Police Horse

I went to a business conference in Austin, Texas in January of 2019, and a bunch of weird things happened all directly related to the room the hotel had assigned me. If you want know about one, two, or all three of these things, read on.

1. The Room

The first thing you need to understand is that this was my first full year as a member of the board of directors for an independent, not-for-profit, technology user association. The association was in charge of an annual conference that drew around three thousand people, and in the years since I’ve learned a lot about how these things work. I’ve written about my attendance at conferences like this before, but now I was in the inner circle helping to actually execute the thing as a volunteer. One thing I learned is that executive suites, limo transportation, and certain VIP perks are built in to the overall package when your organization commits to thousands of hotel rooms. You literally can’t host a conference without this stuff. Disclaimer: My actual employer wasn’t footing the bill for me to attend; I was there on my own time, and in the capacity of an event volunteer. So don’t come at me, bro!

I wish I could remember the name of the hotel. It was surely some flavor of Hilton, Marriott, or Hyatt, in downtown Austin, Texas. As I said, it was my first year on the board of directors of this organization, so I was surprised at the airport when a man in a too-large, rumpled suit holding an iPad with my last name on it in bold, block letters helped me grab my suitcases, then led me to a black SUV with tinted windows and drove me to the hotel. OK, kinda baller! I was more accustomed to calling a Lyft and waiting out on the curb, trying to determine ten minutes later which Toyota Camry was for me. This was definitely a treat for a stoner from North Hollywood like me.

After checking in at the front desk, they gave me a room key that said 2208/2210. I didn’t understand what that meant, but I didn’t pay it too much attention. I took the elevator to the 22nd floor, then followed a sign that said 2201 – 2210 down a hallway that seemed to end in a T.

But before the end of the hallway, there was a door propped open, directly facing me. I walked through this doorway and saw room 2210 on my left, with the door closed, and room 2208 on the right, with the door propped open. I walked into 2208, naturally, and there was a bellman in there setting up some items on a little table in the “living area” of an immaculate two-room suite.

As he placed chocolate strawberries and cheeses and crackers on a little tray I thanked him as I began to unpack. He welcomed me to the hotel and hoped my stay would be a pleasant one. I asked him about the propped door at the end of the hall that I had walked through to get to my room, 2208, as it seemed to have the same kind of door handle and locking mechanism as all the other rooms. He said “Oh, just keep that door propped open.” OK, I replied. But what was that room across the hall then, 2210? “That’s someone else’s room.” Fine. A strange arrangement, but whatever. What did I know about the ways of comped suites on the luxury floors of Austin hotels? I did wonder though, what would happen if the door that led to 2208 and 2210 was closed? Would my keycard let me in? Would it let the occupants of 2210 in? The universe is a realm of mysteries, and I doubted I would uncover most of them, including this one.

I thanked the hotel employee for the snacks and swore I would find him later to offer him a gratuity, as I was not prepared with cash. Rookie move, I know. In a shocking twist to this story, I never did find him later. Sue me! I carried my own bags to the room; I didn’t know there would be a MAN IN THE ROOM WAITING FOR ME!

There was a blue box on the table next to the snacks. Some champagne flutes stood nearby; they had come from the box, I discovered. I examined the flutes and the box; they the seemed to be from Tiffany & Co. Wow! That’s quite a gift. I could get used to this lux life! Well, I had no time to snack or examine the flutes any further. My phone was blowing up with group texts from my fellow volunteer colleagues: Where are you? We’re in the hotel bar! What time are you going to be at dinner? My flight was delayed! I’m still in my Lyft from the airport… These were not all directed at me, but we had a very tight crew of volunteers from all over the country who were descending on the hotel within a few hours of each other, and we were desperate to meet up and hang out, as we only saw each other a couple of times a year.

The next few days were a whirlwind, as they always are at these events. “Work hard, play hard” is not a motto we invented, but we abide by it. We were in meetings and educational events by day, helping the paid organization staff in whatever ways we could. By night, we partied. Nothing extreme, only the rare lampshade on the head, but sometimes a group of anywhere from six to twenty-five of us would descent on someone’s hotel room, depending on the size of the suite, and have some drinks and the occasional 80’s dance party. Typically the conference chair or the board president – in later years I would act as the former, but never the latter – would have *really* nice suites, meaning it was possible to host incredible parties. The next year a close friend and colleague of mine had a two-story suite with three balconies, four bedrooms, a gym, three bathrooms, and a full kitchen. We called it the Jay-Z & Beyonce suite, because someone said the power couple had once stayed there. I’m not sure if that was true. Regardless, these niceties come with the conference package; you don’t pay any more or less for them. Someone has to use them!

In Austin this year, however, room 2208 was in no way that ostentatious, but it was very nice. I would be in the hotel for six nights, and I was more than comfortable in the corner suite with a living area separate from the bedroom and bathroom. Can you imagine? When I was married, my children’s mother and I would stay in some truly nightmarish accommodations up and down California: rooms barely bigger than a solitary confinement jail cell with three kids under the age of ten attempting to run around like lunatics – as kids do – but being thwarted at every turn by thin walls and nowhere to go. It was the hospitality version of a family straitjacket.

But I kept wondering about that room across the hall, number 2210, which, remember, was written on my room key envelope alongside 2208. Why was there a door at the end of the hall that led to both rooms? Why had the bellman instructed me to keep it propped open? I kept hearing his authoritative voice: “That’s someone else’s room.” I was in and out of 2208 several times a day, and I never saw nor heard my neighbor in this strange cloister at the end of the hall. About two days in I closed the door that led to both 2208 and 2210. It had a key reader on it. I wanted to see if my key would unlock it. It did. So I could get into the door that led to 2208 and 2210, and I could get into 2208. That’s when the devil in me said, “But sir, can you get into 2210?” I looked left, then right, then down the hall. I furtively listened at the door of 2210… and tried my card.

No luck. The keypad flashed red. I made a hasty retreat to 2208 and quickly shut the door behind me, sure that suspicious and violent people were looking out of the peephole of 2210 at the exact moment I tried to run my card and then scurried across the hall. Whew, close one! Still, by the next day I couldn’t stop wondering about 2210. It didn’t make sense to me. Why were two rooms secluded by a common door at the end of the hall? Finally, I called the front desk.

“Hi, I was just curious about my suite setup. My card key envelope says 2208/2210.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I’m in 2208, and there’s a door that I have access to that leads to both 2208 and 2210, but, like, what actually is 2210?”

“That’s yours too.”

Wait, what? WHAT!! THAT’S MINE TOO??? My head spun around in three full circles as I tried to process this information. I let them know that I had tried my card, but it didn’t open 2210. “Oh, sorry,” they said. “Let me reprogram that for you. OK, try that again.”

I hung up and went across the hall and tentatively scanned my key. Green light.

It was like Dorothy discovering Oz, like Harry discovering he’s a wizard, or Lucy finding Narnia in the back of the wardrobe. I opened the door to a wonderland of amazement and adventure! OK, I exaggerate. It was just another room in a hotel, but one without a bedroom. Only a large area for entertaining, a bar, and a whole other bathroom suite. What in the actual fuck??? I immediately arranged to host an 80’s dance party in my new wing for later that evening.

The next morning, basking in my newfound elbow room, I realized I could now close that door at the end of the hall, and leave the doors to 2208 AND 2210 propped open full-time, and basically have a whole house with multiple rooms at my disposal. Truthfully though, after the 80’s dance party that night, I never had need for all the space. I made a point of drinking my morning coffee over in 2210, with a view of a different part of Austin from the floor-to-ceiling corner windows, just, you know, because I could. I enjoyed the super-suite for only the latter half of my stay at the hotel, sadly, because a bellman setting up strawberries and champagne flutes propped one door open and told me another door wasn’t mine. Oh Bellman, Oh humanity!

2. The Shirts

During this time, January of 2019, I was in the best physical shape I’d been in since maybe my early twenties. I would turn fifty later that year, but about two and a half years prior to this time, at the age of forty-seven, I began an exciting fitness and weight loss journey. I had gotten pretty, shall we say, *comfortable* from my thirties to mid-forties. I was married, I had children, I worked full time at a mostly sedentary job. I coached the kids’ sports teams, went on their school field trips, had family and other commitments, and tried to steal a little time away here and there for myself, but I overall was living what some would say is a “normal,” suburban, American life. I was not unhappy. I wasn’t one hundred percent happy either, but who is? The kids provided a mountain of joy along with a fair amount of heartache and hair-pulling, but I wouldn’t trade any of it for the world. Physical fitness, however, was never at the top of my list. I was probably my fattest in my mid thirties, once even tipping the scales at a ghastly 209 pounds, which is a LOT for a five-foot seven-inch frame. It’s embarrassing to be a short guy but need XL T-shirts and 36″ waist pants. Big hoodies, thick flannels, and cargo shorts were my best friends. American Dad 101.

As the kids got older I was able to eek out a little more free time. I began to ride my bike on my daily work commute and errands instead of driving my car. I tried to walk more, hike some, and go for a jog very occasionally. I coached all my kids in various sports at one time or another, so that helped some. By the time I was forty-six or so I was down to about 192 pounds. Not fit enough to get out of the XL T-shirts or 36″ waist pants, but much better than 209. The main problem was that I ate like a fucking pig.

Put food in front of me, I ate it. Leave some on your plate, I ate it. If it was in the fridge, I ate it. I ate and ate and ate and ate my way to being way heavier than I had wanted. Then right before I turned forty-seven it changed. I wrote about some of that period here, but a big change that happened in 2016 was that I joined a gym and started eating better and eating LESS. The pounds started melting off, more from my kitchen habits than my gym habits maybe. By January of 2019 I was recently separated, living back in Midtown, Sacramento, starting to date again for the first time in decades, and feeling great physically. I was not feeling deprived food-wise as I weighed myself and tracked the weight daily. I was clocking in at a svelte 155-158 pounds. Yes, a full fifty pounds lighter than my heaviest days in my thirties, and easily 35 pounds lighter than just four years prior. (Disclaimer from the beginning of 2024 here… I’m about halfway back to my fattest, normally now weighing in at the 177 – 179 range. I don’t feel good about it, but I do seem to have leveled off, and I have kind of plan for getting back down some.)

One of the great and terrible things about losing a lot of weight is that you need ALL new clothes. It’s super fun, but also expensive. In early 2019 I was riding high – despite the hit to my wallet – routinely sporting size medium T-shirts, occasionally even smalls when it came to roomy button-up shirts or jackets, and 31″ waist jeans. I needed so many new clothes, I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t know how to shop, or where to shop. For a few years I did Stitchfix and got pleasantly surprised every three months with new clothes in a box that my “personal stylist,” – working with in the strict confines of an algorithm, I’ve learned – sent me. Sometimes I kept lots of things from the box, other times I kept only one or two. It was a great way to get new clothes without having to trudge out to the stores and suffer the indignities of parking lots and dressing rooms. And who doesn’t like surprises that come in a box!

(I abandoned Stitchfix after two or three years when they finally sent me a box of absolute shit. They have your measurements and general style preferences on file, which is why it was weird to be sent an entire box of stuff that didn’t fit size or fashion-wise. Their deal is: Only keep and pay for what you like, and ship the rest back within a week. The catch is there’s a $25.00 “styling fee” that is waived if you purchase even one item in the box. As a loyal customer for a number of years, with never a problem, I figured they might spot me the styling fee for the shit box they sent me (it was my first month with a new algorithm-assisted stylist). Nope, fuck off, they said. We’re charging you $25.00. I said fine, we’re done! And done we were. Haven’t been back, won’t go back. They have my $25.00, but not my hundreds – maybe thousands – of dollars worth of clothes since then. Good business, people, good business!)

Lots of my new clothes were concert T-shirts, not from Stitchfix, but picked up at some of the shows I had attended during the preceding couple of years. Some may have been size medium, and others might have been small-fitting larges. I had a Justin Townes Earle shirt, a Zepparella, a Conor Oberst shirt that I purchased personally from Phoebe Bridgers, a Sacramento Republic F.C. or two, and a David Bowie shirt that I bought at the great man’s concert in 1990, that almost 30 years later I became miraculously able to fit into again. There were surely two or three others that I’m forgetting now. I loved my concert shirts. I wore them untucked (cool), tucked in (maybe not), under sports coats (umm… okay), I wore them with everything. I felt very affectionate toward them. They were sometimes even conversation starters with strangers who knew the band.

Let me digress here for a moment. Now, you, as a free person, are at liberty to wear whatever kind of shirt you want. But if you walk around with a T-shirt of, for example, Neil Young’s Harvest album at a brewfest, and a stranger (me) says, “Hey, great album!” as you pass by, do not put on a fucking stink face and scurry away because you were spoken to by a stranger. You are a thirty-something year old man with a decent beard, for goodness sake. Be willing to acknowledge that the advertisement you put on your torso has generated an opinion from a passerby, and you must be willing to – if not discuss, as I’d prefer – at least acknowledge a comment. And God forbid you wear a Nirvana tee from Target and don’t know how to opine about whether Bleach is accessible or not to the average rock fan, the way Nevermind was.

I loved those tees and I loved talking about them if strangers had something to say. I loved how well they fit my new frame. I loved that they reminded me of amazing adventures from concerts or soccer games with friends. I loved that I could now pull off wearing the the soft, thinly woven “vintage” style of T-shirt that had become popular, and no longer felt the need to wear the Hanes Beefy-T cotton suit of armor style. I wasn’t trying to hide my body behind a T-shirt anymore. I loved those shirts. And I lost them all forever in that Austin hotel room, number 2208.

How did I lose them, you ask? Were they ripped from my body by sex crazed conference-goers? Were they flung off the balcony as I dived 22 floors into the hotel pool? Were they burned by spliffs after parting with a reggae band? Or were they freely given to Austin’s less fortunate, huddled, cold, and camped by the river? No, I just left them there.

I was anxious as I was packing up to leave the conference, because I was flying from Austin to visit and old friend on the East Coast. The shirts were in the middle drawer of three drawers. Apparently I cleared out the top and bottom drawers, but for some idiotic reason I failed to pack the middle drawer, or even check it on my way out. I had a lot of luggage. I was so hyper focused on my weight and fitness in those days that I even packed my scale, I’m embarrassed to admit. And somehow in the chaos I left the shirts behind.

But I never should have even put my clothes in the hotel room drawers, you say. Why not just leave them in the suitcase on that little folding stand, like a normal person would? Well, one, I am not a normal person, and two, you need a LOT of clothes at this conference. It was my first full conference on the board of directors, so I had to come in early for meetings. It was seven days and six nights, and that was before my next trip to the East Coast. Those seven days are looooong ones, too. Typically meetings or events early each morning, while each night would routinely last until between 11PM and 2AM. Long days and nights: working hard, playing hard, learning a lot… you need to sometimes do two or three changes a day. Some affairs are more casual than others. In sum, it’s tough to do out of a suitcase. You really need to organize your shit better than that. I even bring a Hefty bag for dirty clothes when I travel. At least that’s how I, a weirdo, do things. And normally it works out fine, except when you leave your treasured T-shirts behind.

I arrived at my friend’s house on the East Coast after a long day saying goodbye to my conference friends and flying several hundred miles. Later that night, as I went to change out of my airplane shirt, frantically rummaging through my suitcases and backpack and dirty clothes bag looking for my beloved tees (I didn’t wear most of them. If I had, they’d have been with the dirties, safe and sound), my heart sank. They were gone. GONE! I was gut-punched. I lost my mind. My friend was sympathetic and understanding about my freakout. I called the hotel immediately. Someone else had already checked into room 2208 unfortunately. Yes sir, we sent someone up there to knock on the door but no one answered. We left them a voice mail on the hotel phone (my God, who would check that?) Yes sir, we spoke to the head of housekeeping. No one has seen the shirts. Yes sir, I’m the manager, I’m sorry, we can’t locate the shirts. They are not in the room after the next group checked out. I called the hospitality planner for the event organization group we hired. She tried as well. I just didn’t know what else to do.

I was beside myself. I wanted to enjoy my weekend with my friend, and I did, so maybe that’s why I let it go. Maybe I could have insisted the hotel patch me through to the room. Maybe I should have pushed harder. Maybe I should have called the CEOs of Hilton, Hyatt, and Marriott. I don’t know. The shirts were gone, including the Bowie shirt from 1990. I hurt to this day. I hurt.

3. The Tiffany Flutes

OK, back to Part 1. Do you remember the Tiffany & Co. champagne flutes and the blue box? Let’s go back to those. There are typically little gifts in the VIP rooms at these conferences, I’ve noticed. Along with the chocolate strawberries my friendly but confused bellman was arranging, there was an Austin-themed bottle opener, a Barton Springs coaster, and a couple of other little knick-knacks. Remember that I didn’t spend much time in my room when I first arrived. I ate a strawberry, glanced at these little gifts, and scurried down to meet my colleagues.

Over drinks that night, we talked about the hotel, and the nice little gift bags we had been given. Most folks had some strawberries or other treats. There was a lovely card from the executive director of our organization, a coffee mug, and the other trinkets. I brought up the flutes. “Hey, and what about those champagne flutes? Am I crazy, those are Tiffany, right?” Everyone looked at me like I was nuts. The president of our board was mock-outraged: “I didn’t get any Tiffany flutes, goddammit!” Others of our group, much higher up on this food chain than me – including the conference chair herself – said the same. I felt a little sheepish.

I said well, I have some nice champagne flutes in a blue box. There was even a little card that said Welcome to Austin with them, although I hadn’t read it yet. We were all confused. I never brought it up again, but a few times later in the week one of my colleagues would say “Why did Chip get fancy champagne glasses?” I would pretend to take an important phone call and scurry away.

It’s hard packing up from these events when they are over. Not only do you collect a bunch of stuff along the way and wonder where to put it all, but it’s always a frantic rush to the airport, thus the missing T-shirts. I knew I wanted to keep the Tiffany flutes, but I had nowhere to put that blue shoe box they came in. The conference even gives you little backpacks to carry your stuff around in, but the box wouldn’t even fit in that. I had two rolling suitcases and a good-sized travel backpack already, but there was nowhere to put this damned box! (Remember I had brought my scale as well.)

My dumb solution was to remove the flutes from the beautiful box they came in, wrap them in the bubble wrap that also came with them, put them and them alone in the small conference backpack that was provided to us, and dangle that small backpack off my main backpack with a carabiner. Every flight was a hassle; I was constantly worried about the glasses breaking, and I must have looked a fool to my friend waiting for me at my next destination on the East Coast, rolling two suitcases, and with a small backpack dangling off my larger backpack.

Finally at home in Sacramento after an exhausting conference in Austin and a whirlwind long weekend on the East Coast, as I began unpacking, I wondered again about the glasses. (I also saw that on eBay, just the Tiffany & Co. extra boxes could sell for $25.00 or so, like the one I left behind in the hotel room.) I found a home for the flutes in my cupboard, and eventually came across the card that came with them:

I know I’m being a little vague about the conference, and that’s to protect the reputations of the innocent bystanders in the various sagas and predicaments I’ve found myself in at that place over the years. But I will say this: It was not for Ford dealers. Not from Houston, not from anywhere. Nor any other kind of car. I didn’t win the Fall Sales Challenge. I don’t sell anything. It was a mistake. Someone gave me Tiffany & Co. champagne flutes by mistake.

For the record, as God as my witness, I would have returned them to the hotel had I known. I would have tried to find out about the Ford dealers gathering that must have been occurring in some other part of the hotel. I would hate to be the one Ford dealer who sat around with his or her crew, maybe at the very same bar I sat around in with my crew, saying “Wait, all of you received WHAT? I didn’t get any!” God bless you, Houston area Ford dealer, wherever you are. I’ll make you a deal: you find my T-shirts, I’ll return the flutes.

Click here for Part I: The Project
And here for Part V: 2 to 10

OK, you did it! I did it! Here we are at number one! Welcome to my favorite album of all time. I’m certain you’ve read every word I wrote about all 99 albums that came before this. You’ve gnashed your teeth and rent your garments at how Lydia Loveless came before Black Sabbath, how Beastie Boys came before Public Enemy, and how a bunch of cultural appropriators like Led Zeppelin came before everyone else. Except this.

Here we are. This has been a journey longer than I care to admit. I was on a pretty good run posting on policehorse.blog before I undertook this project. I posted probably 15-20 items – of varying degrees of quality or interest – between the time I started this site in January of 2017, and my last post in mid 2020. The truth is that this project was supposed to be called Fifty at Fifty. My fifty favorite records of all time, reflected upon around my fiftieth birthday. Well, I turned 53 on my last birthday (54 is later this month), and I’ve been working on this for about four years, on and off. For some reason I felt I *needed* to finish this before I posted shorter pieces about other things. When Justin Townes Earle died in 2020 I did write a short piece about it, but otherwise this has been my project. True, I would go months without writing, but I would always return to try to knock out another album or two or three every so often. So here we go.

1. David Bowie – Hunky Dory

I don’t remember when I first became aware of David Bowie. Being only two years old when his Hunky Dory album was released in 1971, I may have become aware of him in general in the early 1980’s. Songs like “Changes” from this album, or “Space Oddity” from an earlier one, could have been in my consciousness. I may have become aware of Hunky Dory around the time that Let’s Dance propelled Bowie back up to the top of the pop charts and made him an MTV staple. What I remember most about Hunky Dory is that the oft-mentioned Tony, my best friend between the ages of about 11 and 16, had an older sister who owned this record. Tony would frequently appropriate his sister’s albums and we’d listen to them in his room, mere inches of drywall and shoddy insulation away from their rightful home.

Hunky Dory was always an album that we listened to in its entirety. Tony might disagree, and in fact, I have no idea if he feels as strongly about this record as I do. It starts off with what some might consider the biggest hit of Bowie’s career: “Changes.” You know the one: “Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (turn, and face the strange…)” It’s a song that despite it’s prolific radio airplay and cementation in the rock and roll cultural lexicon, along side stalwarts like “Stairway to Heaven”, “Smoke on the Water,” and “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” it never feels old to me. I never get sick of it. I know it like the back of my hand, and although I am not a skilled singer, I can hit every note, every small inflection, every warble of Bowie’s voice on the song. I realized that my turntable was amiss when I purchased a vinyl reprint of Hunky Dory and realized “Oh, that’s off.” I had owned the record player for months before this song made me realize that the timing was slightly askew. I summoned up a version on Spotify, timed it to the album track while adjusting the speed setting, and my JVC has been harmonious ever since.

That’s how well I know the song. That’s how much I love the song. It’s almost quaint now, lyrically. The long dead Bowie in his youth shaking his fist at the establishment, the autocrats who left his generation with a steaming pile of shit. But it’s an anthem that I hope still rings true with young people of every generation:

And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They’re quite aware what they’re going through

As I finish this project, I want to remind you that I’m not here to try tell you why this music is important or what it means. Other people have already done that. I’m here to tell you why this music is important to me, why I love it. And I’m the only one who can tell you that.

Bowie has fascinated me from the day Tony and I played the purloined copy of his sister’s Hunky Dory until this very day, forty years later. Someone is to this day releasing live albums, outtakes, and remixes of his material. Of course Bowie was active musically from the early 1960’s until just before his death from cancer at the age of 69 in 2016. I’m not an expert on all his music, I don’t love it all, and I haven’t really even heard it all. I’ve liked some of his later stuff, like the nearly-posthumously-released Blackstar from 2016, or 2013’s The Next Day. The first of his albums that I loved, in his own chronology, was Space Oddity from 1969, and after uncountable twists and turns culturally, musically, and stylistically, the last one I really enjoyed and played a lot was 1983’s Let’s Dance. So that’s a heyday of 14 years, which is aeons in the music business. The fact that he was successful commercially and critically for close to fifty years is remarkable. You wouldn’t have thought the artist who made Let’s Dance was the same one who recorded Space Oddity, but Bowie was notorious for shifting genres, trying on styles, and being ahead of his time, a throwback to earlier times, and exactly of his times, simultaneously.

The style that I loved the most was the period that began with Hunky Dory in 1971 and ended with Diamond Dogs a scant three years later in 1974. I have loved albums before this (Space Oddity, The Man Who Sold the World) and I have loved albums after this (Young Americans, Station to Station, Scary Monsters, even Blackstar.) But the four-album run of Hunky Dory, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Aladdin Sane, and Diamond Dogs is a perfect quadrafecta of records, rivaled only by, well, some of the others you’ve read about here (Zeppelin, Beatles, Stones, Floyd…)

Bowie’s birthday was January 8, and he died on January 10, 2016. So I and other local fans refer to the second week of January as Bowie Week. I’ve been to countless Bowie Week events these last few years. Hell, I could – and maybe I will when I’m done with this endless project – do a whole post just about Bowie Week 2019, or more specifically, Bowie Night at B-Side that year. An eventful night in my life, to be sure, with an interminable cast of characters. But more on that another time.

