10 Influential Albums, Part I

From time to time, I'll realize how much a certain album has influenced me for one reason or another. Maybe it was the album that got me into jazz, or made me realize something about myself, or served as a soundtrack at a turning point in my life. I decided to put them all down on paper and see if I could figure out which were the most important. Some choices were easy. Others quite difficult.

In the end, I came up with ten, which I'm going to present in chronological order of when they came into my life, along with a brief description of why they were important.

I've decided to divide my list into two parts, else I may never get anything posted. We're moving over the next couple of weeks, have the first event in our new poetry series at a local public library next Friday, and summer sessions are in full swing at the university, among other things.

Some of these albums are well known, and I'm sure they've been important to many other people. Other choices are a little more obscure. These are not necessarily my favorite albums, though some of them would be on that list as well, but all of them played a role in my musical or personal development.

One thing I realized in doing this list was how grateful I am to friends I've had who turned me on to some wonderful music in my life. Also, a nod to Steve Caratzas, who did a list of Top Ten Life-Changing Albums on his blog. His list is infinitely more interesting than mine, too.

I'd be curious to know what albums have been important to the rest of you, so consider this a meme, and you've all been tagged. (Or not.) You don't have to do 10 albums, but maybe 5?

So, drum roll, please . . .

1. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: The Beatles – I can't say for sure if this was the first album I ever owned (it might have been Help!), but it plays that role. In the early 1970s, my mother started going to weekly gatherings at the house of a cool Catholic priest named Fr. Dick Berg. The house had wooden floors, was mildly hippie-ish in decor (it was Austin in the early 70s), and we took communion while sitting on a rug. I have many warm memories of those evenings. Fr. Berg had been at St. Edwards University but wound up taking a position at the University of Portland, where he eventually became Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and is still connected to the university to this day. When he moved away, he gave me some of his Beatles albums, including Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour. For a kid who loved the Beatles, this was heaven.

It's probably impossible to explain to people who grew up later what it was like to be a kid in the late 1960s and early 70s, listening to the Beatles. As La Reina said the other day, the Beatles were more than music, they were like the air of our childhood. They surrounded us. The day I got my first paycheck, at 15, I went to the record store and bought every Beatles album I didn't own. That's how important they were to me. When I was in my 20s, post-punk and increasingly cynical, I thought I had moved beyond the Beatles and didn't listen to them for a long time. Then, around my mid 30s, I gave them a whirl again, and it all came back. And having listened to a lot of other music in the meantime, I came to appreciate them even more. It's amazing to me that these four lads from Liverpool who shot to fame as teenagers in something of a Boy Band could wind up turning their fans on to the likes of "Tomorrrow Never Knows," "Love You To," and "It's All Too Much."

Of all the different Beatles albums, Sgt. Pepper was probably the most influential on me as a kid because it was so grand, multi-layered and exotic. Presented almost like a play, the opening "welcome to the show" appealed to me, because I felt like I was entering into some kind of wonderful carnival. The musical range of the album made each song seem like a different booth in this strange and marvellous show. "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was magical and dream-like, and my love of the song now seems like a harbinger of a later interest in surrealism. "Within You, Without You" seemed totally out of this world. The lush, mysterious, and expansive atmosphere of George singing over Indian sitars was something extraordinary for a 10-year old boy in Austin, Texas. The world seemed like such a rich and fascinating place. The herd of animals rushing from one speaker across to the other at the end of "Good Morning, Good Morning" simply delighted me. What is this wondrous zoo?!

Listening to the Beatles isn't like listening to another group for me. It's part great music, part nostalgia/memory and part yearning for something we've lost as a people. Cynics make fun of "All You Need Is Love" and the hippy-dippy Sixties. But today, listening to their music, especially some of John and George's spiritually searching songs, I realize how lucky I was to grow up with the Beatles as my "air."

2. Dark Side of the Moon: Pink Floyd – I may have been intrigued by the Indian strains of "Within You, Without You," but musically my childhood was incredibly normal. My mom had some Neil Diamond records (it was the 1970s and she was single and in her 30s),some Dave Brubeck and Elvis, but there wasn't a lot of music in the house. Besides the Beatles, I owned a few 45s of the big hits (Barry Manilow's "Mandy"!), listened to Top 40 radio, and had a couple of albums by the Bee Gees (Saturday Night Fever!) Then, one day, when I was about 13, my friend David Esensee brought over this album and said, “You’ve got to listen to this.”

