did come in last." I mean, that hierarchy, regrettably, was really on my mind when I was young. I wanted to be cool. And Jerry was cool. Les Claypool was cool.
We went to a concert at UMD, the Ritchie Colliseum, Nov. 1st 1993. The Melvins opened for Primus. Looking back, I realize again that this was the second time I had seen Primus. The first being that Zoo TV concert. Unfortunately their greatness was wasted on me that first time around, and the sound in the stadium blew chunks during their show. But at the Colliseum, we endured the Melvins - who much like I learned to like tomatoes after hating them as a kid, I came to really dig - and their confusing drone and over-distorted crunch sound, to finally be able to rock out with Primus. I had not yet rocked hard until that show. That show was a turning point in my life. I rocked hard so many times after that. My back still hurts from all of the rocking hard I have done. I continue to rock hard, really, thanks to "Here Come the Bastards", "Jerry...", "The Way of American Life", and "Fish On."
Nirvana - Nevermind: I was lucky enough, in high school, to have a great art teacher. Of course there was the art teacher who was a gentle old lady who taught us to draw people with circles and ovals, and to paint inside the lines. And there was the large, loud angry lady with the shaded glasses who cut her hair really short and melted GI Joe figures into necklaces (looking back, I think she was probably a lesbian. Not to stereotype or anything). But then there was Mr. Smith. Mr Smith encouraged our dissent from any sort of traditional art, while encouraging us to focus on things that we were feeling. He pushed us into the corners to look for new ideas, new ways of interpreting the world. He brought out in most of his classes an ability to make art for art's sake, rather than for an assignment. Or maybe he was just cool. He also told his classes to check out First Thursdays, the open gallery nights down in Baltimore.
I went to my first First Thursday with some friends who were like older sisters to me. We picked up a friend of theirs at his house, and when he got in the car, he held up a tape. "This album is going to change the world of rock music forever," he said. No, actually, I don't remember the words he really used, but his statement was something comparable to that. What he said laid a heavy weight down in the car, like we were about to hear something amazing, mind-blowing, and very different. These kids I was friends with were great artists. They saw things real differently, and they expressed it in their art and in their writing and in their music. This guy with the tape, I think his name was Paul. I remember Mr. Smith telling a story about Paul once. He said he had to sneak into an abandoned building to look at Paul's advanced art class project, because it was spray painted on the side of a wall that was going to be demolished. Paul was cool.
Whoever was driving put the tape in the deck immediately. I didn't really know much about music, but by this point I had learned to rock, and this album rocked. It was, of course, Nirvana's Nevermind. There is no avoiding my putting this amazing album in this top 5. I had that experience. Like where were you when you heard JFK died? Where were you when you heard Jerry Garcia died (okay, I don't remember that one). Where were you when you first heard Nevermind? This is not something I will forget. I was with a bunch of amazing artists, on our way to look at art, in the early 90s, in Baltimore. Rocking.
Thinking about Nevermind and the way it influenced me makes me think about the way I often listen to music without actually hearing the words. I think this album was one that I didn't look too hard for meaning in. I wasn't trying, at the time, to understand what any of the songs were written about, or why they were written that way. I was just feeling it. I was on a plain, and I couldn't complain. There was "something in the way, oooooh." And I was looking at the cheerleaders in the video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit".
The Beastie Boys - Check Your Head Another tape deck incident. Another friend from high school immediately comes to mind. Dave. The tall one, who played guitar in the band with Bill, and who played guitar in the other band with Tricia, the girl who was probably my best older friend in that car that night I first heard Nirvana. Dave was driving a silver Volvo sedan, at the time, I think, though I remember at some point during high school he had an old small two wheel drive pickup that was painted yellow with black stripes that he once washed in its entirety with the squeegee at a local gas station.
Dave picked me up at the Cockeysville library one day. I can't remember why. I can't remember anything about this day except Dave, a Volvo, and the Beastie Boys Check Your Head album. I remember it was awesome. I knew how to rock, but this was something new. This was to lead me to later appreciate funk music like Parlaiment, Grant Green, Donald Byrd. This was the predecessor to my one day getting into DJ Shadow, Dr. Octagon, Aceyalone. Check Your Head was a natural progression, I guess. The first tape that I ever owned was License to Ill. (Actually, I think it was the soundtrack to Footloose, but for some reason I always think of License to Ill first). But I hadn't listened to the Beastie Boys in a long time. When I had gotten License to Ill I was in 6th grade. I completely missed Paul's Boutique, somehow. Don't worry, I caught up later.