Honestly, it’s *almost* a coin flip for me, Hunky Dory vs. Ziggy Stardust. I think most people would say Ziggy Stardust given the choice. I know my friend Kevin (whom I met at Bowie Night 2019) would. The obvious hits on Ziggy make the case: the title track, “Suffragette City,” “Moonage Daydream,” “Starman.” And there is no filler on Ziggy either: “Five Years,” “Soul Love,” “Star,” “Rock N Roll Suicide…” it’s a perfect record. Is Hunky Dory more perfect? No. But for me, it’s where the coin lands.

“Changes” turns to “Oh, You Pretty Things,” which pushes Bowie’s voice into falsetto range as he implores “Don’t you know you’re driving your mamas and papas insane, let me make it plain…” It’s a banger for sure, on an album full of bangers. This gives way to “Eight Line Poem,” a beautiful, piano-heavy ode to a mobile, a cactus, a dog, a shadow on the wall, the things that make up the artist’s day, and your and my day as well. It’s a gorgeous melody. Hunky Dory is a sublime record, without many “hits,” but with all the beauty and glory that make up the works of an artist in his or her prime. It’s a masterpiece. The masterpiece of my lifetime.

Open shops down the west side
Will all the cacti find a home?
But the key to the city
Is in the sun that pins the branches to the sky

“Eight Line Poem” flows into “Life On Mars,” which I wouldn’t think of as a huge Bowie “hit,” but was at one time his most downloaded song on Spotify. The thing about Hunky Dory is it’s an eleven track poem from start to finish, without being a “concept” album. It’s the artist as a rebel, the artist as an alien, the artist as a husband and a father, the artist as a different artist. It encapsulates everything David Bowie was, from beginning to end, in a single record, I think more than any other.

It’s a God-awful small affair
To the girl with the mousy hair
But her mummy is yelling no
And her daddy has told her to go
But her friend is nowhere to be seen
Now she walks through her sunken dream
To the seat with the clearest view
And she’s hooked to the silver screen

And on we go, in “Life On Mars,” describing the action on the screen as it mimics the action in our real world. What is art? Does art describe us? And if so, why do we care, when we have Us, ourselves? Is art boring? Is there life on Mars? Who cares? Because there is life here.

Next up, “Kooks” is a gorgeous ode to Bowie’s young child, imploring him about the important things in life.

Will you stay in our lovers’ story?
If you stay you won’t be sorry
‘Cause we believe in you
Soon you’ll grow, so take a chance
With a couple of kooks hung up on romancing

It’s a fun song that can’t help but get you tapping your feet and singing along. But after that comes “Quicksand,” a lament that questions everything about the world, love, life, death, and existence itself.

I’m not a prophet or a stone age man
Just a mortal with potential of a superman
I’m living on
I’m tethered to the logic of Homo Sapien
Can’t take my eyes from the great salvation
Of bullshit faith

Bowie never minced words, but he sliced and diced them a bit to show us – as Picasso did in paint, as Eliot did in poetry – the twisted world reflected back on us, and dared us to look into the mirror. Quicksand would never be called a hit, but I have wept more than once as it played. If no one else was around.

After the “Quicksand” dirge, Hunky Dory continues its effortless flitting from style to style, sound to sound, genre to genre. Next is the jazzy little romp “Fill Your Heart,” a lovely, optimistic, command to fill your heart with love. Fear is in your head. You can know it all, if you choose. Lovers never lose. Love will clean your mind and make you free. It’s the most un-Bowie of Bowie songs, but here on Hunky Dory it is absolutely perfectly Bowie.

But without a break in the tracks, it gets deeper, darker and begins the twin songs “Andy Warhol,” and “Song for Bob Dylan,” homages to two of the most influential artists of the 20th century. “Andy Warhol” begins ominously, with computerized notes that are more circuitry than music. An earnest Bowie, as Warhol, explains how to pronounce his name: “It’s ‘hol’, as in ‘holes,’ ‘Andy War-HOL,” or maybe this is just studio banter and he’s discussing with his bandmates and producers how the artist’s name is pronounced. The song doesn’t properly get started until almost 50 seconds in, with Bowie exclaiming:

Like to take a cement fix
Be a standing cinema
Dress my friends up just for show
See them as they really are…

A few other choice lines are below. He continues,

I’d like to be a gallery
Put you all inside my show…

Finally,

You think about paint
And you think about glue
What a jolly boring thing to do

The internet must know, but I don’t know exactly what Bowie is trying to say here. When Hunky Dory was released in 1971, Warhol was at the height of his influence: The Factory, The Velvet Underground, and the Pop Art phenomenon of the 1960s’ that he spearheaded were at their very peak. Some could argue that Bowie himself was a kind of Warholesque figure in rock music, “dressing his friends (and himself) up for show,” always challenging artistic expression’s reigning paradigms. I think Bowie sees himself in Warhol and is uncomfortable with what he sees and wants to tease him a bit. Maybe I’m reading into something that’s not there. Who cares, it’s MY song! It’s a dark tune with a jaunty chorus, which I think describes both Warhol and Bowie pretty well.

From one contemporary to another, Bowie then takes on Bob Dylan with the eponymous “Song for Bob Dylan,” which is performed in the jangly, rocky, folksy style of Dylan himself. I think Bowie is kinder to Dylan than Warhol here, as he pays homage to the American legend a few years after Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, but years before Blood on the Tracks. In other words, Bowie muses right in the middle of Dylan’s massive popularity and influence on global culture and counterculture.

His words of truthful vengeance
They could pin us to the floor
Brought a few more people on
And put the fear in a whole lot more

It’s interesting that Bowie (or someone) chose to put these testaments to contemporary artists back to back on the record. I don’t know if there was a connection between Warhol and Dylan, or what their connection – if any – to Bowie was here at the beginning of the the most artistically prolific phase of his career, but if nothing else, it makes you think of these three men together: the influence they had on art, poetry, music, culture, counterculture, sexuality, and rock and roll. Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, and David Bowie. Decent company for a dinner party, right?

Hunky Dory is such an eclectic collection of songs and stories, “Song for Bob Dylan” gives way to an absolute banger in “Queen Bitch.”

And she’s known in the darkest club
For pushing ahead of the dames
If she says she can do it, then she can do it
She don’t make false claims

Mick Ronson is absolutely slaying on lead guitar here: Crunchy riffs that more or less defined the “glam rock” sound, to be memorialized by so many bands who came later. Bowie himself is in full rock star mode describing a queen of the night, whose gender is not necessarily revealed, in a perfect description of an early-70’s underground frenetic energy and vibe that half makes you wish you were there, and half makes you wonder if you’d be able to keep up.

Finally, the last track of the record: “The Bewley Brothers.” God only knows what’s it’s really about. It sounds like nonsense, but I have read that in later years Bowie admitted that it may have been loosely referring to himself and his schizophrenic half-brother. It’s impossible to explicate, so I wouldn’t want to try too hard. As a coda to this album, my favorite album of all time, it’s perfect. It has a beautiful melody, vocals, and guitar work just before it ends incredibly weirdly. I think of The Pixies when I hear this song because I suspect it’s about nothing at all, but the abstract strings of words sound absolutely gorgeous:

Sighing, the swirl through the streets
Like the crust of the sun
The Bewlay Brothers…

I was stone and he was wax
So he could scream and still relax
Unbelievable
And we frightened the small children away…

Now my brother lays upon the rocks
He could be dead, he could be not, he could be you
He is chameleon, comedian
Corinthian, and caricature

I mean, come on! This is poetry. What does it mean? I can’t tell you. I don’t even know if Bowie could have told you. But it’s a perfect ending to a perfect album.

Again, Ziggy Stardust may have had more hits, while Diamond Dogs and Aladdin Sane are both very worthy bests on anyone’s list of Bowie albums or any albums. But for me, it’s Hunky Dory. It’s a record you can put on day or night, weekend or weekday, in any company, and you can be assured that you will love it, and many other people will love it too, and some will think it’s really weird. And it’s my favorite. Of all time. I’m not saying the music was the best, or the guitar playing, or the lyrics, or even Bowie himself. But in a universe of incredible records by artists young and old, dead and alive, hip hop and jazz and classic rock and heavy metal, Hunky Dory is it for me. I claim it. It’s mine. But you can have it too, and do with it what you want. This is the beauty of music, and hell, all art. It doesn’t have to be cool. It doesn’t have to make sense. People don’t have to agree, and it doesn’t need to belong to you. But when it does, it does. And you seldom ever let go.

So that’s it. We’re done. Reflecting back on the years I took to put this list together has been eye-opening. Well, let’s be fair: the list was easy. Trying to write something meaningful about one hundred different records was the hard part. And honestly, that part wasn’t too hard either. The real hard part was sitting down to do the writing. Once I start, I’m on a roll, but then I might not start again for four months. This is why I know I’m not a writer. Writers write. Painters paint. Musicians play music. Athletes compete. I’m a dabbler, and now I’ve dabbled enough to get thoughts about one hundred records down on – well, not paper, but you know.

If you want to know what’s important to you, look at where you put your time. Is it gardening? Playing video games? Watching TV? Working out? Hanging out with your friends or family? Reading? Working? For me, I put time into all these things. Someone interesting – don’t ask me to remember who – recently said to write down the 25 things that are most important to you, in order. Then cross off the last 20 things on that list. The five things that remain are the things that you will truly pay attention to. Everything else will be “best effort.” So nurture those five. Live with those. Find love in those. Here are mine:

1. Financial security
2. Physical health
3. Relationships with family
4. Relationships with a romantic partner and with friends
5. Music

Everything is about me and my relationships (the first two lead directly to the second two, for me). The first thing outside of that that comes up is music. If I expand my list you’ll see things like reading, gardening, traveling, watching great films and TV shows, exercise, my career, my cat, cooking, hiking, camping, etc. But ultimately, as I sit here firmly in the back half of my life, besides my personal well-being and my relationships with the important people I surround myself with, it’s always been music. David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Pixies, Beastie Boys, Liz Phair and all the others I’ve discussed in these posts. These people, I don’t know them. I’ve never met them (well, I’ve met a few of them…mostly lower on the list), and I don’t know who they are or were as human beings. But I know what their music has meant to me. It’s meant the world.

Click here for Part I: The Project
And here for Part III: 26 to 50

25. The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds

The Best of the Beach Boys, Vol. II was my first record. My sister Nicki, 11 years my senior, owned it, and I loved it so much that as a five-year-old I played it over and over and over. The next Christmas she bought me my very own copy, wrapped up under the tree with a bow, and I was ecstatic.

I’ve always loved an appreciated The Beach Boys. They have always been the quintessential “fun” band. You can’t go wrong with “Surfin’ Safari,” “Catch A Wave,” “Fun, Fun, Fun” (see, “fun” is right in the title!) and crooning ballads like “Surfer Girl,” “In My Room,” and “Don’t Worry Baby.” But then they released Pet Sounds.

You can read the Wikipedia entry. You can read the liner notes of the reissues. Or you can sit back and let it blow your fucking mind that this album was recorded in early 1966. That’s 57 years ago as of this writing, and it may possibly be the most influential rock album ever recorded. It basically created the modern rock and roll album. It was something more than a string of (hopeful) hits, but a coherent musical flow that wrapped itself around in a circle from the first song to the last and back again. Brian Wilson said it was a reaction to The Beatles‘ Rubber Soul – which was a stellar record; the Beatles were also getting close to the full album concept at this time – and then the groundbreaking Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band was a reaction to Pet Sounds itself. Without The Beach Boys there may have been no Beatles – at least a Beatles the way we remember them. Sadly, this was the last real album from the original Beach Boys, and many consider it to be essentially a Brian Wilson solo effort.

It almost seems gauche to talk about the actual songs on the record, the album itself being its own animal, but “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” I Know There’s An Answer,” “Here Today,” “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times,” it’s like noting your favorite ray of sunshine on a perfect day. They’re all perfect.

I didn’t come to Pet Sounds until I was a little older. I knew old Beach Boys stuff because of my sister, and, you know, America. But I picked up this CD sometime in the 90’s and immediately realized that this is why people talk about The Beach Boys, that fun surfin’ band from the 60’s, with a reverence that they just don’t hold for too many other bands of that era. I need to get this sucker on vinyl. I want to listen to it right now. It’s perfect, in every way.

24. Nirvana – Nevermind

New Year’s Eve 1991, The Cow Palace, San Francisco, California. The bill: Pearl Jam opening, Nirvana the middle act, and Red Hot Chili Peppers headlining. The gig was legendary! I was a huge RHCP fan, and just starting to get into Nirvana. But was your boy there? Nope.

I can’t say why. I have no excuse, no reason. I can’t remember any of my friends from Sacramento going (this is where they all pipe in and say “I went,” and “I was there,” and “We invited you, asshole, you should have come!”) The Chilis were one of my favorite bands (see number 32), and at that time I hadn’t yet seen them live. I can’t remember precisely when I got into Nirvana, but I wasn’t an uber-fan yet, just a couple months after Nevermind was released.

I eventually saw the Chilis, and thankfully I saw Nirvana as well at a different gig, just about a year before Kurt Cobain died, at one of the greatest shows I’ve seen in my life. It was a benefit show to raise awareness about sexual abuse in Boznia-Herzegovia, organized, as I recall, by Nirvana’s bassist, Krist Novoselic, who had a family connection to the region. The night was phenomenal! The Breeders (Check “The Leftovers” in this series) in Kim Deal‘s post-Pixies heyday were glorious. Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy – also in The Leftovers – are in my mind the greatest one-album hip hop band of all time. They absolutely destroyed. L7 was one of the only other hard rock bands from that era that I really loved, and though they were not from the Pacific Northwest, they got lumped in with the grunge bands of the time, most of whom left me a little flat.

But Nirvana stole the show, as predicted. It’s so sad to know that Kurt only had a year to live after that. Imagine the music he’d still be making. I could not possibly remember the setlist now, but the internet tells me they played 26 songs, which must have been about the entirety of Nevermind and a fair amount of Incesticide and In Utero, which had not yet been released. (I was never much of a Bleach fan; maybe I should go back and give it another listen.) They crushed it, of course. Kurt was on point, Krist was the unsung hero of Nirvana, and Dave Grohl pounding away on drums…how funny to think now that Nirvana was just Grohl’s short-lived original band before the juggernaut of Foo Fighters.

The album, Nevermind, was superb. From the opening power chords of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the band’s most well-known song to this day, to the next 11 songs of pure perfect pop/grunge/rock, to the final hidden track (as discussed before, so popular in the CD era) “Endless, Nameless.” It’s a brilliant record, and I often wonder how I love this album so much, but really don’t care much about Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Screaming Trees, or Stone Temple Pilots. I can’t say I’ve owned a single record by any of those other bands (but I did have a CD of Mother Love Bone back before Andrew Wood died. It was…fine). I tried to like it more than I actually did. Nothing against those bands; they made some really fine music. It just wasn’t my thing.

It’s weird to think back now: Nevermind was released 32 years ago at the time of this writing (it’s taken your boy a minute to finish this all, so sorry for the inconsistent timelines). 32 years? Many of my good friends are about that age. It’s inconceivable to me, but that’s the human condition. We’re born, we live, we die. Before dying, if we’re lucky, we get old, I’m not “old” old yet, but it’s creeping up. Saying I’ve seen Kurt Cobain and Jerry Garcia and Chuck Berry, and Metallica open for Ozzy in the 80’s, and Cake at house parties… it makes a fella feel old. But damn, how lucky am I? Slap me if you ever hear me complaining!

23. N.W.A – Straight Outta Compton

Just the other day I put the original “Boys-N-The-Hood,” the slightly different version from the N.W.A and the Posse album, and – troubling lyrics and all, mainly around the treatment of females – it sounds as fresh today as it did in the 80’s. The full group’s proper debut album though, Straight Outta Compton is a masterpiece. It affected this white boy from North Hollywood – who dicked around on the streets plenty, but didn’t truly understand “Street Life” in a profound way – chiefly because of the exceptional music and rapping.

When I discovered Straight Outta Compton I already loved Beastie Boys, Run D.M.C, and LL Cool J, but I wasn’t a serious hip hop fan. However, when I heard this record I knew I was listening to something brand new. It’s a perfect record. Again, I have to overlook the horrible treatment of women in the lyrics; it will never sit right with me, but I have to be honest about how I felt about the album as a whole. Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, MC Ren, and the late Eazy-E are all flawless rappers, and each takes a turn dominating on this album. The production is insane, the beats, scratches, and samples are timeless, and the lyrics are, well, hardcore. This is the album that defined Gangsta Rap, after all. But you know all this. You saw the 2015 movie. You know the story. I eventually saw the movie, and I liked it quite a bit, but I’m never one to want to go deep behind the scenes on something that I really care about. I just want the thing: the thing itself. The art. The painting. The novel. The film. The album. This album.

The first track, the title track, announces who the fuck N.W.A are, where they come from, and what they’re all about. Before you ever hear a note or a beat, you hear Dre announce in plain speech:

You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge

That’s it. That sums up the album, and so many that followed by the group’s individual members on their own albums later, and albums by countless others influenced by N.W.A, needing to tell their own stories. Ice Cube takes over the lyrics from there, followed by Ren, followed by Eazy. The onslaught never lets up. Not from start to finish. The album is funky, soulful, hilarious, hateful, violent, freaky, danceable, and as fresh in 2023 as it was in 1988. I can’t say I lived anything close to N.W.A’s story, despite being the same age as many of the band members, and growing up in the same city. (But to be fair, North Hollywood and Compton, despite both being “L.A.,” are decidedly not the same city.) The only time I ever went to South Central back then was to go to a concert by white guys: The Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, U2, and others at the L.A. Coliseum, Sports Arena, or The Fabulous Forum. And it always made me nervous to head through that area, I can’t lie. But when N.W.A told their story, I listened. And I listened over and over and over and over and over. I bet I’ve played this album 900 times, and I still don’t quite know all the rhymes.

Here’s a murder rap to keep y’all dancin’
With a crime record like Charles Manson
AK-47 is the tool
Don’t make me act a motherfucking fool
Me and you can go toe to toe, no maybe
I’m knocking n****s out the box, daily
Yo, weekly, monthly and yearly
Until them dumb motherfuckers see clearly
That I’m down with the capital C-P-T
Boy, you can’t fuck with me
So when I’m in your neighborhood, you better duck
‘Cause Ice Cube is crazy as fuck
As I leave, believe I’m stompin’
But when I come back boy, I’m coming straight outta Compton

22. Violent Femmes – Violent Femmes

I can’t remember where I got Violent Femme’s first album on cassette. I don’t remember which car I owned, which is weird, because with cassettes I can almost always remember which car I bumped that thing in. I want to say maybe I got this with my employee discount at Sam Goody Music & Video in Costa Mesa, and played it non-stop during the summer of 1989 and then for the next several years. As with every other album on this list, every track is a banger. The Femmes’ debut album from 1983 remains their most popular and successful album, with songs like “Blister In The Sun,” “Kiss Off,” “Add It Up,” and “Gone Daddy Gone” in all its xylophonic splendor. But my first introduction to the Femmes was on the mixtape I wrote about for #32 Freaky Styley, made for me by my friend Molly when we were teenagers. “Gone Daddy Gone” made an appearance on that life-changing tape, and it let me know there was other awesome music in this world besides hard rock and metal. But “Gone Daddy” was really the only song I knew for a few years before I really dived into this album. I was aware of “Blister” and “Add It Up,” and maybe “Kiss Off” too, but I didn’t realize how this whole album flowed so perfectly together. It’s a tight 37 minutes of perfection, each song rolling seamlessly into the next. “Blister” and “Kiss Off,” the one-two punch of the opening tracks, into the slower, funkier, sadder “Please Do Not Go,” then the knockout “Add It Up,” but are they done there? We’re already through three of the most popular Femmes’ songs at this point. No, we’re not done, people! “Confessions” is haunting, cacophonous, and gut-wrenching. Then you flip the tape and the happy-go-lucky “Prove My Love” gets you bopping again, “Promise” is great punk ditty, then “To The Kill” is another haunter. The xylophones come in after that and knock you off your chair with the ass-kicker, “Gone Daddy Gone,” and finally, the hopeful, sweet, sad, “Good Feeling.”

Good feeling

Won’t you stay with me
Just a little longer?
It always seems like you’re leaving
When I need you here
Just a little longer

I finally saw them a few years ago at the UC Theater in Berkeley. I went with a friend, and he was there with his new girlfriend, and his old girlfriend was also there, with her new boyfriend. I adored both of these girlfriends, and I was the only one to bridge the couples and hang with both. My buddy and his new girlfriend and I were right up at the front, where we like to be, and it was one of the best concerts of my life. Certainly top 15. (Wait, is another list forthcoming?) The old girlfriend was standing a little higher up, and she texted my friend, simply, “I don’t like it.” Meaning the new girlfriend, not the Femmes. I think. Regardless of the drama, it was an amazing night. I still always think about that. “I don’t like it.”

Good Feeling, won’t you stay with me, just a little longer?

Please?

21. Jonathan Richman – I, Jonathan

Jonathan Richman is a performer, like so many others on this list, that I came to later than I should have. I had heard of Modern Lovers, but I didn’t know their stuff. I think my first awareness of Jonathan was from the 1998 comedy – and one of my top three comedies of all time, but that’s another post – There’s Something About Mary. Richman and long time drummer and bandmate Tommy Larkins played the Greek Chorus in the film, sitting in trees, commenting on the action while playing their instruments, and in the end getting shot.

But what led me to my first J-Rich album, I, Jonathan? Who knows? I think I kind of had him confused with Richard Thompson, another great artist about whom – at the time – I knew very little. Such simple white guy names. The album, like all on this list, is spectacular from start to finish, and it’s absolutely the place to start when talking about Jonathan. He is an incredible songwriter in that his songs are simple – just a few easy chords – and they speak honestly about the things Jonathan cares about. His music has been called whimsical and childlike, but I think it’s anything but. It’s not complex in its orchestration or lyrics – he’s no Colin Meloy – but it burrows itself into your heart and soul, and if that’s not the most complicated trick there is, then you may as well stop reading here.

I’ve seen him live several times, always at small or small-ish venues, which is a gift. He’s the only guitar player I’ve ever seen who plays standing up without a strap. Try it, it’s hard as fuck. When I’ve seen him live over the years, mainly in the previous decade – the one we don’t quite yet know what to call… (the teens?) – he rarely plays a song I’ve ever heard of, and by now I know quite a bit of his solo material and early and later period Modern Lovers stuff. I’ve been to shows where he sings more songs in Italian and Spanish than in English. I shook his hand once and thanked him for his music. He had the rare combination of possessing a thousand-yard stare alongside utter sincerity and appreciation of the compliment. After the gig, he packs up and hauls away his own gear. I always want to offer to help bands who do this, but I don’t want to be weird or make their routine more difficult.

The cover of this album is what gets you at first. Just a wholesome American lad from the Northeast. A semi-nautical shirt with light blue and white horizontal stripes. Just an honest, fresh faced, bushy-haired man. And the title: “I, Jonathan,” borrowing I think from the 1934 Robert Graves novel, the fictional autobiography I, Claudius, the roman emperor during Christ’s lifetime. That title may have influenced Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot stories of the 1940’s and 1950’s. Someone should look into this.

Richman’s lyrics on this record are simple, hilarious, and heartwarming. A sample:

(Where are the good parties?)