My life has never been the same.

If Sgt. Pepper felt mysterious at times, Dark Side of the Moon totally blew my pubescent mind. I just didn't know music could be like that. It seemed to tap into a different part of my brain. The moody bass lines and atmospheric synthesisers created a musical world that seemed related to the Beatles, but utterly different. It seemed heavier, darker, and edging deeper into a zone of which I was just becoming aware.

Listening to the album for the first time was a major turning point. After that, I ditched the Top 40 singles, started listening to the rock and roll radio station, and began to explore music and the world at large a little more. Suddenly, I was buying albums by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, The Who and other bands I had missed as a child. Oh dear. Adolescence was calling. And I was ready to rock and roll.

3. Never Mind the Bollock’s, Here’s the Sex Pistols: The Sex Pistols – It was 1979, and I was a junior in high school. Since the 4th grade, I had had two of the best friends in the world. We really were The Three Musketeers. But around 10th grade, we each started moving in different directions. We were still really close, but definitely changing.

A new sound had hit Austin, and I loved it. My two best friends did not. They made fun of my B-52s album. They hated that "punk" group, the Police. They hated that geek Elvis Costello. I was feeling torn up. One day, at Inner Sanctum, the great punk record store in Austin at that time, I picked up the Sex Pistols album. I had heard a lot about them by then, knew they had played a confrontational and disastrous show at a country & western club just a few miles south in San Antonio. Knew they had gotten in trouble for their song "God Save the Queen." They marked a dividing line at the time. It didn't matter that they could barely play their instruments - this was it. I could play it safe and stick to Boston and Styx. I could pretend I was cool and get the Cars. Or I could jump full-force into the hurricane. I was 16 years old. I wanted something more. So I bought the album.

The raw energy was electric. The snide singing and outright anger of Johnny Rotten touched something in this increasingly rebellious teenager. The music was fast and furious and wanted to knock against the walls of the world.

To this day, I can remember my friend Steve thumbing through my records, trying to find something to put on. I was in another room, listening to him mumble as he went through the collection. "The Doors? No. Led Zeppelin? No. The Beatles? Nah." Suddenly, silence. Then, shouting across the house: "What in the hell is this?" He had found the Sex Pistols.

I liked other groups much more than the Pistols, especially the Clash and Joy Division. But buying Never Mind the Bollocks, even knowing it would cause division with my longtime chums, definitely marked some kind of passage into a new and different "self." Before that, I had been afraid of what other people thought about me, especially my closest friends. No longer. The Three Musketeers would remains friends through high school, but we hung out less and less. Now, I was headed off by myself into an unknown direction.

4. Stardust: Willie Nelson – Ironically, at the same time I was desperately trying to establish my own identity and listening to the Sex Pistols, I also bought this album. I can actually remember thrashing around my room one night to the Pistols and, after exhausting myself, putting on Stardust as I went to bed. Who knew at the time that this too was my identity. I denied it for a while, because at age 17, good punks weren't supposed to be listening to old fart's music like Willie Nelson.

But I loved the tunes. And, in the end, Stardust had much more of an impact on me musically, because it was through this album that I learned about people such as George Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael, Irving Berlin and Duke Ellington. I began to look these people up. Who were they? What was their music like? Later, as I started listening to jazz, I came across their names more and more. And these tunes would show up on a Billie Holiday record or a Louis Armstrong record. It was like someone saying, "Welcome, Come On In to Jazz."

Willie Nelson had spent all of the 1960 as a country & western songwriter (Patsy Cline's "Crazy," for example). In the early-mid 1970s, he did a few country albums of his own, none of which were particularly popular. Then he came up with the idea for a country & western concept album called Red Headed Stranger, and one of the singles, "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain, " became a big hit. So what does a country singer do then? Well, an unsual one from Austin gets Booker T. Jones to produce an album of old standards by Gershwin and Hoagy and Berlin. It's Willie's same ol' country band, but now everything has changed. The selection of material was excellent, especially Hoagy Carmichael's two songs, because much of his jazz always did have a rural, country feel to it. And Willie tapped into some of those older, deeper music connections, like Jimmie Rodgers, the Father of Country Music, cutting records with a young Louis Armstrong. Ray Charles, also, would've been an influence, crossing over between jazz and country and the blues. And Texas itself has a rich jazz history (though no one talks about it much), along with folk, country and the blues. In many ways Stardust goes back to that time when folks would sit out on the porch on a warm summer evening and someone would get their guitar and start picking at a few favorite tunes. That's the atmosphere Willie created on this album.