"People how you doing there's a new thing dawning." Definitely. Listen to the turntables. Listen to the beats drop, so heavy. The production of this album still blows my mind. The samples, combined with the dripping soul of Money Mark's keyboard, combined with the Beasties actual playing of these instruments, punk rock mixed with soul. I guess Check Your Head defined hip-hop early for me. I heard the lyrics, I remembered the lyrics, I sang along, but the entire product, the rythm of the words, combined with the meaning, "be true to yourself and you will never fall", combined with the movement of the music. I was spoiled. Since that day outside the library I still can't really embrace a hip-hop song unless the music and the words flow together, rather than one supporting the other.
"And now, I'd like to ask you how, you like the feel of the bass in your face in the crowd."
"You should sleep late. It's much easier on your constitution." That one still rings true for me.
I don't think I could define the word "namaste" better than the words and sounds of the song on Check Your Head by that name does. Mellow. Relaxed. Peaceful. A butterfly floats on the breeze...
Sonic Youth - Dirty
In that car - - that car that I first heard Nirvana in, not the Volvo, but the other one - or maybe driving that car - was a girl named Tricia. She was so cool. She was an amazing artist. She was the singer and songwriter in a band with Dave, the driver of that silver Volvo. A band called Spastic Cracker, a band that changed my ideas about music probably as much as Sonic Youth. Details are vague in my memory on how I came to own a tape of Dirty. One thing I am almost sure of is that Tricia's influence played a role.
Sonic Youth was something so different than anything I had ever heard before. I first heard and appreciated Dirty in high school, but the sound that they created remains printed in my mind still as something more than music. It turned my entire musical world upside down Fierce cutting alternately tuned guitars ripping through the outer linings of my thoughts to grab my attention. Climbing disharmonic solos dropping into layered distortion, like you could walk across the guitar sound, stepping note to note. Then jump off, flying through the sky where far below guitars play riffs of happy dancing arpeggios until everything folds with a crushing machine-like drum roll into a building crescendo of controlled musical chaos, then explodes into empty space.
I asked my friend Tom today, my best friend from high school, and a fellow appreciator of good music and friend of Tricia who also got his mind blown by Dirty, if he remembered any significant details of where we might have first heard this music. He immediately also mentioned Tricia. He also said something that I completely agree with. Hearing Dirty was hearing music that to our knowledge had no precendent. It was a different form of rocking. And yeah, of course later we heard the Velvet Underground. I recently watched Kill Your Idols, and understand a bit more about the whole No Wave music scene that is strongly connected to Sonic Youth's roots. But at the time, Sonic Youth's guitar tunings were like a metaphor for their music - there was no understanding why they would have come into existence, where there sound would have evolved from. But they were so mind-blowing, so beautiful...a delicate balance of chaos and harmony. Their sound was a way of rocking that I never would have thought could exist. And at the time, we didn't know it, but we had only touched on the surface.
My 90s were defined my so many amazing albums. I think now that the 90s were a heyday of music for my generation. I am sure I have missed about 1,237 or so articles that people have written that have said something similar. So many amazing albums! So choosing even just 5 for high school was so difficult. I shouldn't whine about it though. I think I am going to have to leave the College Top 5 for another blog. Too much to even start to think about. The SuperDeformed hat, that the cute older rocker girl at the Stranger Than Fiction show thought said "Superchunk". Who is Superchunk? I ask. Who indeed.
I would really like to thank my brother for inspiring me to think about this. I want to of course thank all of the people I have mentioned for their influence in helping me to rock in what I think has been a really successful way for many years. Also, I want to thank Les Claypool for continuing to support the oddidty in my life. He recently acted in and composed music for a movie that was filmed in the Anderson Valley, CA (ever had Boont Amber Ale?) called Pig Hunt. I have yet to see it, but I hear he plays a preacher. Thank you Kurt Cobain, may you rest in peaceful rock and roll anonymity in the afterlife music scene. Thanks for being one in a long line of singers whose words couldn't always be understood and didn't always make sense when they could be. Thank you Sonic Youth for so often throwing my mind into the blender, pressing the puree button and blending my thoughts into something I never knew could taste so delicious. And thanks to REM for writing "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)". Even though it wasn't on Out of Time.
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