Could there be block parties ’bout which I don’t know?
Maybe they’re in neighborhoods where I don’t go
Could there be all these parties down some little lane
With potato chips sitting there and guitars playing?
We need more parties in the USA

(It sucks to have a shitty roommate)

Your sense of humor has gotten worse
Now that you live with a guy who can’t converse
You can’t talk to the dude
Well he’s set in his way
Got a bad attitude
When you say what you say
You can’t talk to the dude
And things will never be right
Until you go

(Loving The Velvet Underground)

A spooky tone on a Fender bass
Played less notes and left more space
Stayed kind of still, looked kind of shy
Kind of far away, kind of dignified
How in the world were they making that sound?
Velvet Underground

(Going to one bar that’s shitty, then a better bar, a lesbian bar)

I was dancing in a lesbian bar, ooh, ooh, ooh

In the first bar folks were drinking sips
But in this bar they could shake their hips!
In the first bar they were drinking sips
In this bar they could shake their hips

(A shitty room on the beach)

It was a rooming house on Venice Beach
Where I was
Half a block
I love that place
Aw, just because
Well I didn’t want it
Who would want my
Bag of crap
So I never locked the old screen door
I just let it flap

(Summers when you’re young)

If you’ve forgotten what I’m naming
You’re gonna long to reclaim it
One day
Because that summer feeling
Is gonna haunt you
One day in your life

(Sunset in a certain New England city)

Taking a left
Going by the Fenway
By the Marshland Park
The little memorial
By the victory gardens
One of my favorite parts of town
Those little plots of land
And it’s getting darker
Mosquitos are coming out now

A tenet of the albums on this list is that they really don’t have duds. It has to be hard to find a favorite track, because they’re all favorites. But the real gem of this album is “That Summer Feeling.” Some of its lyrics are quoted above. I’ve seldom had a song so strongly and viscerally invoke a real feeling in me. But dredging up the sights, sounds, and smells of summer when you’re young? My God. Endless, eternal days; the smell of grass; the feel of cool water; friends you love and trust; girls you crush on: and you long for it. You don’t know then, but we all know now: that summer feeling is going to haunt you one day in your life. Like every day after about age 25, right?

Thank you, Jonathan. You, Jonathan, for this masterpiece. I’ll watch you play live for as long as I can. Sing in Italian and Spanish, never play a song I’ve ever heard of. It’s fine. Because of this record, I’ll always show up. 

20. Public Enemy – It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

This is the highest I’ve ranked a black rap act, and it makes sense. I loved 80’s and 90’s rap, but my heart and soul were – and I admit still are – always more aligned with rock and roll. In fact, as I peruse this list, this is the highest I’ve ranked a black artist period, regardless of genre. This is something that could definitely be discussed: how few black and woman-led bands make my list, but this is not a list to prove my progressive bona fides: it’s the the real list of the albums that I’ve loved the most in my life. I will say I’m trying hard to be more open-minded as time goes on here.

Nation of Millions was an absolute force of nature. It’s a perfect record that still holds up – hell, especially is relevant – in 2023. Chuck D has a fearsome approach to the microphone. Public Enemy doesn’t boast about being the most talented rap group (although they pretty much were); they came with something to say. They were a band whose message absolutely cannot be separated from their music. They were a product of the Black Panther movement; fierce voices demanding the listener pay attention to the immoral treatment of Black America by White America in the 20th (and 21st) century.

But message doesn’t play without music, and Public Enemy delivered, insanely. The beats were hypnotic, repetitious variations on a theme. Whistles reminiscent of police sirens screamed constantly in the background. Flavor Flav lived up to his name by constantly adding color and flavor – and humor- to Chuck’s sincere, beat-driven, angry rhymes. Chuck’s and Flav’s call and response was legendary. Remember, these were the very early days of rap’s emergence as a viable, lucrative, popular form of American music. Chuck, Flav, Griff and the rest of the crew were uncompromising with their hypnotic beats, their righteous message, and their furious lyricality. 35 years later, you can believe the hype: Public Enemy’s second studio album is an American institution.

19. Concrete Blonde – Free

I have no memory of how I became obsessed with Concrete Blonde in the late 80’s. It was before “Joey,” so they had no hits. All I remember is having this cassette in my ’79 Malibu, driving around with my girlfriend and telling her “No, I’m telling you, this is a CHICK singing, not a dude!” She was dumbfounded. After all these years and listening to all of Johnette Napolitano‘s and Concrete Blonde’s records, I find it hard to believe I ever thought the lead singer was male, based on Johnette’s husky, passionate voice. But at the time they were a new-ish band, and I had a single cassette with no pictures of the group on it.

But what an album it was. Flawless from start to finish, beginning with the powerful, haunting, wicked abbreviated riffs from James Mankey that began the ass-kicking “God is a Bullet.” The album, like so many rock records in this collection, has the perfect combination of fast and slow, hard and soft, concrete and blonde, if you will. The powerhouse songs on this album, besides “Bullet,” are the amazing Thin Lizzy cover “It’s Only Money,” “Roses Grow,” and “Run Run Run,” which will straight up knock you down. The mid-range songs like the infectious “Happy Birthday,” the folksy “Little Conversations,” and the poppy “Scene of a Perfect Crime,” lend a perfect balance to the record. But the slow songs just floor you. “Sun” is on my Death Songs Spotify Playlist, to be played at my memorial service, hopefully many years hence.

Sun
Part the dark and chase it gone
You’re the sweet and sunny one
As bright as any star tonight
You smile like a beam of light
You can
Show me a ray
Show me a ray
Show me a ray
Show me a ray of
Sun

I’ve also always thought of this song as “Son,” and I haven’t been a son for a long time. I miss my mom, my dad, and my stepdad. I’m not a son anymore, but I was. And I hope I was a good one. So this song always makes me think of that too.

The gorgeous “Carry Me Away” ends the album. Another heartbreak song, the only kind of song that matters, right?

Concrete Blonde, to my taste, made three amazing albums: Their dynamite 1986 self-titled debut, Free, and their monster hit Bloodletting with “Joey,” “Tomorrow Wendy,” and “Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)” among others. Bloodletting would be a contender here too, as I listened to that cassette when it came out in 1990 just about as much as I had listened to Free a year or two prior, but Free was the record I fell in love with Concrete Blonde over. They made a couple more albums just a few short years after Bloodletting, but to my mind – and others, sadly – they couldn’t capture the heart or the ferocity of those first three long players.

I saw Blonde only one time: at The Crest (where else?) in Sacramento in the early ’90’s. I can’t remember with whom I went, maybe my friend Jennifer, maybe Mathieu “The Herm” or Randy. Maybe Brandy or Sandra or Colleen or Sean. I honestly don’t recall. I bought a T-shirt and I think I still have it somewhere, but it never fit quite right and it almost immediately became too small. We ran into another friend that night, Michael, just hanging around on K Street because that’s where the cool people were, I guess. I asked him if he was going to the show, and he said “I don’t know, I’ve never really heard of this band.” I said “Dude, they’re GREAT, you have to check them out!” He said OK, and that’s the last we saw of Michael until later that night at Lyon’s coffee shop on Alhambra. He said “Dude, I snuck in and watched the show and got backstage and hung out with the band. They were amazing!” So he ended up with a better story than me that night, but all good. I got Concrete Blonde a new fan, and I had a concert experience I’ll never forget, that being the only time I ever saw one of my favorite groups.

18. Lydia Loveless – Somewhere Else

This is an important album to talk about, since at number 18, it is the most recently recorded entry in this project this high up on the list. Only Hamilton is more recent than this album, and it’s way up at number 31. I have albums going back through every decade since the 60’s on this list, and although we’re heaviest on the 70’s and 80’s, 2014’s Somewhere Else by Lydia Loveless is the record I got into the most recently that makes the list, and makes it this high. After writing my first draft about it, I realized I needed to move it up many places.

I first became aware of Lydia Loveless from scrolling through Facebook one day, a thing I once did. I saw an ad for a concert at Harlow’s – my favorite venue, as I’ve told you over and over – for a guy named Justin Townes Earle with an opener named Lydia Loveless. I had never heard of Justin Townes Earle, but I immediately knew he must be the great Steve Earle‘s son, because of his name alone. Lydia Loveless’s name sounded familiar, but maybe that was just because it sounded so much like Lydia Lunch.

Of course these were two different people, Lunch and Loveless. I looked up Lydia Loveless and the first thing I saw was that she had a documentary on Amazon Prime called “Who Is Lydia Loveless?,” made about her when she was just 25 years old. What the fuck? Who even is Lydia Loveless? That was a great question, because that’s what I wanted to know, especially after buying the ticket to her and Earle’s show sight-unseen and music un-heard.

I watched the documentary and fell in love. Not in a romantic way, like I “loved” Olivia Newton-John as a kid, but with an artist that was so raw, so powerful, so talented, who was singing about all the things I felt, even though I was more-or-less-kinda-sorta happily married at the time. Legit, all of Lydia’s song are about fucking heartbreak. And it spoke to my soul and wormed its way into my DNA.

Somewhere Else is a perfect record, like the rest of the albums on this list. It starts with a bang with “I Really Want to See You” about a woman who gets hammered at a party and just misses her ex and wants to call him and see him even though he’s married now. (“I wonder how that worked out for you?”) Who can’t relate? Each song is flawless, but the penultimate track, “Everything’s Gone” just haunts me. Honestly, there’s not a lyric to that song that wouldn’t be meaningful tattooed up and down one’s body. Here’s one verse:

Well, I swore I’d never be this bitter again
But some years have passed
Well, I guess I lost religion and my piece of mind
I thought I’d be okay without a home if I just had grace
These years I’ve been away haven’t been too kind

Lydia Loveless is a force of nature. I’ve listened to and loved all her albums, including 2016’s great follow-up to Somewhere Else entitled Real, 2020’s Daughter, and lots of earlier, more raw stuff (which includes a song simply called “Steve Earle,” her tour-mate’s father, a fictional tune about a creepy, male musician trying to get in the pants of a young, female, up-and-comer. It’s not about Steve Earle at all, by Lydia’s own admission, but someone else. Why the legendary Steve Earle is the stand-in here, I can’t say. Ask Lydia). I wasn’t an uber-fan by the time I saw the Justin Townes Earle / Lydia Loveless show at Harlow’s, but I was familiar enough with her music to really dig it (and Justin’s too). She performed solo, and mainly strummed her acoustic guitar and sang with her eyes closed for about a half and hour, hair up in a bun. Not the rock and roll dynamo of the documentary, but no less jaw-dropping a performer. She was hanging around the merch table after the show, and I shook her hand and thanked her for her music. She was polite, but was talking to someone else, so I moved on quickly. I saw her a couple of years later in San Francisco opening for The Mountain Goats – a bucket list band of mine at that time – and it was more solo, acoustic Lydia. Phenomenal, of course, as were TMG, but I was still itching to see her with a full band. That itch finally got scratched in October of 2021 at Goldfield here in Downtown Sacramento, on tour with Lilly Hiatt – daughter of the legendary John Hiatt – whom I saw once open for Amanda Shires, Jason Isbell‘s wife, at that same venue, but we’re really getting into the weeds now. It was phenomenal!

I went with my friend Jessica, a great sport who will go see pretty much any band, any time, whether she knows them or not. I made one of my patented “lyric jackets” that I was into for a few years, and I talked to her guitar player, Todd May, for a long time. Covid was still a thing then, and Lydia masked up the second she left the stage. I saw her dealing with merch stuff at the back of the venue when she came and frantically asked Todd something with her arms full of merch boxes – a bit lighter because of the LP (Indestructible Machine), T-shirt, and pin I bought – knees starting to buckle. I asked her if she needed help carrying any boxes and she looked at me from beyond that mask like I was a crazy person who asked if I could please sniff her dirty socks. She shook her head no, annoyed, and continued to ask Todd if he could do something for her. She scurried away and Todd kind of shrugged at me and said, “Well, duty calls.” I don’t regret any of it.

When I was going through my separation and divorce several years ago, for whatever reason this album just spoke to me. It became the soundtrack for my soul. I played it nonstop, over and over. The songs aren’t weepy laments about lost love, they are about yearning and helplessness and pain: all the things I was feeling. Sometimes when you associate music with something so painful in your life (as I do with Cowboy Junkies – The Caution Horses and my stepfather’s illness and death) it becomes hard to listen to later. Not so with this album. I love it if I’m dating someone new, or if I’m in an established relationship, or if I go through a breakup. It’s a perfect record for all occasions, as long as you have a heart that has been, is, or will be broken.

I’m going to do something haven’t done on this list: I’m going to jot down one little snippet or verse from each song on the album, in order. Her lyrics, to me, are that powerful. I won’t identify the song (because, who cares?) but know that they are all originals except for the last one: a cover of Tracey Ullman‘s cover (who knew that was a cover?) of Kirsty MacColl‘s “They Don’t Know.”

So, I was cleaning up my room, I found a magic 8-ball
I asked if I’d ever get to kiss your lips again
Oh, it said I better not tell you right now, so I had to call

That’s all I really wanna do
Is be somebody that you could talk to
That’s all I really wanna do
I went too far like I always do

I’ll buy a pickup truck, paint it flat black and go out
on my own
Trying to make amends to myself for all of the chances
I’ve blown

And I never did want that much from you
Or at least not everything
I never did want you to be mine
Well, at least not all the time

I haven’t felt this way in so long
Why does it gotta be right now?
Well, I said I never meant to hurt nobody ever
I don’t see what’s wrong with two people loving each other

Well I learned to live without you, but I don’t want to
‘Cause I need you more than I would ever let on
Some mornings I still wake up all kinds of confused
‘Cause I fell asleep with your record on again

Well, Verlaine shot Rimbaud because he loved him so
And honey, that’s the way that I love you
Well, Verlaine shot Rimbaud because he loved him so
And honey, that’s how I want to go

Now I say I want to leave
And then I say that you’re all I need
And I don’t want to be with anybody at all
I just want to be somewhere else tonight

Please stop telling me to turn it down ‘cause it ain’t that loud
I haven’t felt like singing in a long, long time

No I don’t listen to their wasted lines
Got my eyes wide open and I see the signs
But they don’t know about us
And they’ve never heard of love

She’s coming out with a new album later this year. I hope to catch her in concert again. Her music means the whole world to me, even if it weirds her out to hear someone say it.

17. Simon And Garfunkel – Sounds Of Silence

We’ve finally gotten to the only doubling up of an artist in the top 50, as promised way back when I was writing about what this project was going to be. Paul Simon gets in here for Simon and Garfunkel’s masterpiece, Sounds of Silence, and also up at #36 for Graceland as a solo artist. He’s the only one to hold this honor, among many worthies: John Lennon and Paul McCartney (What, Beatles are coming?), CSNY (one of them is coming?), The Modern Lovers? Eazy E? I guess George Harrison was in both Traveling Wilburys and The Beatles, but with the Wilburys he was one of five members, and they were an acknowledged supergroup assembled well after all its members had established careers. So George doesn’t count. Remember, I make the rules.

But Paul Simon was a special talent, essentially having an equally impactful career in his original band and then later as a solo artist. The group, Simon and Garfunkel, made five studio albums together, all in just over a five year period in the 1960’s. While Sounds of Silence is maybe not technically their “best” according to many critics, is nevertheless my favorite.

Each of their five albums has a couple/few hits that most everyone today recognizes. There’s an interesting story about the title track, “The Sound of Silence,” that you can read about on Wikipedia. In a nutshell, the original acoustic version of the song from their first album, Wednesday Morning, 3AM, became a hit only after the commercial failure of that album. A producer added electric accompaniment and drums, then re-released it unbeknownst to the band. It became a mega-hit, and the duo reunited to hastily a record a follow up album – this one – to capitalize on the success of the song.

It’s a shitty music industry story, but it led to my favorite S&G record. It was my favorite mainly because I got the cassette from the Columbia Music Club and I played it until I wore it out between about the ages of 18 and 23. I had always liked S&G because my stepbrother Mark was really into them, and I appreciated their folkiness, musicianship, storytelling, and singing and harmonizing. They truly are one of the greatest folk groups ever.

This record is stellar. The newly electrified title track leads to nine other songs that were never hits, before ending with the famous “I Am a Rock.” But those nine songs in between are truly, in my opinion, what make the album. I won’t write about all of them here, but “Kathy’s Song” makes me cry every time:

And as I watch the drops of rain
Weave their weary paths
And die
I know that I am like the rain
And there but for the grace of you
Go I

Later, “Richard Cory” and “A Most Peculiar Man” are back-to-back tales of a rich man and a poor man committing suicide. After that, “April Come She Will” is one of the duo’s greatest songs, ticking off the springtime of young love and ending in autumn, in September, as “a love once new has now grown old.” Never a hit, but it stands the test of time.

The smaller tracks of the album: “Blessed,” “Somewhere They Can’t Find Me,” “We’ve Got a Groovy Thing Goin'” are all excellent songs. The entire album just flows perfectly from one track to the next. Faster, slower, melancholy, instrumental, now speed it up again, make you think, make you cry, make you feel, here comes the “Anji” refrain again, and then start it over. For me, Sounds of Silence is Simon and Garfunkel’s masterpiece among five excellent albums. Art Garfunkel is a terrific musician, singer, and songwriter in his own right, but Paul Simon… Legend.

16. The Rolling Stones – Some Girls

Completely objectively speaking, The Rolling Stones are probably the best rock and roll band ever. Yes, they’re only at #16 on my list, and yes, I would never say they are *my* favorite band, but it’s hard to make the case for a better rock and roll group, considering their: hits, stamina, relevance, cultural impact, longevity, consistency, and pure cool factor.

Despite all that, I’ve been concerned about the Stones knowing I was going to get to them eventually, and here they are at number 16. My dilemma? Sticky Fingers or Some Girls. Some Girls from 1978 or Sticky Fingers from 1971? Many people consider Exile on Main Street their best record, but that one is like Radiohead or Son Volt for me: try as I might to fall in love with it, I just never seem to succeed.

The Stones are an interesting band for me. I’ve been aware of them literally my entire life. I vividly remember one of those only-on-TV greatest hits commercials from the 70’s that seemed to play constantly, and for the next several years I felt like I knew 29 Stones songs without having ever owned one of their albums. Hey, I found the commercial! I beg you, please watch this. The whole thing. This is what your elders had to endure just trying to watch Gilligan’s Island reruns after school.

I didn’t have that TV greatest hits album, but I did a lot of greatest hits and live Stones listening when I was younger. So my love for them is much stronger than a single album. It’s spread out from not only Some Girls and Sticky Fingers, but through Beggar’s Banquet, Let it Bleed, Aftermath, Between the Buttons, even Tattoo You and Steel Wheels. OK, Exile as well.

I’ve had a lot those Stones albums over the years, and listened to even more since the digital music era. I’ve seen them once in concert (Steel Wheels tour, L.A. Coliseum, 1989). They’ve been there my whole life, but I didn’t have the emotional pull toward them that I did other bands of the era (The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, et al). And I still don’t. I don’t really have a story to tell about the Stones, or about this album. So why put it so high? Why is it my 16th favorite album of all time? Because it’s just that fucking good. And so are the Stones.

That’s it. That’s the reason. I had Some Girls on cassette at one point. I’d like to get it on vinyl. I don’t play it too much on Spotify these days; I mean, it’s the Stones. I don’t play the Beatles much either, or Zeppelin. These are bands whose music I know so well, that I’ve spent so much time with when I was younger, sometimes I just don’t feel like diving back in. I mean, how many times do I still want to listen to “Paint it Black” or “Ruby Tuesday?” However, if one of those comes on I’m going to sing along with it at the top of my lungs.

But when I do dive back into the Stones in earnest, I’m reminded of the brilliance of this record. Every song is strong, but “Miss You,” “Just My Imagination (the Temptations cover),” “Beast of Burden,” and “Shattered” are the Stones at their very finest, a full 13 years after “Satisfaction.” Their early blues influences coalesce on this record with the funkier sounds of the 70’s. It was rock and funk and blues and disco and country all at the same time.

So at number 16 all time, I do have to admit it was not because Some Girls was such a meaningful album for me, but the Stones in their entirety were. I listened to enough of their studio albums to where I just had to pick one, and in a tight win over Sticky Fingers, this was the one.

15. The Mountain Goats – The Sunset Tree

This album knocked me on my ass the very first time I listened to it. It’s a concept album, an undertaking that seemed to have a resurgence in this new century by bands like The Mountain Goats, Sufjan Stevens, Green Day, The Dear Hunter, and even Kendrick Lamar, among others.

Sure, I could relate to elements of older concept albums like Quadrophenia and The Wall, but The Sunset Tree is the first that seemed like it could have been written by me, about my life: A teenager in Southern California grows up in a step family surrounded by constant fighting, tension, and verbal/emotional if not overt physical abuse. There’s nothing like being ten years old and having a 38 year old man screaming at you at the top of his lungs with a vein bulging out of his forehead. The album’s protagonist, like me, turned to drugs, alcohol, and girls to try to kill the pain. Eventually he grows up and finds some common ground with the old man, enfeebled by time, age, and sickness, and even begins to love the old son of a bitch before he dies. Yeah, it’s my story.

But that doesn’t mean anything if the music doesn’t measure up as well. The Mountain Goats’ music is an acquired taste for many, but The Sunset Tree grabbed me at the very first note of the record, which begins, uncommonly, with vocals:

I checked into a bargain-priced room on La Cienega
Gazed out through the curtains at the parking lot
Walked down to the corner store just before nightfall in my bare feet
Black tarry asphalt, soft and hot
And when I came back, I spread out my supplies
On the counter by the sink, looked myself right in the eyes
St. Joseph’s baby aspirin
Bartles and Jaymes
And you
Or your memory

The narrator is haunted by the memory of a girl, and is constantly looking for ways to dull the pain. We don’t meet his stepfather until track 3: “This Year,” which according to Spotify is the band’s second-most-popular song. We should add here that The Mountains Goats aren’t a band so much as they are John Darnielle with some help from some other musicians. Lyrically and conceptually he’s a one man show; in his earlier years he recorded full albums on cassettes and a boom box, à la Daniel Johnston.

The album is a masterpiece, a term that has and will continue to be well-applied to just about all records in this project. There are lines on this album that punch you right in the heart. Lyrics that I want tattooed up and down my soul.

There will be feasting and dancing
In Jerusalem next year
I am going to make it through this year
If it kills me

Lean in close to my little record player on the floor
So this is what the volume knob is for

And we hold on
For dear life, we hold on
We hold on

Held under these smothering waves
By your strong and thick-veined hand
But one of these days
I’m going to wriggle up on dry land

There are just too many powerful verses and lines to enumerate. It’s the whole record. It brings me to my knees. I almost never fail to cry when I listen to this. The album maybe should be higher on this list. Maybe #1.

Musically, Darnielle would likely be called an “indie-folk” artist. But what are genres? It’s very quirky stuff. Some don’t care for his voice or his style. I do. It’s nerd rock, to a certain extent, but every single bit of it is heartfelt and authentic, never ironic. Fans of Kurt Vile would likely be into Mountain Goats, and certainly Zappa fans (of whom I do not count myself). Possibly admirers of Conor Oberst or Daniel Johnston. Again, it can be an acquired taste for sure.

The Mountain Goats, with the incredible Lydia Loveless opening, at The Fillmore in San Francisco may have been the last big show I saw before Covid struck. It was a dark couple of years without live music, if you don’t count sneaking open mic shows into Land Park (thank you, Gonzo!) I thought about this show a lot during Covid, about what I wouldn’t give to be back in that crowd, screaming along to “This Year” with a thousand other obsessives, wondering if concerts would ever happen again. Well, they’ll be back this year, and much closer to home: Ace of Spades, in fact, a ten minute walk from my house with my sons in tow.

My stepfather has been gone for almost thirty years now; I am older now than he ever got to be. I can’t imagine having a child or stepchild like me, in that I put him and my mom through a whole lot of shit. But I also can’t imagine living through the shit he put me through, yet live through it I did. It’s bittersweet now. I miss him. And this album always makes me think of him, especially the last lines of the album.

My sister called at 3 AM
Just last December
She told me how you’d died at last
At last
That morning at the racetrack
Was one thing I remembered
I turned it over in my mind
Like a living Chinese finger trap
Seaweed in Indiana sawgrass
Pale green things

Pale green things

14. Josh Ritter – Hello Starling

I came to Josh Ritter in a prosaic way. I heard a song that I fell in love with – I don’t remember which one – during either a TV show or its credits – I don’t remember the show either. Such a dumb way to discover an artist, but my understanding is that artists LOVE to get their songs on TV shows and in the movies because 1) it pays well, especially if the show goes into syndication (remember that?), and 2) because they can also make new fans that way. And this fan has spent a shit ton of money on Josh Ritter over the years, in terms of concerts, CD’s, LP’s, T shirts, and tour posters. I think I’ve converted a handful of new fans as well.

The first album I bought by Josh Ritter, on CD, was Hello Starling. As Renee Zellweger says to Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire, “You had me at hello.” Josh not only had me at Hello (Starling), he had me from the first note of the first song, the C major that begins “Bright Smile, Dark Eyes.” It’s a magnificent song about a man who’s always been looking love, and finally finds her in a certain woman, one who has a bright smile and dark eyes. I know, groundbreaking material for rock/folk music, but Josh brings a freshness and a talent to the genre that is absolutely breathtaking.