Booker T.'s production still sounds great today - roomy, lush and atmospheric. Willie's acoustic guitar takes on a haunting, nostalgic quality that captures Gershwin beautiful and aching "Someone to Watch Over Me." Mickey Raphael's wailing harmonica moves out of the honky tonk and becomes a mournful songbird on a summer evening. And, perhaps I'm biased because I heard Willie sing these songs first, but I think he does an amazing job with them vocally. He did some other albums of standards, but this one is far and above the best. It's even ranked 257 on Unnamed Corporate Music Magazine's Top 500 of All-Time, not bad for a country singer doing old jazz standards at the height of the Rock and Roll Era. The album remains one of my all-time favorites, and I highly recommend it.

5. Blood on the Tracks: Bob Dylan – In high school, I had gotten into a lot of 60s and 70s music, but I never liked Bob Dylan. That voice! Who could stand it? But my first year in college, a new friend and fellow poet loaned me this album and said I should really listen to the words.

At the time, I was living in north Austin, and the railroad ran close to the house. Sometimes the trains would stop, and as I drove by, I'd notice that some of the box car doors were open. "How easy it would be," I thought, "to just hop in one of those box cars and go." I had just turned 18 and I was restless. College was okay, but it felt just like high school. I wanted to travel, to journey, to wander.

That's when I started listening to Blood on the Tracks. Even the title was cool, I thought. The opening song, "Tangled Up in Blue," was all about drifting around and experiencing interesting things. And the guy's voice didn't seem that bad now. In fact, I liked it's ragged, earthy quality. He sounded like a dirt road. And the lyrics were phenomenal! How could I have missed all of this?! "Idiot Wind" was like an epic novel. He had some of the Pistols anger, but he seemed really different. He sounded wiser and more experienced.

And there were women involved. Dylan wasn't singing stupid love songs, he was singing about sex and relationships. I was 18 and going through my first love affair. It was terribly dramatic and intense. I wanted to run away with this girl. She was my muse, my lover, my goddess. And Dylan seemed to know all about it. He gave out warnings about how much pain might be involved. Ironically, a few years later, after my love and I had run away, and then broken up, this album really struck a deep chord. My heart and soul tore itself up in agony as Dylan sang, "If You See Her Say Hello," because I had lived the song now.

I started buying up all the Dylan albums I could find. My friend Walter, who had loaned me Blood on the Tracks, and I went through a feverish friendship that first year in college, both of us totally into Dylan. It was one of those rare but special occasions when you can share your musical madeness with someone else. We started a literary magazine together. Went to see foriegn films together. Shared an aprtment. Drove out of town in the middle of the night to go exploring, or to hang out in some truck stop cafe at 4 am. I dropped out of college the next year and worked full-time at a supermarket. Then I left Walter and Austin behind, as my girlfriend and I headed to the mountains of Colorado to chase down our romantic dream. Dylan was the soundtrack to that dramatic time of my life. I couldn't have asked for better.

After all is said and done, Bob Dylan has probably had more influence on me than anyone else artistically, though I don’t listen to him nearly as much anymore. If I was headed to a desert island and could only take one Dylan disc, I would struggle between this album and Blonde on Blonde. Nostalgia would make me choose Blood on the Tracks.

Good Bye, Lady Bird

Another one of the Grande Dames of Texas passed away yesterday. Lady Bird Johnson was 94.

Growing up in Austin, it was impossible not to hear of her. I watched her television station; listened to her radio station; rode my bike along the Hike and Bike Trail, which she helped create; visited her husband's Presidential Library countless times; saw all the wildflowers she helped plant along the roads of Texas; and even went to the Johnson Family Ranch, which she turned over to the nation in 1972 as a National Historic Site.

Her radio station, KLBJ, was a pretty damn good station, too. The only real rock and roll station in Austin in the 1970s. It embraced punk rock early and introduced me to groups such as the Clash, Sex Pistols and others.

She brought poetry and barbeque to the White House. Can't get much better than that.

There's going to be a public cortege on Sunday, starting at the Capitol in Austin, passing along Cesar Chavez Street, crossing Town Lake, and heading out of town all the way to Johnson City, where she'll be buried at the family cemetery.