A man is only half himself
The other half is a bright thing
He tumbles on by luck or grace
A man is ever a blind thing

And the album only gets better from there. His lyrics are pure poetry, his songs are like novels. In fact he is an actual author: his debut novel Bright’s Passage was published in 2011, and then The Great Glorious Goddam of it All in 2021.

His songs paint pictures of incredible beauty. In fact he is also a painter whose works grace not only his album covers but sell for real money.

Josh is a gift to the 21st century. The Idaho native releases a new studio LP every two or three years. Some are amazing, but all are at least very good. I thought I might change my mind at the last minute as to which Josh Ritter album I’d put in this spot. Hello Starling was the first of his albums I bought, and probably the one I’ve listened to the most, although I wouldn’t bet much money on that.

I wondered if I instead would have gone with The Beast in its Tracks. When you get into an artist, there’s usually one album that really does it for you. In my lifetime, it’s seldom been that artist’s very first album. So you fall in love with a record, then go backward into their catalog and find other records to love, then anxiously await the new material and judge that along side the stuff you already know. It’s a scary emotional journey, because it’s incredibly difficult for artists to make record after record after record that all speak to YOU in the same amazing way their music did when you first heard them. I am hard pressed to think of bands whose entire catalogue of published work I love almost equally. Pixies, Beastie Boys, The White Stripes, and Led Zeppelin are some that come to mind. There may be others if I thought harder about it. (Hmmm… maybe records by those bands are upcoming?)

So Hello Starling brought me backward only one album, to the stellar Golden Age of Radio. (Josh’s eponymous first album was nearly impossible to find back then. I’ve listened since, and while I appreciate the record, I seldom go back to it.) But after Starling, I’ve been blessed with a great many new studio albums from the man, as well as some EP’s and live albums. With each one, I’m hoping to recapture the beauty and majesty that is Hello Starling. I would say some have succeeded and even surpassed that benchmark, and most others have come damn close. Josh’s next album, the superlative The Animal Years, may be even better than Starling. The next two: The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter and So Runs the World Away are also amazing records, with the vast majority of the tracks being truly exceptional. Then he released The Beast in its Tracks.

I was disappointed with Beast. None of the songs resonated with me. I didn’t find the music exceptional. No great hooks, nothing to make you get up out of your chair and sing. So I put the record behind me. Josh followed Beast up with two other excellent records: Sermon on the Rocks (probably my third favorite Josh Ritter album, or tied for third with Animal Years), and Gathering. Since then he’s released the quite good Fever Breaks, and just this year, Spectral Lines. I didn’t think about 2013’s Beast much. I thought it was Josh’s only real blemish in a discography with an impossibly high batting average. But then I got divorced.

After 21 years with the same woman, an exceptional human being, but one with whom I was not ultimately meant to be with, I finally understood The Beast in its Tracks, written by Josh about his own divorce. And I couldn’t get enough of the record. I listened to it obsessively. I still put it on from time to time when I’m feeling melancholy, or if I go through another breakup, or if it’s raining. I just can’t get enough of it. It is a motherfucking masterpiece, and I began to think “Maybe this is my favorite Josh Ritter record.”

To be fair, The Beast in its Tracks doesn’t really speak specifically to any of my breakup situations in the last few years. There’s just an homage to loss and sadness there that resonates deeply. It’s about wishing your ex well, but not too well. It’s about new lovers that remind you of old lovers in a certain light. It’s about hope and sorrow and the way your whole life changes when a relationship ends. It’s just an unbelievable record that I didn’t know I’d ever grow to love. Musically it’s quieter than his other works, but no less impactful.

Maybe Beast is now my favorite Josh Ritter album. But Starling was the first, and, ultimately, probably the most accessible to folks who don’t know Josh.

And I call him Josh because I feel like I know him. I don’t, of course, but I met him and talked to him for a few minutes at the first of the many times I’ve seen him in concert. It was some kind of festival in San Francisco (not Outside Lands or Hardly Strictly Bluegrass) and I went to the thing specifically to see Josh, dragging a friend who said he literally hadn’t been to a concert in 20 years. We got right to the front of the stage, and while everyone else was kind of sitting on blankets and smoking weed, I was right in front dancing along and singing every line to every song. I couldn’t even tell you which other bands were on the bill. Later in the day I saw Josh and some other dude walking across the park. I approached him and thanked him for his set. He broke into this incredible grin, and gave me the warmest handshake I’ve ever received. He said “Wow, thanks man! Thanks a lot!” He was just beaming. “What’s your name?” I told him, and then he introduced me to his friend. “This is Zack, he’s my bass player!” I shook Zack’s hand and Josh asked me where I was from. I told him Sacramento, and that I hoped he’d play there some day. (He did, at least a couple of times over the years.) We talked for several minutes until I ran out of things to say. I think Josh would have stood there talking to me all day. Wherever he and Zack were going just didn’t seem too important. He never stopped smiling, and I fell in love with him that day. I always see him when he comes to town or to San Francisco, and I sing his praises wherever I go.

He brings the same happy exuberance to his live concerts, and it’s downright refreshing. He makes the audience think that he is the luckiest guy in the world to get to do what he does for a living. It’s sincere, and I think that’s a little rare in entertainment – not for performers to feel happy to be doing what they do, but to wear that emotion so proudly.

I’ll be a Josh Ritter fan until the day I die, even if I never love his newer records the way I love Starling, Beast, Animal Years, or Sermon. He’s not a household name, and may never be, although I think he should be. Maybe it’s good enough to not have to hold down a day job, and to make music, write novels, and paint for a living. I think that makes Josh happy. You can see it right there on his face.

13. Cowboy Junkies – The Trinity Session

I’ve written a lot about Cowboy Junkies and this album in particular right here on this site. I can’t say it any better here than I did then, so if you’ll forgive me, let me cheat on this one by excerpting the piece linked to above.

My best memory working at The Crest for the Animation Festival was after each show ended. I would put the merch away, organize things for the next show, and then I had some time to kill while a manager squared the cash with the tickets. I got friendly with the theater’s projectionist, and he agreed to play a CD of mine over the state-of-the-art sound system, while I hung out in Row N of the balcony, audience right, smoking cigarettes.

What is the correct album for listening to by yourself in a 975-seat, hundred-year-old, painstakingly restored theater at 2AM on a Saturday night? I really want you to think about this. What is that album? Which band’s disc, from start to finish, would be the ideal soundtrack for this exquisite scene? Are you done thinking? There is no right answer, of course. For as many people as there are in the world, there may be that many choices. My choice: The Trinity Session by Cowboy Junkies.

To me, The Trinity Session is the perfect album. It is slow, ethereal, and gently powerful. It whispers its beauty with Margo Timmins’ haunting vocals and the band’s restrained rock and roll take on blues and country. The nascent band learned to play quietly because every time they rehearsed a neighbor complained, so they learned to tone it down. Necessity was truly the mother of invention, because that sonic discipline became Cowboy Junkies’ signature. Margo originally didn’t want to be in the band. She was not a musician or performer, but a college student studying social work in Toronto when her brother Michael convinced her to sing for them, at least in the garage. Their first several shows she had such stage fright she sang with her back to the audience.

The Trinity Session was recorded in a Toronto church, and if I remember the liner notes correctly, the band recorded the album live, playing at the church’s apse, while a single microphone was placed in the back of the nave. This is not how albums are recorded, but it gives The Trinity Session its singular, spare sound. It’s absolutely one of the ten records I would take to that proverbial desert island. To Zen out and listen to The Trinity Session in row N of The Crest’s balcony was pure heaven on earth.

Walking this earth and keeping my peace
I do what I want but the price is steep.
It don’t seem right, it don’t seem right.

My mama she told me, one step at a time
and sooner or later you’ll walk that line.
I don’t want to, I don’t want to.

Taking my time to live and die
I wanna find a way to do it right
and I ease on, and I ease on.

They say one thing always leads to another.
I open my mind, I don’t get it.

Breaking away to the other side
I wanna make sense of why we live and die.
I don’t get it, I don’t get it.
I don’t get it, I don’t get it.

Except back then, in 1992, I got it. I am not a spiritual person, but listening to Cowboy Junkies by myself in The Crest was perfect peace. I could breathe in, and feel all life flowing through me in stillness and beauty. I was in a new town, with new friends, a job, and for the first time since third grade I was enjoying school and doing well. If I had died one of those nights, it would have been a good life.

12. The White Stripes – White Blood Cells

I don’t remember precisely where I was when I first listened to The White Stripes, but it had to be sometime after the release of this album in 2001. I had spent the previous several years parenting young children, and had fallen out of listening to new music somewhat. Several bands brought me back into fandom and got me buying CD’s again, and The White Stripes were at the top of that list.

I spent a couple years really digging that “nuevo-garage” movement or whatever they called it. I logged a lot of hours with The Mooney Suzuki, The Datsuns, The Vines, The Hives, The Donnas, The Strokes, Franz Ferdinand, The Libertines, et al. If we’re being honest, twenty years later the Strokes are the only band of that group I even occasionally listen to. But Franz Ferdinand played Sacramento’s Concerts in the Park a few years ago, so that was cool.

But White Blood Cells grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I was absolutely obsessed. The entire album is only forty minutes long, but sixteen amazing, trippy, interesting songs are included. That’s an average of 2 1/2 minutes per song, a welcome change from a lot of the classic and prog rock I grew up on. Most of the songs hit hard, loud, and fast, but they are all over the place musically, despite the fact that there only seems to be about two instruments ever being played: Jack‘s guitar and Meg‘s drums. “Fell in Love with a Girl” was probably the most well known of the Stripes’ songs at that time: a sub-two-minute ass-kicking rock/punk ode to young love. It’s mainly power chords and screaming, but there was something melodious and sweet about it amid the chaos that spoke to me – and a lot of other fans. “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” was heavier, “Hotel Yorba” was folkier, “The Same Boy You’ve Always Known” was sweeter, but the songs all hit you in the head with either a large or small hammer, and you were never going to be the same. At least I wasn’t.

The album completely holds up twenty years now after its release. From this record I went backwards to De Stijl, which was the first of what was – in my opinion – the Stripes’ run of three perfect records: De Stijl, White Blood Cells, and Elephant.

When they toured for Elephant in 2003 they were still playing 2,000-capacity-ish theaters, such as The Warfield in San Francisco. It was one of the few concerts I went to on my own. I drove to San Francisco, parked my car in some weird lot, walked to the Warfield, and saw my favorite band. I briefly spoke to a few fellow fans standing in the crowd with me, but for the most part I rock and rolled my ass off by myself on the floor of The Warfield deep in that human sea. The Stripes had gotten much more famous by that point; the next time they came around would be at The Greek in Berkeley, capacity 8,500.

My then-wife and I took our five year old son Henry to that gig, although he was just a little guy. We brought him ear plugs, but he refused to wear them. We found them later in the dryer, melted in his little jeans pocket. He wanted to hear the show! At 24 now, he’s proud that his first concert was The White Stripes. As well he should be! He also informs me that the freebie poster The Warfield gave out that night – that I promptly had framed and has hung in every house I’ve lived in since then – is now worth several hundred dollars!

But I digress. We were talking about White Blood Cells here. It was a seminal record for me, and when the Stripes achieved super stardom – with their “Seven Nation Army” riff playing at every basketball arena in the nation, with Jack White marrying and divorcing supermodels, and selling out shows around the world – I felt justified. I wasn’t an O.G. fan from Detroit or anything, but I knew the sound I heard on this incredible album wasn’t just a gimmick. The White Stripes were an incredibly talented band; even though many drummers don’t give Meg her due, her and Jack’s musical relationship just plain worked. Analog-only recordings, two instruments, cheap guitars, the Stripes proved that powerful music could be made from extremely spare parts. This is something we knew at the very beginning of rock music, and it was holding true at the dawn of a new century.

11. Spoon – Gimme Fiction

I’ve theorized that when you poll most music fans, or at least album fans, the record that introduced them to a band will always remain their favorite. This was not the case with Spoon for me. Kill the Moonlight introduced me to the Austin group; it was the first CD I ever played in a car CD player. In about 2003 I paid good American dollars to get a CD player *installed* in my car, a 1987 Acura Legend my dad had passed down to me. I cranked Kill the Moonlight on the way home from The Good Guys. The opening staccato organ to “Small Stakes” sounded incredible on that 14 minute drive, and I’ll never forget it.

Piano and organ figured heavily on that outstanding album; I loved it so much I went backwards and bought their Girls Can Tell album as well, which is excellent and hits in different ways. So I was already a fan when Gimme Fiction came out in 2005, and… just… WOW!

How many times on one website can you say that an album is perfect? That’s pretty much been the case up to now, and certainly will be until we hit #1. Spoon’s Gimme Fiction is a superlative dream of craftsmanship that’s incredibly hard to achieve, especially given that they’ve had excellent albums before and since.

I don’t know how to write about Spoon. Are they rock? Indie Rock? Post Punk? None of it seems to fit, and that’s great. They are a band I can’t describe, but they’re made up of the most prosaic part of every other rock band out there. Singer, guitar, bass, drums, sometimes piano or keys. But I love them. I mean, I LOVE them. I look at the 11 tracks on this Gimme Fiction, and it’s like seeing photos of my 11 best friends. I’m overcome with emotion and imagery and it almost brings me to tears.

Their lyrics tell stories, but I’ll be damned if I can explain them. Their songs are like reading unconnected short stories in a great collection that you can’t quite explicate, but you feel it deep inside just the same. How can a band so astute at making incredible music also write lyrics that you just want painted across your entire body?

I got a feeling, it don’t come cheap, I got a feeling, and then it got to me comes from the opening offbeat rocker “The Beast and Dragon, Adored.” Then we get to a fun number, “The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine” which seems to be about a play that surely I must know, but it seems to be made up. The next three tracks include one of their biggest hits – if Spoon truly had hits – “I Turn My Camera On,” which I love, but I don’t put it above any other track on this stellar album. Then we get to Sister Jack:

I was on the outside, I was looking in
I was in a drop-D metal band we called Requiem
And I can’t relax
With my knees on the ground and a stick in my back
Sister Jack

What the fuck any of that means, I don’t know. I only know I feel like a privileged spectator at the altar of masters doing a thing that is so perfect that it truly blows my mind that people around my age have done it. (Britt Daniels, Spoon’s frontman and creative force is a couple of years younger than me, and that’s the highest-ranked artist on this list who wears that badge of honor!) You can talk about the genius of people like Paul Simon, Jagger/Richards, or Tom Waits, and you can say “Well, they’re way older than me. They came from a time when such things were possible.” But then there’s Britt Daniels of Spoon, some cat about your age, who is making this original, incredible, impossible music that brings you so much joy, and he’s just a dude who grew up here in this amazing and fucked up country right around when you did.

“I Summon You” is a classic, and a quintessential Spoon song:

Remember the weight of the world, it’s the sound that we used to buy
On cassette and 45
And now this little girl, she says will we make it at all?
800 miles is a drive
Yeah you got the weight of the world coming down like a mother’s eye
And all that you can, all that you can give is a cold goodbye

Again, you’re plunged into an Ian Fleming or a James Ellroy novel, and it’s incredible, and you don’t really know what’s it about, but you don’t care because the prose is so perfect. Now set that prose to perfect, indie/rock/pop music and you have the greatest band that’s been working continuously in the last 25 years. Thank you, Spoon, for helping me believe in music again.

Next up, the top 10!

Click here for Part I: The Project
And here for Part II: The Leftovers

50. Amy Winehouse – Back to Black

The process of putting this list together was part analytical, and part pure feel. And Amy making it into my top 50 was pure feel. I didn’t really even seriously start getting into her – this album mainly, but Frank is fantastic also – until three or four years go, many years after her untimely death as a member of the 27 Club.

You’re going to hear this a lot, probably for the next 49 albums too, but this album is perfect. Every single song is a rare gem; not a dud to be found. The fifth track, the titular track, is the most haunting and musically unique on the record:

We only said goodbye
With words
I died a hundred times

You go back to her
And I go back

To black

Amy was a force of nature, and that we got only two albums out of her is evidence that the human race was robbed of probably one of the most gifted artists of the the 21st century. Imagine all the additional music that Jimi Hendrix would have continued to make, or Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, or D. Boon, had they lived past 27. In my 50’s now, myself, and not being a musician, and thinking about all the twists and turns my life took since that age: just imagine. God bless you, Amy. Thank you for your music.

49. The Clash – London Calling

Although I played it hundreds and hundreds of times, for whatever reason, London Calling didn’t speak to me on the same social or emotional level that The Clash spoke to so many others. My friends and I didn’t cut school and listen to The Clash, we listened to Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin. The Clash didn’t bind me together with a counterculture sticking a big middle finger to The Man. Nevertheless, this album is a collection of incredible songs, and as I said, I listened to it hundreds of times and loved it more and more each time.

I bought the CD at Tower Records on Broadway not long after I moved to Sacramento in 1989, along with Public Enemy‘s Yo, Bum Rush The Show, and possibly a third CD that is lost to the annals of time. It wouldn’t be right of me to write about what The Clash meant to England, America, the world, in the late 70’s and 80’s. They weren’t that to me. They were just some band that the punk rock guys were into, and when I finally bought their most famous album, I listened to it about nine hundred times in a row. It’s a fucking great album. Timeless. I could put it on right now and it would be like putting on a comfy sweater of amazingness.

48. Depeche Mode – Violator

I almost didn’t include Depeche Mode in this list, because my first serious introduction to them – beyond what was played on KROQ in L.A. in the 80’s – was a used cassette I purchased somewhere in the San Fernando Valley in the late 80’s: Catching Up with Depeche Mode. This lifelong stoner/rocker fell in love big time with this synth-heavy British pop/new wave music from the early-mid 80’s, and played the hell out of that cassette. And as you recall from Part I, greatest hits collections are expressly disallowed from The Fifty.

But Violator was somewhat of a departure from their dark-tinged pop into full-blown blackness. And it’s incredible. There was nothing much like it in the 80’s, as this album heralded a new sound of the 90’s where pop, rock, goth, punk, new wave, folk, dance, and electronic music were all given the freedom to loose their shackles and cavort shamelessly together. This album has been described as haunting and heavy, and I would agree. But mainly I see it as an emphatic door slam to the 1980’s. Not only to Depeche Mode’s own music, but to entire genres.

Takes me completely
Touches so sweetly
Reaches so deeply
I know that nothing can stop me

47. The Cult – Love

This was a very important album for me. Released in 1985 when I was 16, it was one of the three albums that broke me out of the heavy metal / classic rock… I don’t want to say rut, or doldrums, but let’s just just say that more traditional hard rock and metal was pretty much exclusively what I had been listening to for the last several years before this. The other two albums that had this affect on me were U2 War, and Talking Heads Stop Making Sense. These three records single-handedly launched me into new genres of music, where I didn’t need to worry about being cool among my stoner friends, I didn’t have to be concerned about whether I possessed a black and white baseball jersey concert shirt of a rock band from a show at Long Beach Arena or the Fabulous Forum. These three albums eventually led me to Love And Rockets, Depeche Mode, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Cure, The Smiths, and then into the hip hop realm. I just needed a couple of records to be told “You can listen to more than Ted Nugent, Iron Maiden, and Jethro Tull.” (Three wildly different artists there, but you get my point.)

The Cult Love was an incredible album that was far from the standard rock/metal of the day, but still still featured a traditional rock band with vocals, drums, guitar, bass and keys. It wasn’t new wave, it wasn’t punk, what was it? I think it was sowing the seeds of what we later called “Alternative,” but that’s not quite right either. It was rock, but with kind of a melodious edge, spiritual themes, and a fearlessness about it. It was jangly and raw with big vocals and big guitars, but no one would really call them hard rock or metal, although they kind of became that later.

Regardless, it’s an amazing album with not a dud on it. “She Sells Sanctuary,” “Big Neon Glitter,” “Love,” “Rain,” “Hollow Man,” “Brother Wolf, Sister Moon…” you’re just not going to get a stronger collection of a mid-80’s post-punk / goth / proto-alt outfit.

46. Hedwig And The Angry Inch – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

My buddies and I do a thing called Don Pedro’s Movie Night, which is a tale for another time, and we used to try to do it weekly. Dinner at Paesano on Capitol Ave., and a movie afterwards. For a few years there, The Crest tried to stay solvent by building a couple of small movie screens in the basement under their main theater. In one of those tiny theaters, my friends and I saw the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a 2001 musical based on stars and creators John Cameron Mitchell‘s and Stephen Trask‘s Off-Broadway hit from a few years prior.

We absolutely adored the film, the story of a young glam rocker from East Berlin, the product of a botched sex change operation (hence the Angry Inch…get it?) unceremoniously dumped in Junction City, Kansas, where she befriends and manages – and falls in love with – a young glam rock prodigy who eventually leaves her behind, à la A Star Is Born, pick your version.

I might have some of the story line wrong. It was one of the first DVDs I ever purchased, in the early 2000’s, but I haven’t seen the actual film more than a couple times, and the musical once in a revival in San Francisco with my friend Joel. But the film soundtrack album…oh, that soundtrack!

It’s simply one of the greatest rock albums of the 2000’s. Think Hair, Saturday Night Fever, or Hamilton: soundtracks of original music that stand tall on their own even when completely divorced from the theatrical or cinematic production from which they came. There are beautiful slow songs (“The Origin of Love,” “Wicked Little Town,” “The Long Grift,” “In Your Arms Tonight”), out and out rockers (“Tear Me Down,” “Angry Inch,” “Freaks,” “Exquisite Corpse”), and wonderful, hilarious, touching hybrids of the two (“Sugar Daddy,” “Wig in a Box”), closing with the anthemic “Midnight Radio:”

Here’s to Patti
And Tina
And Yoko
Aretha
And Nona
And Nico
And me

And all the strange rock and rollers
You know you’re doing all right
So hold on to each other
You gotta hold on tonight

I think I played this CD for five years straight. I’ve never stopped loving it.

45. Guns N’ Roses – Appetite For Destruction

Wow, how to even begin writing about an album like this. Let me start by saying there are far bigger Guns N’ Roses fans than me. I liked them a lot, I saw them in concert once, opening for Aerosmith, and I played this album (along with G N’ R Lies and Use Your Illusion I/II) about a million times.

Listening to it now, it’s a flawless record. Every single track is strong, rocking, and somewhat fresh in the era of mid-late 80’s hard rock/heavy metal. But somehow GNR just reminds me wholly of the years 1987 to 1991, and it’s a little tough for me to go back. I consider 1986 – 1991 the greatest five years in the history of rock and roll, followed closely by 1966 – 1971. GNR is just a small reason for this. (The Smiths, The Cure, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Cowboy Junkies, Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana, Pixies – Lord, must I go on? – are the main reason for it.)

But the album itself? Ummm… just hop in your buddy Rich‘s Camaro with the T-tops off and fucking blast it. Every song. You’ll see.

44. Love And Rockets – Express

Jesus, this project is taking me a hella long time. “Hey, I’ll just write about a few of my favorite albums! OK, I’ll turn fifty later this year, let’s go top fifty! But what about all the leftovers? Let’s write about all of them too!” It’s a miracle I’m finishing this before it’s time for Sixty at Sixty.

So where was I? Oh yeah, Love and Rockets – Express, from 1986. They were featured on an NPR story a couple of years ago. “One hit wonders’ second best songs.” What the fuck? One hit wonder? Love and Rockets? Blasphemy!!! OK, “So Alive” was kind of a hit, and the eponymous Love And Rockets it’s on is also a great album, but Express was the album that made me fall in love with Love and Rockets. What did NPR say was their second best song? “Yin and Yang (The Flower Pot Man)” from Express. I might have chosen “Motorcycle” also from the Love and Rockets album, or “Ball of Confusion” from this album (which I must admit I didn’t realize was a cover when I was 17 and first getting into this band), or “No New Tale to Tell” from Earth, Sun, Moon. Whatever. L&R was definitely not a “one hit wonder.” Eew!

Truth be told, I was WAY more into Love and Rockets than I ever was into Bauhaus, which if you don’t know, was all the members of Love and Rockets minus Peter Murphy. L&R was one of those non-metal, post-rock bands that truly and sincerely helped me break out of my hard rock / classic rock / heavy metal exclusivity mind frame. Earth, Sun, Moon is also an incredible record, as is the eponymous Love And Rockets, but Express will always be nearest and dearest to my heart.

43. The Traveling Wilburys – Vol. 1

I can’t believe this album is as low as #43. Seems like it ought to be a top 20, but that’s what happens, I guess, when you start making lists. This is a flawless record: every single track a straight-up masterpiece. Who’s still alive from the Wilburys as of this writing? Just Jeff Lynne and Bob Dylan. Who would have thunk it? Roy Orbinson would have been 87 if he were alive in 2023, and he was the oldest of the Wilburys, so we really could – and should – be living in a world where all the Wilburys are still alive. Rest in Peace Roy, Tom Petty, and George Harrison.

I don’t really know what to say about this record. If you’ve ever liked any of the members, or any of the bands they were in, you ought to love this album: The way they trade off lead singing/songwriting, the jangly melodies, the badass backing vocals, and whoever was playing session rhythm section crushed it (don’t make me look it up.)

Again, if you’ve ever been into The Beatles, or Bob Dylan, or ELO, or Tom Petty, or really any great classic rock music, it’s hard to believe Traveling Wilburys Vol. I wouldn’t make your top 50, too.

42. Black Sabbath – Paranoid

This is big. BIG. Black Sabbath was one of the earliest bands I got into. It must have been seventh grade or thereabouts.

At the time I was getting into Sabbath, original lead singer Ozzy Osbourne‘s debut solo album Blizzard of Ozz was enjoying enormous popularity, well before the opening riff and echoing vocals to “Crazy Train” became sports arena anthems. It was a great time to be an Ozzy/Sabbath/Dio fan, because Ozzy was killing it, Ronnie James Dio – Sabbath’s next lead singer – would soon strike out on his own with some incredible solo albums- and Sabbath’s most meaningful body of work – 1970 to 1981 – was just ending. The music – 50 plus years old now, like me – was fresh and HEAVY.

Black Sabbath of course were heavy metal pioneers. If you look up Heavy Metal Music on Wikipedia, they are the second band named. I was only a tot then, but I don’t think the term Heavy Metal was much in use in the late 60’s and early 70’s. I feel like the term took hold in the early 80’s, but I could be wrong. You could call them hard rock and you wouldn’t be far off.

Paranoid is without question regarded as one of Black Sabbath’s greatest albums, and most consider the Ozzy era to be Sabbath’s definitive time frame. (But I contend that their first album – Heaven and Hell – with Ronnie James Dio on vocals as Ozzy’s replacement, is one of their very best records as well. I wrote about a live Dio/Sabbath cassette surviving a boy/boom box/bus crash once.)

The album itself? Well, half of its eight songs are basically Sabbath’s most iconic: “War Pigs,” “Paranoid,” “Iron Man,” and “Fairies Wear Boots.” Although “Iron Man” is terribly played out, those other three sound as fresh and heavy in 2023 as they did fifty plus years ago when the album was released.

41. Bright Eyes – I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning

Conor Oberst‘s 2005 masterpiece could easily be placed much higher than this. You shouldn’t compare any of these bands, but in the mid 2000’s I really got into Damien Rice, Decemberists, Iron and Wine, Josh Ritter, and other singer/songwritery types too numerous to name (Oh, OK, I’ll name some of them: Chris Garneau, Dave Doobinin, Gary Jules, Joanna Newsom, Calexico, Jose Gonzalez, Jim Noir, none of whom made this list, but all of whom made my heart burst with incredible music love). It was a good time to be a singer-songwriter, and Conor did it better than most. He was prolific, he was sincere, he was insincere, he was raw, and he was open.

This album starts with a weird spoken word tale about an airplane going down, and continues from there with an absolutely flawless collection of pop/folk/rock classics, most notably “First Day of my Life.” I learned to play a shitty, half-assed version of that song on my acoustic guitar, and it never fails to make me happy. I had this on CD, but rebought it on vinyl a few years ago and have been overjoyed ever since.

Somewhere in the mid to late 2000’s, my wife at the time and I saw Bright Eyes at UC Davis and I was left underwhelmed. This album is fairly quiet, but the show was almost impossibly loud. I’m no stranger to loud rock shows, but it didn’t really jibe with who I thought I was going to see. Conor seemed quite drunk, and he kept screaming into the microphone, “You don’t have to like the music, but you HAVE to RESPECT it!” My ex wife and I joked about that for a long time, mimicking the admonition to each other at various times: “You don’t have to like the dinner, but you HAVE to RESPECT it!”

I saw him many years later at a 300 seat venue in Grass Valley with the phenomenal – unbeknownst to me at the time – Phoebe Bridgers opening. It was a whole different Conor. A more real, more mature, nuanced performer who had made incredibly great music between that time – 2017 or so – and the time I first saw him. Phoebe was out selling her own merch, and I talked to her for a few minutes. I have a special place in my heart for artists who sell their own merch. If they’re lucky, they eventually get a merch person, as Conor must have years ago, as Phoebe eventually did. For a couple of years I had a Conor Oberst T shirt that I literally purchased from Phoebe Bridgers. Maybe one day I’ll write about what happened to that, and all my other concert T shirts.

40. Queen – The Game

Oh boy, now that we’re hitting the low 40’s, we’re really starting to discuss some bands that I have a lot to say about. Queen…what can you say about Queen that hasn’t been said a million times by a million fans and critics? All I can tell you is what Queen meant to me, and this album meant a lot. Truthfully, I went back and forth between this album and A Night At The Opera, as far as which to include on this list. (As we remember from Part I, only one album per artist.) Opera would probably be considered most Queen fans’ favorite record, but I have to be honest here: The Game was my first Queen album, and it remains my number one go-to Queen record if forced to choose. Opera has the ubiquitous, iconic, ever-present, fucked out “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Amazing song…do we need to keep hearing it though? I know, that’s not what this list is about, but it’s one of those songs – like “Stairway To Heaven,” “Roundabout,” and “Sympathy for the Devil” – that is so iconic it’s hard to listen to just as just a song any more. Opera is an incredibly well-rounded album, never a dull moment, with wild swings of hard rock, (“Death On Two Legs,” “I’m In Love With My Car,” “Sweet Lady”) beautiful folkies and ballads, (“’39,” “Love Of My Life”) and oddball throwbacks (“Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon,” “Seaside Rendezvous,”). It’s pretty much a perfect album.

But it’s not The Game.

The Game came out in the summer between my fifth and sixth grade, and of course my first introduction to it was “Another One Bites The Dust.” You want to talk about an iconic, ubiquitous song? “Dust” was everywhere, all the time. You could NOT get away from this song. Before long I had the cassette, and it is the pure definition of a flawless record. Not only is there not a dud on the album, every song absolutely slays. Most of the songs are rockers, but they’re more synthy than the band’s previous records. Pure pop/rock masterpieces such as “Play The Game,” “Dragon Attack,” “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” and “Coming Soon” pretty much comprise the whole album, except for the final song, “Save Me,” just a gorgeous, bombastic song that hits you right in the feels every time.

I worked in a locked-ward chemical dependency treatment center between the ages of 18 and 20, and the clients there were between 13 and 17; not much younger than many of us on staff. I was playing The Game a LOT during those years (truthfully, there weren’t many times I wasn’t playing this cassette a lot,) and one day as I drove away from the facility at the now-demolished St. Luke’s Medical Center in Pasadena, I watched one of the patients staring at me and waving to me through her window as I headed out to the parking lot to my 1979 Chevy Malibu that I bought from my friend Eric for $800. The patients would sometimes get little crushes on us, and this girl watched me through the window, waving sadly, as I drove away. 15 years old and locked up in a drug rehab by her parents for runnin’ and gunnin’ a little too hard. It seemed like she was saying “Save Me.”

I don’t remember her name, nor do I know whatever happened to her, but I still occasionally think of that poor kid when I play this song.

I hang my head and I advertise
A soul for sale or rent
I have no heart, I’m cold inside
I have no real intent

Save me, save me, save me
I can’t face this life alone
Save me, save me, oh
I’m naked and I’m far from home

39. Iron Maiden – Piece Of Mind

To me, Iron Maiden are the strongest point of the holy European trinity of 70’s/80’s metal, the other two of course being Scorpions and Judas Priest. You read about Scorpions and Judas Priest in Part II, but Maiden is my favorite of that bunch. I first remember becoming aware of Iron Maiden in seventh grade. I don’t remember The Number Of The Beast coming out (an album that I almost included in this spot, rather than Piece) when I was in seventh grade, but I do remember Piece coming out toward the end of eighth grade. It was only the second album with new vocalist Bruce Dickinson, and although it’s hard for me to say it’s better than Beast, I think I have to put it down as my favorite Maiden album.

The three members of the holy trinity of European metal of the 1970’s and 1980’s all had an identical makeup: A shrieking lead singer, kick ass drummer, dominant bass player, and two – count ’em, TWO – face-melting lead guitarists. Adrian Smith and Dave Murray of Maiden were in fine form here, shredding on track after track after track. None of these European metal bands had much in the way of huge “hits,” but upon the opening riffs of “The Trooper,” “Flight of Icarus,” or “Die with Your Boots On,” a million metal kids will light their Bic lighters and shriek with wild abandon every time.

I eventually appreciated the leaner sounds of their debut album, Iron Maiden, and then Killers, with original lead singer Paul D’ianno. And after Piece came Powerslave, an album almost equally badass. A friend and I saw Maiden live on the World Slavery Tour, supporting that album, at Long Beach Arena (“Scream for me, Long Beach!”) in March 1985, when we were 15 years old. That was, I believe, my second big arena concert (the first being Robert Plant on his Principle of Moments tour with my bosom pal Chad). Those Maiden shows at Long Beach Arena were forever etched into metal history with their inclusion on the peerless Live After Death live album. I used to tell people, “Hear that ‘Wooooooo!!!! on side 3? That’s me!” when listening to Live After Death, but that was almost certainly not the case. There was a lot of Wooooo-ing and Yowwwww-ing at that concert, and to be truthful, I was a distance from the stage.

(Twisted Sister opened for much of that tour. I was never a huge fan of theirs, but Dee Snider said something from the stage that night that I still think about almost every time I see a band, in a venue large or small. Sister was getting ready to open for one of the biggest rock bands in the world – this must have been just before they had a bit of mainstream success with their Stay Hungry album, and its hits “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock” – and fans were milling around, and sitting down, and buying Maiden merch on the concourse. Dee shouted at the crowd between songs “YOU CAN’T SIT DOWN AND ROCK AND ROLL!!!” As ambivalent as I am about Twisted Sister’s music, he was fucking right. You can’t. To this day I’m absolutely pissed when I see a band I like, and it’s a dumb seated show at some kind of theater. Fuck that.)

Today, I can put on any of Maiden’s first five albums and be transported into a time machine of pure happiness, but almost none of their records after that have the same effect. There was a time in my life, 1982 through 1986 when Iron Maiden meant the world to me. Decades later I almost saw them again, in the fall of 2019 at Golden 1 Center, but I got violently ill on the night of the show and had to sell my ticket on StubHub. It’s OK. The epic Long Beach Arena show from 1985, immortalized on their first live album, will have to suffice.

38. REM – Automatic For The People

This is a very interesting entry for me. I was an R.E.M. fan, but not exactly a gigantic one, although I love and appreciate so much of their music. Truly, they’re one of the greatest rock bands of all time, despite our attempt to use them to define that 80’s/90’s “college radio” sound. You cannot deny that Automatic For The People is an intense record. They had already hit it big with Green and Out Of Time, but Automatic For The People is, to me, their best record. It’s deep, it’s dark, it’s sad, but it retains its semi-pop sensibilities. “Drive,” “Man On The Moon,” “Everybody Hurts,” “Nightswimming.” I don’t have a ton else to say about this record except that if you don’t like it, well, I don’t know what that says about you. If you don’t know it, fine, that’s fair. But if you know it and don’t love it? I’m just… sorry.

37. They Might Be Giants – Flood

I can’t for the life of me remember how I got turned on to They Might Be Giants. The quirky, prolific, East Coast duo – “The Johns” (Flansburgh and Linnell) – absolutely stole my heart with this album, their third, from 1990. It was just after I had moved to Sacramento, and I was so excited about their oddball sound that I tried to turn everyone I knew onto them, including my heavy metal-loving L.A. friends, who were likewise trying to turn me on to Queensryche‘s Operation Mindcrime. None of us succeeded in convincing each other. (My friend Brian hand-wrote all the lyrics to Queensryche’s metal dystopian rock opera on a sheet of paper, in the tiniest possible handwriting, for me. I feel guilty to this day that he went through so much work and within a couple songs I was like, “Meh,” and never listened again nor read his painstakingly crafted lyrics.)

I guess TMBG is still making music. They had a great documentary, Gigantic, that came out in 2003, and they made awesome kids’ records: No! being particularly popular with the whole family when my kids were little. But TMBG for me will always be Flood. “Birdhouse In My Soul” is a brilliant song, and the closest thing they ever had to a hit, but the record itself is flawless from start to finish. It opens audaciously, with a processional chorus proclaiming:

Why is the world in love again?
Why are we marching hand in hand?
Why are the ocean levels rising up?
It’s a brand new record, for nineteen-ninety
They Might Be Giants’ brand new album
Floooooooooood!

And then it rolls right into “Birdhouse,” eventually hitting “Lucky Ball And Chain,” “Your Racist Friend,” “Particle Man,” “We Want A Rock,” “Women And Men,” among many other gems, then the penultimate “They Might Be Giants,” – where they just sing the name of their band over and over among lines like

They might be fake
They might be lies
They might be big, big, fake, fake, lies

and doesn’t stop until the slow crooner “Road Movie To Berlin,” the perfect coda to this masterpiece.

TMBG is one of those weird, acquired-taste bands. I contend they are by no means a novelty act just because they have funny lyrics and play a lot of accordians. I saw them at The Crest at some point in the early 90’s, and I either went by myself or I might have talked a friend of a friend into attending. They were fantastic, of course, and I’m surprised that’s the only time I’ve seen them. I could be an anomaly in my fandom: I think they’re more typically the kind of band you’ve either hardly heard of, or that you’ve followed obsessively for 35 years and seen live a hundred times. I haven’t paid much attention to them since the early 00’s, if I’m being honest, but my goodness, Flood was – and still is – a treasure.

36. Paul Simon – Graceland

We’re getting to the point in this project – with 36 albums still to go – where I’m starting to feel unqualified to even write about these records. So much has been said about Graceland that I’m almost embarrassed to even add my two cents. How can I be close to qualified? Could I write about The Godfather and say simply “I liked it, good acting, good writing. Thumbs up.” I really am starting to feel like an idiot here. I guess all I can do is tell you what this album means to me.

As you know, very strict rules were in place when enumerating my favorite fifty albums of all time. One was one album per artist. When I introduced this piece I mentioned there was one kinda-sorta exception by someone who was once in one band, and then went solo, and both iterations made my top fifty. From reading The Leftovers and also from deductive reasoning, that of course could only have been Paul McCartney or Paul Simon: Artists whose original bands were so stellar, but somehow, incredibly, went on to have equally – or even more – amazing solo careers. This is where it’s hard to give it to McCartney though. His Wings stuff was super, and he’s had a lot of real nice solo work, but let me ask you this: If The Beatles had never existed, but all of McCartney’s post-Beatles stuff did, would he be a household name today? Would you recognize his name? Would your brother or sister? Your neighbor? That teenager down the street? Your dog or cat? Maybe. Probably not. Sorry Sir Paul, I feel like an asshole for saying it.

Simon and Garfunkel were, and remain, really big, but nowhere as big as the Beatles. However, Simon’s post S&G work has been absolutely stellar. He has made strong, popular, highly relevant music throughout the 70’s, 80’s, and I’ll argue even the 90’s. (I can’t speak too much about his work between 2000 and 2020.) While S&G only put out five studio albums in just over five years in the 60’s, it didn’t slow Simon down a bit after he and Art Garfunkel parted ways. Hell, Simon put out a really nice record called Seven Psalms in May of 2023. The man has had a hell of a run.

Simon was first heralded then years later criticized for embracing (or appropriating, depending on your point of view) music from distinctly different cultures, notably African music, to make this record. But when it came out when I was about 17, after loving Simon and Garfunkel and much of Simon’s solo stuff, I didn’t think much about that. And even now, as long as he gave credit where credit was due and paid his musicians fairly, I have absolutely no problem with it. Hell, I remember purchasing a Ladysmith Black Mambazo cassette just because I loved their sound on this record, and it seems like they became much more successful after the release of Graceland.

Simon is an inventive musician with boyish charm and a gift for lyrics. Every single song on this album is a banger, and it truly stands the test of time. Listen to “Homeless,” “Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes,” “Graceland,” or “I Know what I Know,” instead of the somewhat played out “Boy in the Bubble” or “You Can Call Me Al,” which are fine songs too.

Again, I adored Simon and Garfunkel, and Simon’s solo stuff before Graceland was fantastic. He’s made a lot of good music after Graceland as well. I saw him in concert once, and I gotta say, I’ll be really fucking sad when the world is without Paul Simon.

35. Buena Vista Social Club – Buena Vista Social Club

Remember big chain bookstores, and how they started getting into the music-selling business? Sometime in about 2000, my then-wife and I went to one of these bookstores, maybe Barnes & Noble, maybe Borders – it was something we did: drop the kids off at her folks, go out to eat, hit a bookstore. I wandered over to the CD section, as I often did on these dates of ours. Buena Vista Social Club was on display. It was featured on the listening station – remember those? – so I strapped on the headphones (eew!), started the store copy of the CD, read the little booklet that described the story of BVSC, and was thunderstruck from the first D minor chord of “Chan Chan.”

Of the hundred albums in the post, and the countless more by bands that didn’t make the list for whatever reason, I can’t think of another one where I remember the precise place and time I first heard of and listened to a band. It’s a pretty special artist that does that for a person, and maybe I should have ranked this one higher.

It’s worth reading up more on BVSC, and this is a good, short piece.  In a nutshell, legendary Cuban musicians from the 1940’s and 1950’s get rediscovered by an American and a Brit in the 1990’s (when one of these Cuban musicians was about to enter his 90’s), they all get together, make this amazing record, and then the musicians get invited to Carnegie Hall, become lifted out of poverty and into international fame and acclaim, star in a documentary by a German, and die (most/many of them) within five or ten years of natural causes at very advanced ages.

Buena Vista Social Club members were never all a part of one single band until Ry Cooder and others helped put them together in 1996. They were individually legends, playing in all manner of groups – sometimes with each other, sometimes not – for many decades, but it was the 40’s and 50’s that defined their sound. Then…well, we know what happened in Cuba.

But all this you can find out on your own. My experience with this record is that I became absolutely fucking obsessed with it. I learned all the lyrics to most of the songs in Spanish and English. I listed to it obsessively. I bought all the members’ solo albums that began coming out, as the elderly musicians gained newfound fame. I saw one of them – Barbarito Torres, one of the few younger members – live at Harlow’s, one of my very favorite places to see bands here in Sacramento. And this was during a time – unlike now – where I was decidedly not seeing many bands or artists play live.

When first writing this, I decided I had to have their Live at Carnegie Hall album on vinyl, so I ordered it from Discogs.com right on the spot. Buena Vista Social Club is an incredible story, and an even better band. Do yourself a favor: sit down with it, read the lyrics and the English translation, learn the stories of Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer, Rubén González, Omara Portuondo, and so many other Cuban legends that comprised that band. You’re welcome.

34. LL Cool J – Bigger And Deffer

This list is woefully short of women and artists of color. I’m aware of it, but I can’t coat it woke and pretend some records mean more to me than they honestly did. These lists are the stuff that has meant the most to me, and there’s no room for anything but truthfulness. The first bands I liked were very white, very male, and very American and Brit-centric. But I’m happy to now get to the first hip-hop album in my top fifty, and my first album by a black, solo artist among this group.

You’re gonna read about a couple of other hip hop acts from the late 80’s later, but this sophomore album by LL Cool J from 1987 is pure perfection. The braggadocio is off the charts (“I’m Bad”), the beats are intense (“.357…”), the funny parts are hilarious (“Kanday”), the sweet parts are wonderful (“I Need Love”), and the entire album is just peerless 80’s rap love.

I haven’t followed rap and hip hop in a long time. I know, I know, get off my lawn, but Kanye, Drake, or Jay-Z don’t hit me the way rappers from the late 80’s did. I feel like that old shit was just funky, and cool, and outrageous, and funny, and as much as I try, I haven’t quite found hip hop today that I love as much as that 80’s stuff. (But shout out to Fantastic Negrito‘s Last Days of Oakland, Kendrick‘s Good Kid Maad City, Tyler the Creator, Denzel Curry, Megan Thee Stallion, and Kehlani. Y’all are gonna bring me back someday, I know it!)

LL Cool J wasn’t much about political commentary or social justice, he was just about amazing beats, skilled microphone techniques, and bragging about what a great rapper he was. Simpler times. I contend that the title track holds up as the greatest rap song of all time. Put it on, crank it, and you’ll see.

33. Grateful Dead – American Beauty

It’s hard to pick a favorite Grateful Dead album. I mean, they suffer a bit on this list because they were the quintessential live band, and you can freely get all their live stuff these days; you don’t have to meet some hippie in the Gemco parking lot in an RV and give him a lid of grass for a bootleg Pauley Pavillion ’73 on cassette.

You’ve learned by now that as a young stoner, I was deeply infatuated with rock music. It was always the music, but I won’t lie, you always wanted to seem cool to your stoner friends. My relationship with most bands in junior high typically started with seeing their logo drawn in Sharpie on some other stoner’s denim notebook. This led to many discussions amongst me, Tony, Chad, Brian, Little Scott, Bruce, and Eric, which would lead to discussions with older stoners like Big Scott, Joey, Ray, Adam, and Tony’s sister (not really a stoner, but cool, and into good music), and others.

In seventh grade, The Grateful Dead were a band I didn’t know much about, but they had the best artwork on their albums and posters. I was already into Zeppelin, Sabbath, Van Halen, and all kinds of heavy rock when I picked up Skeletons From The Closet: The Best Of The Grateful Dead on vinyl from Auditory Odyssey on Laurel Canyon Blvd. (Artistic license here: it could have been Music Plus on Ventura Blvd. Odyssey was way cooler though. They sold bongs and shit.) With the smoking skeleton on its cover, and the weird devil man, I knew I was gonna be in for the heaviest of heavy metal. This was going to be one kick ass, deep rock shit. Proto-metal before that was even a word.

Well, from the opening keyboards of “The Golden Road…” – a real jangly hippie jam, à la early Jefferson Airplane – to the closing strums of “Friend Of The Devil” – a folkish, country ditty, albeit with a very dark theme – I couldn’t have been more mistaken about what kind of music was going to come out of my speakers. And even now, in 2023, I feel like people who don’t know The Dead don’t realize that they are probably more at home on a country radio station than a rock station. Did I fall in love with The Dead from that collection? No, despite the fact that some of their greatest – and later my favorite – songs were on it. “Sugar Magnolia,” “St. Stephen,” “Uncle John’s Band,” “Mexicali Blues,” plus the ubiquitous “Truckin'” and “Casey Jones.”

Later I discovered live Dead, with the Dead Set and Reckoning albums, which I acquired on cassette sometime just after high school. This was back when there were very limited options in record stores for live Dead, and these two were classics. I listened to these a lot, discovering incredible jams like “Brokedown Palace” (please play this at my funeral), “Deal,” “Loser,” “Dire Wolf,” Cassidy,” and “Ripple.” I was becoming a full-fledged Dead fan – never one to call myself a Deadhead, though – and I eventually saw them live in the Jerry Garcia years precisely three times. (Which has always seemed odd to me. Most people I know have seen the Dead zero times, but a handful have seen them dozens or even hundreds of times.)

I had the good fortune of working at Sam Goody’s Music and Video in Costa Mesa, California in the late 80’s, and we got a great employee discount. I typically picked up a couple of cassettes each week at 33% off, and my first two of these were American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead, still considered their best studio albums from a band who mostly seemed disappointed by their own studio albums, according to stuff I read. They made the studio albums to fulfill their obligations to the record companies. What they really wanted to do was get on the road.

American Beauty is just what the title implies. A beautiful compilation of perhaps the most distinctly American band. The Dead was blues, hard rock, acid rock, folk, and country, all rolled up in one. Many of their most iconic songs – some mentioned above – debuted on record with this 1970 release, such as “Box Of Rain,” (And by the way, how cool is it to let their bass player, arguably the worst vocalist in the band, kick off the album with his song. It’s a beautiful tune inspired by the recent loss of his father), “Friend Of The Devil,” “Sugar Magnolia,” “Ripple,” “Brokedown Palace,” and “Truckin’.”