Here's part of an obituary from the Austin American Statesman (free registration required):

Her marriage to a larger-than-life Texan thrust a shy, small-town girl named Lady Bird Johnson into the national spotlight. A love affair with the great outdoors kept her there.

And though nationally, she was best known as the wife of Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th president, Mrs. Johnson was very much a figure in her own right. She mixed Southern graciousness with a quiet, cast-iron fortitude that not only won admirers but allowed her to steer a large business enterprise and help forge a national environmental movement.

Mrs. Johnson was an author, a businesswoman, a champion of education and conservation efforts, a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother and, most of all, a supportive and loving wife. She was a tireless advocate who left her gentle fingerprints on America's history and helped shape its diverse landscape.

Her legacy includes the millions of daffodils that bloom every year in the nation's capital, that strip of serenity along Town Lake known as the hike-and-bike trail and the bursts of spring color that have made stretches of Texas highways nothing short of remarkable.

Mrs. Johnson was a true intellect who loved books and poetry and, above all, stimulating conversation. At home and on vacations, she surrounded herself with writers, academics, politicians and thoughtful people whose discourse was far from idle chit-chat.

Her love of nature didn't confine itself to boardrooms and committee work. The outdoors and natural environment were part of Mrs. Johnson's regular day, as her once-frequent walks along Town Lake made evident, along with her picnic/poetry readings on the lawn fronting the LBJ Library.

Her environmental work took her from the National Geographic Society board of trustees to the Advisory Board on National Parks. She also served on the board of the American Conservation Society.

Lady Bird and Lyndon, dancing at their daughter's wedding reception in the White House, 1967.


And from the New York Times obituary (free registration required):

Mrs. Johnson was a calm and steadying influence on her often moody and volatile husband as she quietly attended to the demands imposed by his career. Liz Carpenter, her press secretary during her years in the White House, once wrote that “if President Johnson was the long arm, Lady Bird Johnson was the gentle hand."

She softened hurts, mediated quarrels and won over many political opponents. Johnson often said his political ascent would have been inconceivable without his wife’s devotion and forbearance. Others shared that belief.

Mrs. Johnson developed her own public projects. She was an early supporter of the environment and, in championing highway beautification, worked to banish billboards and plant flowers and trees.

Mrs. Johnson financed her husband’s first campaign for Congress in 1937 with a $10,000 loan against a small inheritance from her mother. She began taking an active role in politics in 1941, after he lost his first bid for the Senate and returned to the House. While he was on active duty in the Navy during World War II, Mrs. Johnson managed his legislative office. From that point she shared his public life, representing him, speaking for him and answering questions with unusual candor.

Johnson openly expressed affection for his wife. He often planted a quick kiss on her forehead and held her hand when they were being driven somewhere. In public, Mrs. Johnson referred to her husband as Lyndon; when they were alone or with friends, he was Darling. She was always Bird.

Although she had attended many state dinners in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, Mrs. Johnson made no effort to copy the style of previous first ladies. Her first state dinner, for the president of Italy and his wife, combined Italian opera and American hootenanny.

The Johnsons enjoyed entertaining official guests at the L.B.J. Ranch in Stonewall, Tex. Their Texas background inspired the menus and entertainment for many White House events. The South Lawn, which the president referred to as the backyard, became a setting for barbecues.

Mrs. Johnson was born Claudia Alta Taylor on Dec. 22, 1912 in a big red brick house in the East Texas town of Karnack (population 100). The youngest of three children and the only girl, she acquired the name Lady Bird as a toddler after a nursemaid described her as “purty as a lady bird.”

Her whirlwind romance with Lyndon Johnson began in the autumn of 1934 in the office of a friend in Austin. They met for breakfast the next morning. After pouring out his life history, financial status, how much insurance he carried and his prospects, Johnson asked her to marry him. When she reported the first-date proposal to her father, he showed no astonishment. “Some of the best bargains are made in a hurry,” he said.

It took a few more tries before Johnson’s persistence was rewarded.

“He was the most outspoken, straightforward, determined person I’d ever encountered,” Mrs. Johnson said of her suitor years later. “I knew I’d met something remarkable, but I didn’t know quite what.”

They were married on Nov. 17, 1934, two months after they met, in St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in San Antonio. The groom forgot the ring, and the best man was sent across the street to buy one at a Sears, Roebuck store for $2.98.

“It has been a wonderful life,” she told Ms. Carpenter in 1992. “I feel like a jug into which wine is poured until it overflows.”