It was a great record, and I played it a whole lot. So it gets this spot in my top 50 list. Fun fact: in 2012 I became absolutely obsessed with live Grateful Dead. I would rip recordings from archive.org and painstakingly organize them on my computer for transfer to my iPod. I, no lie, listened to zero audio except live Grateful Dead from probably the summer of 2012 until the spring of 2013. I didn’t listen to podcasts, talk radio, or even my own family. Just live Dead. I got out of it, of course, but I can still dive back in so readily, so easily, and so lovingly. The Dead will always mean a lot to me.

32. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Freaky Styley

I had a friend named Molly when I was a teenager, and she made me a mixtape once that blew my mind. While I was listening mainly to Iron Maiden, Scorpions, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath, she gave me a mixtape of Gene Loves Jezebel, Love and Rockets, Violent Femmes, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, among others. U2, Talking Heads, and The Cult had already broken me out of my hard rock / heavy metal doldrums, but Molly’s mixtape sent me to a stratosphere of great music. The Chilis were a love of mine from my first listen to “Jungle Man”on that mixtape in 1986 or so, all the way until I more or less gave up on them after 1995’s One Hot Minute. I hate to say it, but in my opinion, that was the album when they jumped the shark, although after that album is probably when they made most of their money, so good for them.

Freaky Styley is an impossible mix of funk, punk, rock, and just plain insanity. Produced by the funkmeister himself, George Clinton, it’s a groovy nonstop ass kicking of the type that hadn’t really been heard in pop music. Four white boys, impossibly funky, playing a style of music that couldn’t really be categorized. Their cover of Sly and the Family Stone‘s “If You Want Me To Stay” is a sublime, faithful, unironic love letter. They cover The Meters with “Hollywood (Africa)” and Dr. Suess with “Yertle The Turtle,” with a million funky stops along the way.

Nevermind the British bands
Nevermind the Synth Funk bands
Nevermind the Wham Wham band
Nevermind Duran Duran
Cause we’re the Red Hot
Chili
Peppers!

31. Hamilton: An American Musical – Original Broadway Cast Recording

There are only a couple of soundtracks on this list, and all of them were obsessions. I had heard rumblings about Hamilton, as we all had, but I clearly remember listening to the first several songs on the way back from visiting my oldest son in Berkeley on the road back home to Sacramento, somewhere in 2016 I want to say.

I was hooked. From the opening notes: Boom, boom boom boom boom, boom boom boom boom…”How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot…” even thinking about the opening of the album right now makes me want to put it on and play the whole thing from start to finish, all three hours of it.

Once I really started listening to it, it took me months to stop. Much like my Grateful Dead pilgrimage of 2012, this album was literally all I listened to for several months in 2016 and 2017. I didn’t have all three hours quite memorized, as documented by middle school girls on YouTube everywhere, but it was close. Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s lyrics and rhyming were so on point it just seemed ridiculous. I didn’t get all the hip hop references, having mostly been out of hip hop since the early 90’s, but they were powerful all the same. And the fact that the songs were sung by black and brown voices about our ever-so-white founding fathers, well, there was just something amazing about it.

My friend Joel and I went to see Hedwig and the Angry Inch in San Francisco a few years ago – when I was well-versed on the Hamilton soundtrack, but hadn’t seen the show live yet – and we met his daughter, who was living in SF at the time, at a local eatery. Of course we had no reservations so had to squeeze in at the bar in an Italian joint near the theater, sitting on those horrible metal square bar stools with no back, and nowhere to hang your jacket, but Jordan came and met us there for dinner even though she wasn’t going to the Hedwig show with us. I was telling her about Hamilton, and of course, remember, my only experience with it at the time was listening to the album on CD and Spotify. Jordan was a fan of musicals, so I said, “Here’s the thing. Just listen to it once, and listen to it all the way through. Until you do that, you may be familiar with it, you may have heard some songs, you may acknowledge ‘Hey, that Hamilton thing is pretty cool,’ but seriously, Jordan, listen to it. Listen to it from start to finish. All of it. Every note. Every word. You will be hooked. You will be obsessed. Walls in your heart will break down and you will scream to the heavens “I get it now!”

A stranger from a couple of bar stools over leaned in and said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but what this guy is saying is one hundred percent true. That’s exactly the experience that I had, as well as everyone else I know. Thanks for letting me butt in, please enjoy your meal.” My understanding is it eventually had that effect on Jordan too.

I did finally see Hamilton live in 2019 in San Francisco with the touring cast, and it was terrific. It’s really hard not to sing along though! At the exact moment the guns are fired in the duel between Hamilton and Burr at the end, a fat old white man had to loudly shuffle back into his seat from the restroom, practically falling all over my guest and me. Any other fucking scene, man!

People who are into Hamilton, are really into Hamilton. And you should be, too.

30. Leonard Cohen – Ten New Songs

I came to Leonard Cohen later than I should have, but when he got his hooks into me I stayed hooked. I honestly don’t remember having any awareness of Cohen until I heard about 1991’s tribute album I’m Your Fan, with lots of great artists I both had (R.E.M., Pixies, Nick Cave) and hadn’t (Geoffrey Oryema, The Lilac Time, Jean-Louis Murat) heard of, contributing. I didn’t own the album, but the name Leonard Cohen became imprinted in my mind as “someone I should know about” long before the internet would let you learn everything about anything over the next 60 seconds.

The next I learned about Cohen was that his brilliant song, “Waiting For The Miracle,” kicked off Quentin Tarantino‘s Natural Born Killers soundtrack. Now I finally knew who this cat was, and that song was the straight dope. I didn’t know he was nearly 60 when he recorded this song, with the inimitable Sharon Robinson, a couple of years earlier. Of course I knew Concrete Blonde‘s version of “Everybody Knows” from the Pump Up The Volume soundtrack, and I think I was vaguely aware it was a cover, but to me at the time it was simply a Concrete Blonde song.

I bought The Essential Leonard Cohen on CD in the early 2000’s, and that’s when I realized this dude was a contemporary of The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, and Bob Dylan, maybe just a couple of years behind, artistically, although older in years. By the time Cohen’s last album came out, while he was still living, in 2016, he had been making relevant pop music in every single decade from the 60’s through the 2020’s. That’s seven decades! Name me one other artist who has done that. Relevant music! You might say Bob Dylan, to which I’d say “But the 80’s.” And then I would win that argument. Cohen’s song “Nevermind,” from 2014, was the theme song for season 2 of HBO’s True Detective, when Cohen was 70 years old. “Avalanche,” as covered by Aimee Mann, was the theme song for the documentary miniseries about Michelle McNamara‘s hunt for the Golden State Killer, “I’ll Be Gone In The Dark” in 2020. No one else has that staying power with music spanning a longer era. McCartney still tours, so did Elton until very recently, and Paul Simon still makes music, but nobody did it like L.C., so consistently, for so many years.

Soon after wearing out The Essential Leonard Cohen, I started diving into his studio albums. Although I love his 60’s and 70’s work, I was most drawn to 1988’s I’m Your Man, with the amazing songs, besides the title track, “Everybody Knows,” “Ain’t No Cure For Love,” and “Tower Of Song.” I was also drawn to 1992’s The Future, which yielded – besides the amazing title track (LC was good at the title tracks!) the aforementioned “Waiting For The Miracle,” “Anthem,” and “Democracy.”

But when I heard 2001’s Ten New Songs, sharing all songwriting credit and the amazing cover photo with the exquisite, incomparable Sharon Robinson, I knew I had found my Cohen studio album home. Every. Single. Song. is a masterpiece. “Alexandra Leaving” will still be standing when all of humanity has burned down. “Love Itself” will make you break down and cry where you stand. “A Thousand Kisses Deep” will make you wonder if you’ve ever been in love (because LC has, as he’s been telling us for 60 years, and from the grave.)

Cohen died one day before the 2016 election of Donald Trump. The singer, songwriter, musician, poet, painter, novelist, illustrator, and Buddhist Monk just knew that at the age of 82, he had done what he could. The world was entering a terrible, new phase.

We will always have his music, but he had to leave us.

29. Urge Overkill – Saturation

Urge Overkill was one of those hard rock bands from the 90’s that kind of got left behind. Saturation was their major label debut, and it was as polished and cool as the band’s matching leisure suits and medallions. It was the grunge era, where bands from the Pacific Northwest tried to out-authenticize each other, with lots of loud fuzz, flannel, and tore-up jeans where you had to earn the damage. Urge, out of Chicago, shared grunge’s love of loud guitars and thumping drums, but they were all about the hooks, the melodies, and a mid-60’s coordinated fashion ethos.

Their biggest hit ever was from their Stull E.P. when they were still on Touch and Go Records out of Chicago. The song was a cover of Neil Diamond‘s “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon.” Creepy as fuck, but prominently played in Quentin Tarantino‘s (there’s his name again, two albums in a row!) Pulp Fiction and also that film’s stellar soundtrack album. It’s the pivotal scene where John Travolta‘s and Uma Thurman‘s characters return from winning the famous dance contest at Jackrabbit Slim’s, and Thurman listens to the song, overdosing on herion, while Travolta has a moral crisis in the bathroom.

That’s as close as Urge Overkill got to real rock and roll stardom, but they had the talent and the shtick to be as big as Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, or Alice In Chains (but maybe not Nirvana, a breed unto themselves).

Saturation starts off with the epic riff from “Sister Havana,” probably their second biggest hit, and continues loud, quiet, loud – Pixies style – until the final cymbal crash of “Heaven 90210.” We don’t need to talk about the hidden track, “Dumb Song, Take Nine.” This was a thing, kids. Ask your elders about hidden tracks.

I only saw Urge Overkill once, at The Cattle Club, in 1994 or so. It was always a singular experience, seeing one of your vary favorite bands in a small venue. And not because they were on a nursing home tour, but because they were on their way up. I chatted with Eddie “King” Roeser at the fire pit for a while. I bought a T-shirt that night; my son Henry still wears it from time to time, and it fills me with pride. I tore a round, cardboard, UO promotional cutout from the club’s wall that night and took it home. It hung in various apartments and houses of mine throughout the years, but has lamentably been lost to the ravages of time.

Sadly, Urge never flew too high, but Saturation remains one of the most crankable-summer-car-windows-down albums out there. And one of their founders, Nash Kato, was instrumental in the career of the only female in my top five, whose jacket she wore in the photo booth for the picture that embosses her incomparable debut album, who encouraged her and believed in her. You will have to wait for that though.

28. Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins – Rabbit Fur Coat

This one is on the list not so much because of what it meant to me, but simply because of how fucking good it is. I’m a sucker for a singer-songwriter, and Jenny Lewis made a masterpiece in her first solo record after Rilo Kiley in 2006. When I think of this record, I think of living in River Park in the late aughts, early teens. I never listened to it nonstop; it wasn’t one of those. But it’s just so, so, good from start to finish. “Run, Devil, Run” is the short, gospel-ish, opening track. It sounds like it belongs on the O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack. “Rise Up With Fists!!” is brilliant and heavy:

But you can wake up younger
Under the knife
And you can wake up sounder
If you get analyzed
And I better wake up
There, but for the grace of God, go I

It’s a slow, sweet, heavy record. Lyrically, it’s just astonishing. The kind of album that it’s really worth sitting down and reading the lyrics while you listen. I won’t talk about every song, because I don’t know them all that well, but each one that comes on makes me excited. Every single one. “Melt Your Heart,” my God!

When you’re kissing someone
Who’s too much like you
It’s like kissing on a mirror
When you’re sleeping with someone who doesn’t get you
You’re gonna hate yourself in the morning

Amen.

After that it rolls into “You Are What You Love,” which is just phenomenal musically and lyrically. I used to play this on guitar, and I should dive back into it one of these days. Some songs on this record are so heavy that my own feeble talents can’t do them justice.

‘Cause we live in a house of mirrors
We see our fears in everything
Our songs, faces, and secondhand clothes
But more and more, we’re suffering
Not nobody, not a thousand beers
Will keep us from feeling so all alone

The titular song, “Rabbit Fur Coat” is an epic tale of a young woman selling her soul – and her rabbit fur coat – for life in a mansion house, and then 20 years later to take advantage of her own daughter in order to chase gold and more mansions. It’s hard to know how much of this is autobiographical, Lewis having been a successful child actor raised by a single mom. (“I became a hundred thousand dollar kid…”)

The next song is a mind-bending cover of the Traveling Wilburys‘ (see favorite album #43) “Handle with Care,” which features its own supergroup of backing musicians: Ben Gibbard, M. Ward, and Conor Oberst. It’s a very faithful rendition of that classic Wilburys song, but it’s enough different – and maybe it’s just the different voices – that it just knocks you right on your ass.

For me, the last amazing song on the album – remember though, there’s not one dud on any of these records – is “Born Secular.”

God works
In mysterious ways
And God gives
And then he takes
From me
From me

The album finishes with a great song, “It Wasn’t Me,” then a short reprise of “Happy,” an earlier song. I can’t speak much to The Watson Twins. They have incredible background vocals, but I don’t know if they had a contribution to the songwriting. Sometimes an album didn’t change your life, but it’s so good it just never fails to please. Rabbit Fur Coat is like that for me. I can’t recommend this record enough.

27. Tracy Chapman – Tracy Chapman

Tracy Chapman’s debut album from 1988, when she was 24 years old, was momentous. The album is flawless, and her career probably suffered from such early success. The second track on the album, “Fast Car,” remains her most popular song to date, 35 years later. Three of her top five songs on Spotify are from the album, and although she’s had a tremendous career in the music industry, she – like so many others – never really matched the success of her debut record.

I don’t remember where I got the CD. It may have belonged to my former stepmother. It may have been the first CD I ever owned, after appropriating it from her. When I moved from L.A. to Sacramento in 1989 to move in with my dad and his new wife, he let me move his Pioneer component stereo system – and new-fangled CD player within – from the living room to my bedroom. It was one of those faux-wood assemble-yourself cabinets with a glass door that closed softly on a magnet. My stepmother had this CD and Enya‘s Watermark, and no one seemed to care that I commandeered them and the stereo. These two CD’s quickly became nighttime rituals as I peacefully entered dreamland to these soundtracks.

I don’t know what to say about the record itself, except from the opening  chords of “Talkin’ About A Revolution,” to the global phenomenon “Fast Car,” “Baby Can I Hold You,” “She’s Got Her Ticket,” “Mountains O’ Things…” Every song is a perfect chapter of the life of a young woman with too much weight on her shoulders, longing for love and freedom, and fighting oppression and heartbreak at every turn. It’s as powerful in 2023 as it was in 1988. I highly recommend a listen for those who haven’t been hipped to it.

I had a feeling that I belonged
And I had a feeling I could be someone
Be someone
Be someone

And yes, I still listen when I go to sleep sometimes. All these years later. (I’ve recently tried Enya as a soporific too, but she just doesn’t work for me anymore!)

26. Tom Waits – Mule Variations

Oh boy, just throw a dart at Tom Waits‘ discography, and you’ll find a candidate for his “best” album. Some would make the case for his debut, Closing Time from 1973. Others would rightly say 1985’s Rain Dogs, or 1987’s Franks Wild Years (no apostrophe). Some might say Swordfishtrombone or Real Gone. I’m quite fond of his most recent studio release, Bad As Me, from way back in 2011. Waits remains probably my biggest bucket list live artist, and I’m just not optimistic, at his age of 73, that it’s gonna happen. He’s not McCartney or Willie or Jagger or Richards. But I will always have Mule Variations.

Like most of Waits’ work, it’s a strange hodgepodge. The opening track, “Big In Japan,” is a funky, lo-fi, kooky prologue to the great music to come:

I got the moon, I got the cheese
I got the whole damn nation on their knees
I got the rooster, I got the crow
I got the ebb, I got the flow

This gives to the odd, rhythmic, “Low Side Of The Road,” which itself turns to possibly my favorite song of all time, even though it’s up here on my 26th favorite album: “Hold On.”

“Hold On” is a masterpiece of storytelling. Haunting, emotional, resonant, wistful, hopeful, and rueful acceptance. It’s a perfect piece of Americana. From the sign that says “If you live it up, you won’t live it down,” to the dime store watch, rings made of spoons, to whether or not you can meet nice girls in coffee shops, the whole song just spins your head around with visions and imagery that whether you’ve experienced something similar or not, whether you’ve been to St. Louis or not, you just want to fall down to your knees and cry, or pray, or scream, or all three. The final verse hammers the final nail in:

Down by the Riverside motel
It’s 10 below and falling
By a 99 cent store
She closed her eyes and started swaying
But it’s so hard to dance that way
When it’s cold and there’s no music
Oh, your old hometown’s so far away
But inside your head there’s a record playing
A song called, “Hold on,” hold on…

Honestly, the rest of the album doesn’t much matter. It’s a great album, and it would stand tall without this song, but some songs are so superlative that they instantly push their album up higher, and higher, and higher. Who doesn’t have a record in their head playing at all times? Is it just me? Is that why I’m compelled to make these lists?

There are more gems: “Pony” (“I hope my pony, I hope my pony, I hope my pony knows the way back home”), “Picture In A Frame,” (“I’m gonna love you til the wheels come off,” to which my good friend and former brother-in-law’s wedding party walked down the aisle), and “Georgia Lee” (“Why wasn’t God watching? Why wasn’t God listening? Why wasn’t God there for Georgia Lee?”)

It’s a curious album, filled with the bizarre vocal stylings for which Waits is famous. Is there such a thing as Industrial Folk? There’s a lot of tune-adjacent piano and what I can only imagine are metal pipes banging on steel beams. Still, it’s a fantastic experience, this record, and dotted with some of the most emotional and compelling songs in the pop/rock pantheon.

OK, there were my 26th through 50th favorite albums of all time. Click here for Part IV of this adventure.

Continued from Part I

When compiling the list of my favorite fifty albums of all time (not the “best,” remember, but my favorite), I went through some very serious teeth-gnashing and hair-pulling. Sadly, these albums below did not make my list of the top fifty, but they’re definitely in the next fifty. So somewhere floating around the realm of theoretical things is my list of favorite 100 albums of all time. I don’t know the order, but these are numbers 51 – 100, in alphabetical order, unranked. Remember, only one album per artist; so if an artist has an album on this list, a separate album by that same artist is not in my top fifty.

OK, here we go:

3rd Bass – Derelicts of Dialect

White New York rappers 3rd Bass had a terrific debut album, The Cactus Album, from 1989, but I came to know them from this second and final record. Pop Goes the Weasel was a big hit, and it talked a lot of shit about fellow white rapper Vanilla Ice, but the rest of the album is solid from start to finish – as is The Cactus Album – and MC Serch‘s Return of the Product. There are about three white rap acts I like: Beastie Boys, Kid Rock (his politics are fucked up, I know) and 3rd Bass. This album got a lot of play in my first years in Sacramento in the early ’90’s. My homie Angus liked them too.

Ryan Adams & The Cardinals – Cold Roses

As you have heard or will hear me say over and over, it has taken me way too long to finish this project, four years and counting. I thought it would take just a couple/few months. An interesting part of my procrastination is that new albums have come to me in the intervening four years and left a indelibly deep imprint on my soul. Although I haven’t spent decades with these new records, they honestly can’t be left off The Leftovers list simply because of their recency. I shall call these “The New Leftovers!”

I had to kick some really good records off this Leftovers list to make room for “The New Leftovers” Some were easy decisions (Edie Brickell, sorry Mrs. Simon), and others were really hard (Nine Inch Nails‘ Pretty Hate Machine… ouch!) but I just couldn’t deny that because some albums hit me hard for a summer, they couldn’t justifiably be ranked in my 51st through 100th favorites of all time. These “New Leftovers” can.

The first of the “New Leftovers” I’m writing about is Cold Roses by Ryan Adams & The Cardinals. I went through an Alt Country/Americana phase in the 00’s, and enjoyed a lot of music by Whiskeytown, Son Volt, and the Old 97’s, among others. It didn’t all stick, although I certainly appreciate those other bands (and others in that genre will come up later in this project). Cold Roses was among my very favorite albums during that time, released in 2005, but I eventually moved on to other things and kind of forgot about it. But I picked it up on vinyl at some point in the last four years, and it hit me *really* hard. It’s one of my most played albums, usually visiting my turntable at least every 90 days or so. The songs are haunting, lovely, rollicking, and heartbreaking all at the same time. “Magnolia Mountain” kicks things off, and it sounds like a ballad from the early 20th century, if not the 19th. Adams’ lyrics will slay you, especially in tracks like “Sweet Illusions,” “When Will You Come Back Home,” and “How Do You Keep Love Alive.” It’s country, it’s rock, it’s folk, it’s all those things wrapped up in one. It’s a gorgeous album, and one that I cannot recommend highly enough to fans of this genre.

Arrested Development – 3 Years, 5 Months, and 2 Days in the Life of…

Some incredible, positive, upbeat hip hop from 1992. This band never recaptured the brilliance of their debut record, although they made a shitload more. I had this album on repeat for a long time during my years at UC Davis, acquired it on vinyl within the last couple of years, and it completely holds up. It’s a beautiful, fun, dynamic, awe-inspiring record that is always a great hang.

Belle and Sebastian – If You’re Feeling Sinister

Another of my “New Leftovers,” I debated whether to include this in the top 100 here, knowing it was displacing some other record (if you must know, Elton John‘s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, an undeniably great album.) But Belle & Sebastian came to me just in the last few years after literally decades of producing incredible pop/rock music. Never huge stars, but always revered by hipsters, I couldn’t get my head around them until my oldest son Vincent – who has excellent and eclectic tastes in music – turned me on to this record and I got hooked instantly. It’s pure pop greatness: lots of members in the band – which includes both men and women – and rollicking songs which are funny and sad all at once, they remind me a bit of The Beautiful South. This is an amazing record that is always the antidote to the “What should I play?” question.

Big Audio Dynamite – Megatop Phoenix

This is the amazing, underrated, maybe not-too-well-known 1989 album by the band fronted by Mick Jones, The Clash‘s lead guitarist and co-founder. Their 1991 album, The Globe, is probably better known, as it produced possibly their only hit: “Rush.” But Megatop is an incredible album from start to finish. It’s part pop, dance, rock, weirdo-fun. Such a strange record, but it reminds me of driving around Los Angeles in my 1979 Chevy Malibu that I bought off my friend Eric for $800. It was a good car, and got me to work and back – from North Hollywood to Pasadena – for a year or two. I went on a recent mini-B.A.D. run because I had been watching Deadwood on the treadmill at the gym, and one of the show’s characters, Mr. Wu, brought me back 30 years to the intro to this album’s hypnotic track, Dragon Town:

Mr. Wu no longer has the laundry…you’d have to say the business was a flop

I spent a few weeks with Megatop and The Globe after that, and was extremely happy. That’s the power of music. A simple phrase, a name, a character on a TV show, can remind you of a lyric, and then before you know it you’re down a deep rabbit hole with a band that you loved 30 years ago.

The Breeders – Pod

Quite a hard one here. The Breeders obviously get a separate entry from Pixies, which – surprise! – don’t make the Leftovers list because they’re in my top 50. Last Splash is also a good candidate for my favorite Pixies record, and truthfully, 2018’s All Nerve, has been on pretty regular play on my turntable at my V Street apartment, then at my 20th Street house, ever since. I had seen The Breeders a time or two in the past, but my son Henry and I saw them at The Masonic in San Francisco front and center a few years ago, and it was one of the greatest concerts of my life. Still, when pressed to choose my favorite all time Breeders album, I have to go with their debut, Pod.

Cake – Motorcade of Generosity

Such a terrific record, and although Cake is a great band, my feeling is this first album of theirs captured their heart and soul more than their subsequent releases, however strong. Part of the Cake-love, of course, is their Sacramento roots. Having seen them play house parties and art galleries, then The Cattle Club, and eventually on to some level of global acclaim is gratifying. Their quirky, honest music never fails to bring a smile, and this record epitomizes mid 90’s Sacramento for me.

Camper Van Beethoven – Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart

This is a cassette that I got used at The Beat when they were still on H Street, before they moved to Folsom Blvd., and before the old Newbert’s Hardware spot (now BevMo) on J Street, and before they went out of business. I played it constantly driving around Sacramento before I had any friends up here in this city, and they were one of those bands that kind of helped break me out of classic rock doldrums and realize rock and roll could be funky, could have some horns, and could have weird vocals. “Turquoise Jewelry,” the “O Death” cover, “Eye of Fatima,” “Tania”…there’s not a dud on the record. I never liked Cracker as much as Camper, even though I saw Cracker a couple times: once acoustically in said Beat Records on J Street, and once opening for John Hiatt at The Crest. For me, it was always Camper. (Monks of Doom were OK.)

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – No More Shall We Part

A haunting masterpiece that barely slipped out of the top 50 and into the leftovers section. I don’t claim to know Nick Cave’s stuff very well. He’s been prolific, but I really only know this album, Let Love In, and maybe The Boatman’s Call and Henry’s Dream a bit. But this one never, ever fails to grip you by the shirt, throw you down, and make you love it so much you can’t stand it. Cave, like Tom Waits, is a storyteller at heart. That he’s also a brilliant songwriter and musician is just unfair. And glorious.

Consolidated – Friendly Fascism

I don’t remember exactly how I got hip to Consolidated, but it must have had to do with Mathieu and Randy. This Bay Area hip hop / industrial outfit lasted a small handful of records before disbanding, and although I never saw them live, they were famous for letting audience members come onstage during their gigs to speak their truths into the microphone, whether they were challenging the band’s ultra-leftist politics or just had something weird to say. Still, the message takes a back seat to the music, and this album is a tour de force of danceable, rappable, groovable righteousness. Their eponymous first album, The Myth of Rock, and Play More Music are also worthy places to start with Consolidated. This cassette was absolutely early 90’s Sacramento, driving around in my Honda Civic with Randy, Mathieu, and whichever other weirdos were around.

The Cure – Disintegration

I’m listening to Disintegration on double LP 180 gram vinyl as I type this, and there’s a case to be made that The Cure are one of the ten best bands to ever come out of Britain. Maybe top five. The Cure almost didn’t make this list, because the cassette I overplayed as a teenager was Standing on a Beach – The Singles, which breaks my stupid “no greatest hits” rules. But since I bought Disintegration on vinyl a couple years ago, it has become absolute staple in my turntable rotation. Ethereal and hypnotic, it may ultimately be their finest work, despite it coming a bit later in their career in 1989. It’s a serious record. When you put it on, you know some serious shit is going down. Such beautiful music, such heartfelt feeling embedded in every song. Every track is about heartbreak and longing, and the music itself is sad, but it retains the pop elements that brought The Cure to fame in the decade before Disintegration‘s release. It’s the perfect record for a glass of red wine on a winter’s night.

Mark Curry – It’s Only Time

When I turned 23, my friends threw me a surprise birthday party at The Velvet Elvis where a bunch of them lived. The Velvet was a warehouse on 28th Street south of T in Midtown Sacramento, before anyone called it Midtown. Everything on The Grid (another new name) was just “Downtown.” The Velvet didn’t have heat, or air, or a proper kitchen. My friends smuggled in a hotplate and a fridge, and threw up some cheap drywall into the cavernous warehouse to form separate rooms. Each roommate paid $200, as I recall. I never lived there, but my girlfriend and all my best friends did. I spent a LOT of rent-free nights there. We froze in the winter and broiled in the summer, and played poker until the sun came up. When they threw me the surprise birthday party, they all pitched in a dollar and bought me Sacramento’s own Mark Curry’s debut CD. It’s a truly phenomenal collection of heartbreaking bluesy rock tracks. You all should listen to it.

The Dark Whatever – Alien Plant Farm

I have a LOT to say about this little-known gem. Anthony Jaeger is The Dark Whatever, and he’s a close friend of a close friend of mine, Jeff. If I recall correctly, Anthony plays just about all the instruments on this record. He is truly one of the most talented musicians and songwriters I’ve had the privilege to know personally. This album is flawless, and hard to classify: rock, funk, folk, freak-folk, psychedelic, honky tonk. Strange that these myriad styles blend so smoothly from one song to the next, but they do.

One of my favorite tracks from this album is “Faster Than You Can Say Things Can Change,” a cyclical title and chorus (things can change, faster than you can say “things can change”) that I took one way, but I believe the songwriter may have taken another. I listened to this album on heavy repeat during the summer of 2018. It was a very odd summer, the last one I was married. Things seemed very good in my life right during that period (dummy!), but fatalist that I am, I was always wary of the proverbial other shoe dropping. Fitness, career, marriage, healthy children, all of this can be taken away in a flash. I’ve seen it happen countless time with loved ones. But at this moment, the summer of 2018 when my life was good, I was grateful for the good things in my life, and painfully aware how much things can change, faster than you can say. And then they did.

But I survived, and all my loved ones did too, thankfully. And I’m happy to say we’re all still surviving and thriving. I didn’t know it was impending at the time, but The Dark Whatever warned me that things can change, faster than you can say “things can change.”

I talked to Jeff about this experience, and what the song meant to me. He said that I had it all wrong, it was about being all fucked up, and having optimism that things could potentially change, faster than you can say. That kind of blew my mind. And that’s what a great album does for you, right? It blows your mind. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Anthony perform on street corners, in small clubs and open mics, and I truly believe he is one of the most gifted musicians and songwriters walking around today. I hope one day the world discovers that.

The Decemberists – The Crane Wife

My lord, this record. When I dropped my oldest son Vincent off at college, I knew I would be an emotional basket case. Neither his mom nor his stepmom – my wife at the time –  came with me. No dis upon either of them, but this was a father/son adventure, dropping my oldest son off at college and driving back home. I thought long and hard about what album I would listen to while driving home the 90+ minutes from Berkeley to Sacramento, after dropping off your eldest child, this life you witnessed birthed into the world, from the nervous cigarettes waiting for the home pregnancy text to reveal its secret knowledge, to the duplex hunting with a pregnant teenage girlfriend, to the eventual split, and legal bullshit, and remarriage, and half siblings, and parent-teacher conferences, and Little League team coaching, and Sly Park chaperoning, and Jr. High graduations, and midnight E.R. pickups. And now I, I, was dropping this child off at college, the way his stepmom and I once dropped him off at kindergarten, worried that he was a foot smaller and *seemed* two years younger than all the other kids.

Well, I dropped him off at his dorm at UC Berkeley, sat in my car for a few minutes, stunned, put on The Decemberists’ The Crane Wife album, and drove home bawling for 90 minutes. Does that tell you what you need to know about this album, and what it can mean to you? Yeah, it’s that good.

Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy – Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury

Nobody remembers this band, or their ONLY album, but they were an incredible hip hop duo in the early ’90’s. You may have heard of their MC: Michael Franti. Spearhead, anyone? Disposable Heroes were an an amazing hip hop group, with Franti and the other dude, Rono Tse, producing one of the most maddeningly listenable, yet socially conscious, rap records of the 1990’s. I was already a fan when I saw them open for Nirvana, The Breeders, and L7 at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1993, just a year before Kurt Cobain‘s death. To this day, it was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to in my life. If you’re any kind of fan of 80’s/90’s hip hop, I DEMAND you check them out. Sadly, Spotify tells me you can’t “quite” listen to their whole Hypocrisy album yet. I don’t know about Apple Music. And you need their whole album. I can’t seem to get “California Uber Alles” (because sampling, but WTF? They had an alignment with Jello Biafra and Alternative Tentacles!) nor “Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury” to play, so don’t fuck around until you can get the whole album. Hit me up and I’ll post a link to the MP4’s on Google Drive for you if need be.

Justin Townes Earle – Kids in the Street

I wrote extensively about Justin Townes Earle elsewhere on this site, so I won’t rehash it all here. We tragically lost JTE at the age of 38 in August of 2020 due to a drug overdose. Steve Earle‘s immensely talented son was an unabashed musical genius. His Americana style was fresh, his guitar talent bombastic, his lyrics heartbreaking, and the world just isn’t going to be the same without him.

This was the first JTE album I owned on physical media, a CD that I played in my car over and over, and it includes some of my very favorite songs by the young Nashville legend, such as the title track, “Champaign Corolla,” “Maybe a Moment,” “There Go a Fool,” “15-25,” “Short Hair Woman”…hell, the whole album is flawless. RIP to the real “JT,” an artist that I appreciate more and more each year that we sadly move on without him.

fIREHOSE – If’n

Although this list of the 50 leftovers is alphabetical, I feel like we’ve reached a point where it starts to feel funky. fIREHOSE was the uber-talented, hardest-working-man-in-punk-rock Mike Watt‘s second band after the amazing Minutemen, who’s superlative record Double Nickles on the Dime probably deserves to be on any list more than If’n. But I loved fIREHOSE (must we continue to stylize it that way?) in the 80’s and 90’s, and I cannot remember who turned me onto them, or how, or why. I wasn’t a punk rocker, nor was I deep into alternative/semi-underground music, but I adored this cassette and played it constantly. It holds up to this day, I highly recommend it.

The Flaming Lips – Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots

People love Wayne Coyne and The Flaming Lips. I mean they really, really, really love them. I don’t. They’re one of those bands I appreciate, but never quite “got” 100%. Except for this record. Yoshimi is a straight-up masterpiece, from the opening killer, “Fight Test…”

“I thought I was smart / I thought I was right / I thought it better not to fight / I thought there was a virtue in always being cool”

…to the instrumental finale, with amazing pop, rock, and crazily psychedelic offerings in between, this album is a goddam masterpiece. So what do you do when a band you like just a little bit makes one incredible record and 17… other ones? You put it on your 50 leftovers list and move on.

Fruit Bats – Mouthfuls

Another of the “New Leftovers,” I have no memory of when I learned about Fruit Bats, aka Eric D. Johnson, but fell in love with their music, saw them live at Harlow’s, bought the alternative cover Mouthfuls album, and let said album wriggle its way into my very heart and soul. But these things did in fact happen sometime in the last few years. It’s simply the purest kind of pop/alternative music; Matthew Sweet may be a decent comparison, or The Shins or Spoon in a more spiritual way, even though those bands don’t really sound the same. It’s one of those delightful albums whose songs flow easily from one to the next, with powerful lyrics that stay with you long after the album ends.

He has lots of really good albums – including a really interesting cover of Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins in its entirety – and I’m not sure Mouthfuls is even considered one of his best. “When U Love Somebody” is a concert staple of his, inspiring audience singalongs at every show, but none of the rest of the tracks on the record seem to be. I think it’s a shame, because this is an unsung gem of pop/alt from the early aughts that it took me WAY too long to find.

Hair – Original Broadway Cast Recording

The Hair soundtrack is a record that fell out and in and out and in and finally out of my top 50 list. Hair is an unparalleled piece of 60’s spectacle. If you think you know this record, you don’t. Unless you’ve seen the musical, and the film, and listened to the album 800 times before the age of 14 like I did. It’s a comic, tragic, brilliant, devastating ode to 60’s hippie culture, the Vietnam War, and the the beauty and hypocrisy of The Age of Aquarius (aka, The ’60’s). Whatever your feelings about hippies or 60’s music, Hair is all about the songs. The songs, the songs, the songs. Hair was the 60’s Hamilton, but written and performed while it was still fucking occurring. “Easy to be Hard:” gut-wrenching; “I Got My:” hilarious; “Sodomy:” mind-(among other things)-blowing; “Colored Spade:” shocking;  “Let The Sunshine In:” heartbreaking. You could take a course in your local university in the American Studies department about The Sixties, or you could just listen to Hair. Same thing. Yeah, they all get naked on stage, even in small performances in Davis, California. What of it?

John Wesley Harding – New Deal

I crossed John Wesley Harding (aka Wesley Stace) off my bucket list a few years back by seeing him perform a short set at Harlow’s opening for Steven Page, the former frontman of Barenaked Ladies. This is one of those shows I went for the opener, but stayed for the headliner, and dug the headliner (but not enough to follow up much. Seeing Josh Ritter open for John Prine made me a John Prine fan, but seeing Stace open for Page didn’t make me a huge Page fan). Stace is a tremendous singer songwriter from Britain; I’ve heard him called kind of a poor man’s Elvis Costello. His New Deal and Here Comes the Groom albums are great additions to anyone’s collection who digs bands like Costello, Squeeze, XTC, Paul Simon, Damien Rice, Ritter…any of these singer-songwritery cats. I implore you to check him out!

Heart – Dreamboat Annie

I really, really got into this record. Heart is a band that, for people my age, you tend to think about a few classic rock radio hits like “Magic Man” or “Crazy on You.” But those two great rockers are just the backbone of this brilliant start-to-finish debut album by the Wilson sisters. It seems kind of like a concept album, with repeating motifs and a rhythmic soft/hard/soft/hard cycle. Their label fucked them over and made them seem like lesbian lovers on the album cover and did other hinky shit, but regardless, this is strong record that I played a lot in my late teens and early 20’s.

Kristen Hersh – Hips and Makers

Kristen Hersh, formerly of the great Throwing Muses (with her stepsister Tanya Donnely of Belly and Breeders fame) made this incredible debut record in the early 90’s, and it’s just stunning from start to finish. Though she never got the due that contemporaries like Sarah MacLachlan, Jewel, Fiona Apple or Tori Amos did, this record deserves to be lauded as a powerhouse of 90’s woman-led folk/rock alubms. “Your Ghost” should be played for the first 100 days after every breakup. “Sundrops,” “Me and My Charms,” “The Cuckoo,” this is a modern masterpiece. That it didn’t make my top 50 doesn’t take anything away from it. If you at all like the other artists mentioned here, this record is a must-get.

Indigo Girls – Indigo Girls

During the time right around when I moved to Sacramento in 1989, somehow I came across some dough and bought a bunch of cassettes all at once, and this was one of them. This album seems like a debut, but apparently it’s their second full-length record. This is a flawless album, not a weak song on it. Their harmonies are perfect, the guitars kickin’, the lyrics intelligent and weighty. This really is a perfect album that I played a lot in my 20’s, and it still holds up today when I pop it on for nostalgia’s sake. (And if you haven’t seen Tig Notaro‘s classic Indigo Girls bit, you should watch her whole 2018 special for this truly weird closer.)

Jane’s Addiction – Nothing’s Shocking

I don’t know what I can say about Jane’s Addiction except I never saw them live, sadly, and I played this record a lot. I liked a lot of that heavy 80’s/90’s alt rock stuff (Jane’s, Nirvana, Pixies, Urge Overkill) and I was indifferent to a lot of it (Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Oasis). Jane’s kicked ass though, and this first full-length studio album is clearly their best.

Japanese Breakfast – Jubilee

Another of the “New Leftovers,” I really fell in love with Japanese Breakfast within the last year, but I find this album so masterful, and I listen to it so much, it truly deserves to be in my top 100. My son Henry turned me on to this exceptional alternative/pop/rock band, fronted by the gifted singer/songwriter/musician/memoirist Michelle Zauner. We saw them in concert at Ace of Spades, and they were terrific, but I didn’t really know any of the songs. We had a great time but I more or less moved on with my life and didn’t think much about the band afterward. (Truthfully, I was more enamored with the opening act, Sasami, a wild, rocking show which was surprising because the album she was touring for is quite mellow.)

But somewhere in the following few months, and I don’t know how it happened, I absolutely fell in love with Japanese Breakfast, especially the opening track, “Paprika.”

Lucidity came slowly I awoke from dreams of
Untying a great knot
It unraveled like a braid into what seemed
Were thousands of separate strands of fishing lines…
How’s it feel to be at the center of magic
To linger in tones and words?…
How’s it feel to stand at the height of your powers
To captivate every heart?…
Oh, it’s a rush

I’m abridging the first verses and chorus of the song, but the words are an incredibly powerful portrayal of what I assume it’s like to be a rock star, singing and playing your heart out while thousands of people dance and bop around and sing along to your music. It must be a rush.

And Zauner’s memoir of growing up with a Korean mother and white American father, as she navigated two cultures and moved back in with her parents as a twenty-something to help support her mother as she dealt with cancer, chemo, radiation, and eventually, death, had me enthralled and in tears. What an amazing young woman, and great band, that I know we’ll hear a lot more from in the decades to come.

The Jesus and Mary Chain – Automatic

This is an album of pure awesomeness. It’s hard for me to classify JAMC. They were making music around the same time of other more successful and inferior Jesus bands (Jesus Jones, The Jesus Lizard.) I was fortunate to see JAMC at The Crest in Sacramento back in the 90’s, and they basically came out on stage, said not one word, played for about an hour amidst machine smoke and colored lights, and left. I picked up Automatic on vinyl a couple of years ago, and it sounds fantastic. One could make a case for Honey’s Dead or Psychocandy, but to me, Automatic is a brilliant representation of 90’s alt rock that stands the test of time.

Judas Priest – British Steel

What an incredible metal band, who have been doing their thing since I want to say the early or mid 70’s. Why Priest makes this list and other British metal bands of the same period don’t is not something I can easily explain, except to say that this is a flat out kick ass album from start to finish. I could have chosen Screaming for Vengeance here, or even Defenders of the Faith (which is probably not one of Priest’s top five albums, but it is one of the few albums I bought the day it was released). “Breaking the Law,” “Living After Midnight,” “United,” these are metal anthems. I mean true, iconic anthems. So much so that “Breaking” became Beavis and Butthead‘s theme song. Plus that crazy razor blade on the cover made all our parents freak out.

Kid Rock – Devil Without a Cause

Kid Rock gets a lot of shit for his politics, deservedly so, but musically, he’s one of these guys who – to my mind – made a crapload of albums I didn’t like, and one phenomenal one. From the opening death march of “Bawitaba,” to the unexpectedly sweet closing track “Black Chick, White Guy,” to the sledgehammer rap classics in between (“Cowboy,” “Devil,” “Bullgod,” “Somebody Got to Feel This”), it’s just a badass kick in the face for any hip hop fan. Basically I like three white rap bands: Beastie Boys, 3rd Bass, and this album by Kid Rock. Honorable mention to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, and Blood of Abraham.

Killing Joke – Pandemonium

I never got super heavy into – whatever you want to call it – industrial rock/dance/techno, but this Killing Joke album got heavy play by me in the 90’s when I was living in my 21st and I Street apartment. I spent time with other bands in this general wheelhouse: Wire, Can, Orbital, Kraftwerk, Chemical Brothers, Moby, Einsturzende Neubauten, Skinny Puppy, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, Ministry, etc. A couple of these bands appear elsewhere in this project, but most were, sadly, a bit of a phase. (I did see Thrill Kill Kult at Harlow’s in 2019, and that was a real treat!) Anyway, the pounding rhythms on this Killing Joke record, the screaming guitars, the heavy electronics and punishing beats were just what my twenty-something ears needed. This album in particular is a genre-bender, owing possibly more to metal than industrial music. It was literally recorded in the Great Pyramid of Giza, if I remember correctly, and it’s kind of what you expect our alien overlords to sing to us when they finally take over the earth. For a long time you couldn’t even find this album digitally (I don’t know what happened to my CD from the 90’s), but it’s available now, and I even found in sweet double blue/clear vinyl recently at Phono Select here in Sacramento. It’s back in heavy rotation, I’m happy to report.

Lenny Kravitz – Let Love Rule

It’s hard to explain to young people how big this album was when it came out. Number it among the great debut albums, and count it among the albums where the artist played, like, all the instruments. Lenny took the pop/rock world by storm with this record. Who was this black dude with the Jewish name? He’s Roxie Roker from The Jeffersons‘ son? He’s Lisa Bonet‘s husband? Where did this fucker come from? Brilliant record: “Mr. Cab Driver, fuck you, I’m a survivor” among other amazing lyrics and songs. I think of my old friend India when I play this record, whom I hung out with a lot in the late 80’s/early 90’s.

Metallica – (Black Album)

Pure metalheads will say this is the album Metallica sold out on, but it’s the one of theirs I like the best, and played over and over and over, a little bit late to the game, maybe in the mid-to-late 2000’s. I saw Metallica open for Ozzy in 1986, and I like them, but that whole speed metal game wasn’t so much for me. By the Black Album, it seems the band tried to purposely try to tone down a bit, get a tad more melodious, and appeal to a wider base. It worked on me, in spades. This record had plenty of hard edges, but was eminently listenable. While I like Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets, they didn’t get the spins this one did.

Ministry – Psalm 69 and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult – Sexplosion

These two – serendipitously grouped together by pure coincidence of the alphabet – scratch a similar itch. Ministry mainly came to my attention after Lollapalooza 1992, where they did not headline the bill (but were not as low as Pearl Jam), though they rocked the entire crowd at Shoreline‘s socks off. I’ve been a fan of Ministry for a long time, but didn’t see them again until about 2018. Same with Thrill Kill Kult, whom I never saw before 2019 (Although if memory serves, I had tickets to see them at the legendary Cattle Club, but they canceled), decades after their heyday, but whose Sexplosion CD was a mainstay in my rotation in the 90’s. Industrial/metal/dance/kitch…this is great stuff that holds up still.

Nice Boys from New York – Nice Boys from New York

When I was about 17, my brother-in-law bought a used car and he found this cassette in the back seat, so of course he gave it to me. A found cassette from the back seat of a shitty used car? What are the chances it wouldn’t suck? But it didn’t suck. In fact it was amazing. I’ve never met anyone who’s heard of this band, and internet info on them is very scarce. Their heyday, if they ever had one, seemed to be the mid-late ’80’s. The best way to describe them would be rockabilly/rock/folk/pop, I guess. That doesn’t say much, and doesn’t denote anything special or interesting, but you must believe me that this was a great, great record. Here are some random lyrics from memory:

Well, they got a lot of good stuff, at the Safeway…

It’s the same God as Ginger Grant, Linda Blair, oh oh…

My little tiny friend, my Jackie, Jackie Ooh…

For many years I found myself with no way to play that cassette, but its tunes and lyrics often flowed back into my memory. It was semi-early internet days, so I did some research on the band and found that the main guy, or one of the main guys, from the band had passed away, sadly. It didn’t seem like they made much other music under that name, but what little I heard seemed more country, didn’t speak to me the same way as the cassette my brother-in-law had found.

I was able to dig up an email address online – and since the cassette wasn’t available in any other format, I sent a message and told my story: The cassette was found in a car, I love it, how can I buy a CD of the self-titled album? I didn’t hear anything, and soon forgot about it, but arriving in the snail mail a few weeks later was a burned CDR copy of the album, a big sticker that says “Nice Boys From New York” and a typed note of appreciation. (I immediately affixed the sticker to a beach cruiser I had. A mom at the Little League field asked me once: “Who’s that band?” I told her about them a bit. She said “I’ll have to check them out.” I said “YOU LITERALLY CAN’T!”)

So forever I had a digital copy of the album that followed me from iPod to iPod, smartphone to smartphone. Eventually I found the very record on vinyl from someone on the Discogs website, in Italy, and they shipped it to me for about forty American dollars. It never goes more than a few months before landing on my turntable.

I see they have a couple albums on Spotify, but not this self-titled one from 1988 or whenever. I don’t know if these others are any good or not, but this one album is just a perfect, beautiful piece of rock music that fit perfectly into my life in the late 80’s.

Okkervil River – The Stage Names

Another of the New Leftovers, I became obsessed with Okkervil River in 2019. I listened to this album a bit a few years before, and liked it quite a lot, but it took my coming back to it years later to *really* get into it. Will Sheff‘s – the founder and front man – project was always kind of in the back of my mind, and when I learned they were coming to Harlow’s in 2019, I immediately bought a ticket. I realized I didn’t know much of their music too well though, so in a rare moment of preparation I made a Spotify playlist of their most played songs from their current tour. I listened to this playlist religiously, and adored it, so when the gig came around I was right there at the front of the stage, knowing all the songs and singing along with many of them.

Sheff was gracious enough take a photo with a friend and me afterward (I don’t usually do that, but the friend wanted one.) But I gave him my patented sincere handshake and told him how much I appreciated his music and thanked him for bringing such beauty into the world for me and so many others.

They stamped a star on my arm that night, like to show that you are a paid attendee. It was odd though: It was way up my arm, on the inside, closer to the crook of my elbow than to my wrist. I looked at it in the mirror when I got home, and although it was a little faded and blurry, I thought it looked really cool. Three years later I got it tattooed in that exact spot, as an homage to my love of live music in small venues. I don’t always think of Okkervil River when I look at it, but sometimes I do.

I haven’t said much about The Stage Names, but trust me. Sheff has a lot of great albums, but if I’m picking one I’m picking this one. And don’t dare listen without really digesting the lyrics. They’ll break your damn heart.

Ozzy Osbourne – Blizzard Of Ozz

My Lord, this album. This album. I probably got into it a year or so after it came out, in seventh grade or thereabouts. It’s an iconic album from start to finish, from the raw opening riffs of “I Don’t Know” to the crashing finish of “Steal Away (The Night).” “Mr. Crowley,” what did go on in your head? “Suicide Solution” never encouraged suicide; it was a lamentation about self-destructive behavior. “Crazy Train” has become an arena sports anthem. It’s just a remarkable heavy metal record. I was just a few years behind being aware of what was going on with Black Sabbath and Ozzy as the Madman left his former band and struck out on his own. It must have been gratifying for Ozzy to have his album reach the stratosphere, where post-Ozzy Black Sabbath never did quite as well without him, despite a fantastic Ronnie James Dio debut in Heaven and Hell just a few months earlier. Tragically, Randy Rhoads, the brilliant young guitarist, who continues to influence metal axemen worldwide, died about a year after Blizzard’s release, but not before recording the almost-as-good Diary of a Madman, at the age of 25. His mom’s music school, Musonia, was around the block from me in North Hollywood. And that’s where my connection with Randy Rhoads ends. I feel badly for his mom. I’m sure she’s long gone by now.

Blizzard makes me think of a boom box, this cassette, Santa Monica beach, Station 17, as a teenager in the mid 80’s. Sneaking beers, smoking weed, cute girls in bikinis, and tripping out that I wasn’t a little kid anymore, but was experiencing this weird, new, next phase of my life.

Parliament – Mothership Connection

There almost aren’t any words for the greatness of this album. I haven’t listened to it in full in a while, but it assuredly holds up like the funky motherfucker it’s always been. It’s hard to believe anyone could groove this hard in 1975, the era of Captain and Tennille, Neil Sedaka, Barry Manilow and America. I went through a funky phase in the early-mid 90’s, where I was listening to a lot of Parliament–Funkadelic, James Brown, and Sly and the Family Stone; this CD was on heavy rotation then. Bootsy Collins is maybe the best bass player of all time, and George Clinton had Maceo Parker from James Brown’s band at that point. I think my favorite part is in during “P. Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)” when George calls out “…David ‘Boowey’…can you imagine Doobie in your funk?” It’s just the best. I don’t know what the hell it means. George Clinton rolls through town every few years and I’ve never seen him. No excuse, a bucket list artist.

Orville Peck – Bronco

Another one of the New Leftovers, and as seems to be a pattern, I have no idea how and where and when I first heard of Orville Peck, but once I found him, I never let go. His real identity is unknown, as he wears a fringed mask that covers his eyes, but you can get a glimpse of a handsome jawline under the garment’s swaying fronds. What he doesn’t hide is the fact that he’s country, he’s gay, and he’s Canadian, maybe not necessarily in that order. His songs are riveting and lonesome and heartbreaking and yearning and celebratory all at the same time. The artist he reminds me of more than anyone is Elvis Presley, with that deep, crooning voice that can suddenly lift and produce the most beautiful ballads. I was an unabashed fan before Bronco came out in 2022, but once it did, wow! It’s been on regular rotation ever since; just an amazing record from start to finish. (A front-of-the-stage view of him and his phenomenal band at Ace of Spades in 2022, just after the release of Bronco, was probably a top ten concert experience for me.) If you ask me at the end of my life to name my top 50 albums, I think Bronco definitely makes the cut. Hell, maybe top ten.

Damien Rice – O

It’s hard to believe this album didn’t crack my top 50, because it is an absolutely GORGEOUS record from the opening strums of “Delicate” – the album really is delicate – to the final notes of the second hidden track (remember hidden tracks?) of his collaborator Lisa Hannigan‘s dark, twisted version of “Silent Night.” I played this album a lot in the early aughts, and I really thought Rice was the second coming of… I don’t even know who? The softer sides of Cat Stevens and Paul Simon? O was his debut album; his next one was decent, and I never cared much for any of his records after that, sadly.

Run DMC – Raising Hell

One of just a handful of hip hop albums on this list, but one of the true greats. The “Walk This Way” collaboration with Aerosmith didn’t do a ton for me, but it is regarded as the first significant rap/rock collaboration, and helped usher hip hop music into mainstream acceptance in both the U.S. and worldwide. For me, the brilliance of this record was in the other tracks: “Peter Piper,” “My Adidas,” “Raising Hell,” “It’s Tricky,” “Hit It Run.” Producers Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin were pure perfection during this time. I challenge any fan of rock music from this era to give Raising Hell a spin and not feel the funkiness down to his or her bones.

Rush – 2112

Hard to pick one Rush album, since they had several that occupied my tape deck regularly in the early to mid 80’s. It’s between 2112 and Moving Pictures (the last of their albums that I cared much about). I landed on 2112 because I virtually never listened to Side 2 of Moving Pictures; side 1 is so epic (“Tom Sawyer,” “Red Barchetta,” “YYZ,” “Limelight”) that I never really had much use for Side 2. In fact, I had to look up which songs are on Side 2 of Moving Pictures while writing this. Now, lots of albums have Side 1s that are a lot stronger than their Side 2s, but a great album holds up all the way through. Led Zeppelin IV is a good example of that. Side 1 of Led Zeppelin IV is one of the all time great rock album sides (so much so, that Fast Times at Ridgemont High‘s Vic Damone implores young Rat to put on Side 1 of Led Zeppelin IV when it’s time to make out. I can vouch for this as an effective tactic for the teens of yesteryear.) But Zeppelin IV‘s Side 2 is incredible, where Rush’s Moving Pictures Side 2 is good, but sadly, somewhat forgettable.

But I digress. We’re talking about 2112 here. 2112 is one of those albums that just rocks from start to finish. A true progressive gem where the music is more rocking than proggy. As I recall, it tells the album-long tale of a time in the future – the year 2112 – where priests of some weird fascist/controlling order rule the world, and basically all music and art has been banished. Our hero finds an electric guitar hidden in a cave, learns to shred, and leads a rock and roll revolution, destroying “The Temples of Syrinx” and bringing peace to the world. But not before he pays with his own life. Oh yeah, I think he summons down some elders from space – or from Earth’s past, I forget – and as he dies he sees that he has saved the world. Don’t quote me on this. I haven’t listened to the album in years but I think this was the gist of it.

My first car was a 1976 Toyota Corolla that my sister Nicki helped me buy. It was a thousand bucks, and I got my money’s worth out of it. I lived in L.A. at the time, but I bought the car in Sacramento, where I was from, and I would drive it up and down Highway 160 along the river, passing green fields, farm houses, and small towns from the levee road. I’d put on 2112 when I’d start on the highway, play it all the way through, and turn around when it ended, playing it in full again on the way back. That’s how much I loved 2112. I owe it a revisit one of these days.

Final note: Rush is one of those bands I really should have seen live, but didn’t. Looking through this list of fifty leftovers, I’ve seen a little over half of these bands in concert. I had tickets for Rush in 1986 at the Fabulous Forum in L.A., but I was in rehab. I – for some odd reason – had the concert tickets tucked away inside one of my Rush albums. Maybe it was 2112, maybe it was Moving Pictures, maybe it was A Farewell to Kings, or Fly By Night, or Hemispheres. But I couldn’t get a day pass out of rehab for the concert, so I told my mom to look in the Rush album, and give the tickets to my friend Scott Powell (no relation). I don’t know if he bought them or if I gave them to him, but I knew I didn’t want those tickets going to waste. 30+ years later, I’ve still never seen Rush, despite ample opportunities over that time. Maybe it was meant to be.

Social Distortion – Social Distortion

I honestly cannot recall how I got into Social Distortion, but I must have come to them sometime in my 20’s. I absolutely love this 1990 self-titled – their third studio – album. It’s just a pure collection of 10 songs, forty minutes or so of an ass-kicking cornucopia of ripping guitars, pounding drums, driving bass, and Mike Ness’s growl that is both punk and rock in equal measures. I dug their previous album, Prison Bound, and their debut, Mommy’s Little Monster, but this LP is straight-up brilliance. Social D has some detractors in the punk world, as haters are gonna hate any punk or hardcore band that ever makes it big or gets on MTV (see Green Day). But Social D’s first four albums – including 1992’s Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell – hit that coveted four-album run of great albums that very few bands are capable of achieving.

If you look up Social Distortion on Spotify, it shows their most popular songs, in order, as “Story of My Life,” “Ring of Fire” (an amazing cover of the great song popularized by Johnny Cash), and “Ball of Chain,” all from this eponymously titled album. Of course popularity does not a great album make, but in this case, my thinking is along the lines of Spotify’s listeners. The Social Distortion album is a motherfucker of a post-punk Southern California long player.

Scorpions – Animal Magnetism

Oh my God, Scorpions, where do I even begin? Another band with a great run of four-plus amazing albums; such a hard feat to achieve (Lovedrive, Animal Magnetism, Blackout, Love at First Sting). It was incredibly hard to choose my favorite Scorpions album. 1982’s Blackout was the first one I got. Their first hits I ever knew were “No One Like You,” “Can’t Live Without You,” and “Blackout.” 1984’s Love at First Sting was their most popular album, and the one I got next, with incredible bangers like “Still Loving You,” (the undisputed, greatest heavy metal ballad of all time) “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” and “Big City Nights.” Lovedrive, looked at and listened to in hindsight, was probably their best album, period, with the amazing ballad “Holiday” and seven ass-kicking tracks alongside.

But Animal Magnetism. Ah…Animal Magnetism. Not my introduction to Scorpions, and maybe not their greatest record, but my clear favorite. Scorpions are the kings of the metal power ballad, and they have not one, but two of the best ever on this album: “Lady Starlight” and “The Zoo.” (You could argue The Zoo is not a ballad, and you’d be right, but it’s a slower moving jam that has some real punch to it, and if that’s not the definition of a power ballad, what is?) The harder, faster tracks on the album are killer: “Don’t Make No Promises (Your Body Can’t Keep),” “20th Century Man,” “Only a Man” (lot of songs about “man”), “Falling in Love.” Let’s be real, the Scorps fast/metal songs are all pretty great, so it’s kind of hard to distinguish one collection on one album versus another collection on another album. It’s the hard-hitting ballads that set their albums apart. And their four-album run gets no better than Animal Magnetism. My friend Kevin agrees.

Matthew Sweet – Girlfriend

An amazing record, much listened to on CD in the first year or so that I moved to Sacramento. I probably read about Matthew Sweet in Spin magazine and bought the CD upon reading their gushing reviews. (I bought many an album because of magazine reviews, and many I never quite got the appeal of, nor maybe the rest of the world either: The Tragically Hip, Cell, The Pooh Sticks, and Teenage Fanclub come to mind. Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted was a Spin album of the year, but it never quite resonated with me.) I regret not seeing Matthew Sweet at Harlow’s a few years ago. I even had tickets, but it was a Sacramento Republic playoff game, and I thought he was opening for The Dream Syndicate, but apparently it was the other way around and I could have made the gig after all. I also don’t think I had anyone to go with, and as I had just separated from my wife of 20 years, I didn’t much feel like going to a concert by myself. Sweet is a beautiful singer and songwriter, and although he had some good songs on some records after Girlfriend, this album was an incredible piece of work, and to my way of thinking, his best by far. Plus it has Tuesday Weld on the cover, and Richard Lloyd from Television plays guitar on it. Finally, he was a little-known Athens, Georgia scenester and contributor in the 80’s, having been in a side project band with Michael Stipe.

Richard Thompson – Rumor And Sigh

I came to Richard Thompson with this album, maybe ten years or so after it came out in 1991, because my friend Adrienne at work was a big fan. Sadly, I wasn’t really hip to him or Linda Thompson or Fairport Convention or any of it before that. But Rumor and Sigh is a true modern masterpiece, with a perfect combination of lyrics, melody, and musicianship. “Vincent Black Lightning” is Thompson’s most popular song, and one of the true gems of the decade. “Read About Love” is a brilliant explication of yearning for a love one knows nothing about; “Feel So Good” can’t leave you feeling anything but, whether you break somebody’s heart tonight or not; “Don’t Sit on my Jimmy Shands,” “God Loves a Drunk,” there is not a dud on this record. If you’re not a fan of Fightin’ Dick Thompson, do yourself a favor and pick up Rumor and Sigh, on vinyl preferably. (But don’t let your friend sit on it.)

Weezer – Green Album

My friend Jeff and I have had eerily similar arguments about Weezer as Leslie Jones and Matt Damon did on the infamous Saturday Night Live sketch. Although I liked the Blue Album a lot when it came out, I kind of lost track of Weezer for a while after that. I admit their kitschy videos and faux-metal ironic stance turned me off a bit. Still, Blue was a real ass-kicker with great songs. I kind of missed Pinkerton, although I struggled to learn “Butterfly” on the guitar for a while there.

Somewhere in the early 2000’s I realized I had been fallen completely off the grid when it came to listening to – much less discovering – new-to-me music. Consumed with child-raising since 1995, I could probably count on one hand how many CD’s I bought between 1995 and 2002 that were actually released during those years. The most impactful was probably Buena Vista Social Club.

(An aside: in the late ’90’s I was killing time while on a business trip in Southern California, and I went into a record store to buy myself a new CD, which was something I had not done in quite a while. I literally could not find anything to purchase. I already had most of the old music I liked, and I didn’t know what new music to buy. I actually had a Staind CD in my hand for a while. I had heard of them, hadn’t I? Some kind of new version of rock/metal? I liked rock and metal, didn’t I? I carried this CD around the store, thinking “Someone, save me!” I was actually ashamed of myself. I knew this album would be a piece of shit, and that I wouldn’t like it. I felt like I didn’t know music anymore. Finally I happened upon International Superhits by Green Day, a pre-American Idiot compilation album. I wasn’t too familiar with Green Day at that time, and I liked it quite a bit. I eventually came to love American Idiot, but not quite enough to put it in this top 100. Still, Green Day saved me from Staind, and Weezer made sure I never had to look back.)

So the Green Album, alongside Green Day, helped rejuvenate my love of rock music as I entered my 30’s, and it’s been full speed ahead since then. While I came to LOVE Blue, and have also come to like Pinkerton a lot, Green is my ride or die Weezer album. They have some fine, eminently listenable albums after Green as well, but I’ll take both Matt Damon’s and Leslie Jones’ side in the SNL skit. Green is my favorite Weezer album, but Blue is my second favorite.

Green is a pure mix of pop/rock faultlessness. Ten short songs, the entire album is a brisk sub-half hour in length. Each song is catchier and livelier than the last. I understand that Rivers Cuomo went into a funk after Pinkerton‘s initial reception (that sophomore slump, am I right?) and decided to write more poppy, less personal songs for this third album as a big fuck you to, I don’t know, the world? I’m not going to say that lyrically the record speaks to my soul (although Island in the Sun hits hard and can’t help but leave you smiling and singing along) but the infectiousness of the ten tracks demand to be played loudly. I can’t play this album anymore without remembering how Weezer helped me fall back in love with rock music again.

XTC – Skylarking

I didn’t used to know too much about XTC, except that they made a handful of really good records, and that lead man Andy Partridge had mental health issues and was notoriously anxious about performing onstage. Though Mummer and Oranges and Lemons are outstanding records, Skylarking is a little piece of brilliance from 1986 that I feel like continues to influence a certain alt-pop melodic style of British-influcenced rock music to this day. Without XTC there’s no Modest Mouse, and possibly no R.E.M. I want to single out a few songs from the record, but literally every single one is amazing. “Dear God” is probably their best known song, but it’s that rare case – like David Bowie‘s Hunky Dory – where an artist’s best known song is on an album with a bunch of non-hits, but every single song on that album is supremely spectacular.

I recently saw a version of the band called EX-TC at the notorious Harlow‘s, with original drummer Terry Chambers and some other fellows. This band has the blessing of Partridge, and they knocked out all the hits for a rollicking night of rock and roll. Oddly, they didn’t play “Dear God,” so I asked the singer/guitarist about it after the show. Apparently, this three-piece used to be a four-piece with a dedicated vocalist. The guitarist said the old vocalist didn’t like to sing the band’s biggest hit because its controversial nature, so the new version of the band was unpracticed with it. I replied that that was precisely why all their fans love the song, because of its controversial nature . The chap agreed with me, we shook hands, I thanked him for the show and his time, and we went our separate ways, silently cursing that old vocalist.

Yes – Fragile

It’s hard for me to believe this album isn’t in my top 50, because I listened to it on almost constant repeat between the ages of about 12 to 16, but it suffers a bit from burnout bias. I think I listened to it *too* much back then. It is so familiar to me now, even though I don’t listen to the full album anymore than once or twice a decade, and it’s such a particular style of prog-rock, that it just doesn’t do for me the thing it used to. Such heavy bass and enveloping synthesizers (truly, Chris Squire and Rick Wakeman, respectively, were masters of their domains) sounds a little out of place to me today, where other prog legends like Pink Floyd continue to sound fresh. But there’s no denying the technical excellence of this record: the short, individual songs that showcase each band members’ talents, and the longer full-band jams like “Roundabout” – their unquestioningly most popular song, and “Heart of the Sunrise.” It’s a great record by a great band that had a lot of great records, but Yes didn’t quite grow with me the way Bowie, Zeppelin, Floyd, or Sabbath did.

OK, there it was, my 51st through 100th favorite albums of all time, in alphabetical order. If you’ve read my mini-reviews of all these albums, well, I don’t believe you. But I appreciate you anyway. Almost as much as I appreciate this music.

OK, next up: My top fifty albums of all time!

In the spring of 2019 I found myself about to turn fifty years old. Since I’m a Virgo, a natural list-maker and categorizer, I decided this would be a fine time to discuss my fifty favorite albums of all time. And it could have a catchy title: “Fifty At Fifty.” It didn’t happen. I had been writing on this site semi-consistently for a few years, putting up some number of posts each year – which are read by no more than a handful of people – but that’s OK. It’s mainly for me. As a list-maker and categorizer, I’m also a chronicler and a memoirist. And to retell things that happened to me and my friends in our thirties, or to me as a teenager, or when I found myself at a crossroads in my life, or what it was like seeing a certain band is fun for me. I’m getting it down on paper, so to speak, and I can reread it and reflect on it as I choose to. It’s opening my life up to others, maybe especially my grown children, even after I’m gone. But I’m getting maudlin.

This project took far longer than the six months I had set aside before my fiftieth birthday. I finish it now about four years later. Four eventful and exciting years, yes, but the task seemed so large I could not make myself write anything else on this site until it was finished, save one piece, because of the tragic passing of one of my favorite musicians, Justin Townes Earle.

But in 2019, approaching my fiftieth birthday, I had recently gotten back into vinyl albums after losing most of the those I had as a teenager to a home construction project. (Don’t ask. It’s a long story that maybe I’ll tell some other day.) My renewed record collecting in 2019 led me to start thinking hard about the albums that have meant the most to me in my life. My turn on this planet is certainly well over half-finished, and therefore the majority of my music-listening years are behind me, rather than ahead. But don’t worry, I won’t let that stop me from soldiering on into the wild, crazy world of rock and roll until I take my last steps out of a club. (One day he walked out of a club, and he never walked into another one.) Yeah, save it for my tombstone.

I’ve been listening to rock music seriously since about the third or fourth grade, and I’ve always been an album person. I don’t quite know why. I just want to listen to a whole album, plain and simple. All the songs, from start to finish. That’s absolutely my favorite way to listen to music. Of course I’ve logged tens of thousands of hours listening to terrestrial radio back when that was the only music-listening option other than the physical media you and your friends owned. Random collections of songs are swell. Mixtapes – and now playlists – have a special enjoyment. But albums were always my thing, and they still are. I’m fascinated by the idea that an artist was in a certain state at the time they produced an album: A particular frame of mind; a distinct place in their creative journey during that period. Which songs did they include, in what order, and why?

A great album is more than the sum of its parts. It’s a snapshot of a period in not only an artist’s life, but the listener’s life. Junior High, Tony’s room: Led Zeppelin‘s Houses Of The Holy. That was a special, formative period in my life. My 1979 Chevy Malibu, driving to work from North Hollywood to Pasadena: Beastie Boys‘ License To Ill on cassette. That was another memorable period that brings back not only who I was at the time, but all the unforgettable people circling around my life at that time: Barry, Dan, India, Mace, Nichole, Brian, Bridget, John, Tracey. They may not have loved that album as much as I did, but it will always remind me of them. 2018, leaving a twenty-year marriage: Lydia Loveless‘s Somewhere Else. Yeah, that was just a few years ago, but already Lydia’s masterpiece has tattooed itself onto my heart.

So, what are my favorite albums? Of all time? We have to frame the question that way: Favorite. Not, “What are the best albums of all time?” Best albums have been pontificated upon by smarter people and better writers than me. I have immense biases, not only toward a type of music – mainly rock and roll – but by the indiscriminate happenstances of which albums fell into my hands, at what age, and during which events of my life.

And what is a favorite album anyway? I’ll call it this way: a piece of mostly original recorded music, produced for the first time in a collective format with, say, seven to twenty separate songs, capturing a period in the artist’s creative life. This is not a collection of greatest hits, nor a snapshot of a live performance, but a grouping of original material, made available to the public at an exact time. You play this album from start to finish – whether the day it comes out or decades later – and you do it a lot! When a song ends, muscle memory tells you which upcoming notes to expect on the next track, down to the very back end of the album. A great record is not a couple of hits with a bunch of duds. It’s all killer no filler. A great record is an omnibus: a masterpiece of pure gold. Every song on an album is never a “hit,” but no great albums contain any “bad” songs. And if you say The White Album has any bad songs, I’ll cut you.

But is fifty too ambitious a number? At first I thought, yes, that’s nuts! Then as I began typing I quickly had a hundred records plus, and some very hard decisions to make about which were my top fifty. Again, this project in no way tries to convince you what the “best” albums are. All I know (“…is he was into field hockey players…there were rumors…“) is what I know, and I know which albums have ingrained themselves into my soul since I started listening to all the songs from Side A to Side B on a piece of circular wax as a little kid.

There is much anciency-bias in my list in the posts that will follow this, meaning records that I adored decades ago tend to be represented more than albums I’ve acquired in recent years. With a few exceptions, of course. There are a number of reasons for this:

1. Scarcity – Music was rarer in the past, and one would listen to the same albums over and over and over, simply because the supply was limited. Especially when we’re talking about cassettes in the car. You literally only ever had: an album or cassette, or, the radio. Those were the choices, and radio was likely to play a lot of Foreigner or Hall & Oates. So albums. And you learned those albums VERY well! But because of Spotify and similar services now, I don’t have to listen to the same albums repeatedly any more, and I seldom do. I embrace much more variety in music these days, but it comes at the cost of less familiarity than I used to have.
2. Attention – Although I still listen to a lot of music, I listened to it more attentively when I was a teenager and in my twenties. Most of my listening now comes incidentally, because I can listen anywhere: when I walk, when I shower, when I cook, when I clean, when I work out. I’m usually doing something else when I’m listening to music these days, whereas in eras past I often just sat there and listened to the music, perusing the lyrics on the album or cassette sleeve if I was lucky enough to have such. Doing nothing else. Just sitting there. Listening to music. Can you imagine? Again, you learn albums VERY well this way.
3. Youth – The things that mean something to you as a teenager always seem to hold an extra-special place in your heart. It’s just the way it is. It’s why my friends in their twenties and thirties love Emo Night and 90’s throwback stuff, why my generation loves 80’s dances, and those a little older than me love going down to Swabbies on the River to see local bands cover Santana and The Rolling Stones. The stuff we loved as teenagers? We’ll keep chasing that forever. I think there’s some science behind this, too. Look it up.
4. Lyrics – I learned the lyrics to songs when I was younger, and I just don’t as much anymore, for a variety of reasons – some outlined above. When you can sing along, and when you know what the artist is really saying, it becomes a richer, deeper experience. The songs become poems you can recite on command. Even though in 2023 we have access to all lyrics of all time, it’s interesting that I know lyrics to past songs so much better than today, even when acquisition of such lyrics were scarce.

So, an ambitious undertaking this, but one that needs parameters. Fifty albums? OK, I can do that. I can cover the main ones I want to cover, but how many Beatles albums? How many Led Zeppelin? How many each of Josh Ritter, Concrete Blonde, Cowboy Junkies, or U2?

One (not the U2 song). The answer I came up with is one. Otherwise, it’s too much of a clusterfuck. Where do you put The Joshua Tree vs. War vs. Achtung Baby!? And where do those go alongside Sgt. Pepper’s, The White Album, and Abbey Road? Sorry, one band, one spot in the the top fifty favorite albums of all time. That’s it! (Except for a kinda exception, for one artist who was peerless in his original band, then later with his solo material. And no, he was not in The Beatles.)

Other rules? This is a tough one, because for me it leaves some of the most incredible artists in rock music behind. However painfully, I decided that no greatest hits nor live albums can be included. Only original studio recordings of a certain number of songs, produced and released by the artist on a particular record could be considered. This restriction seemed reasonable to me at first, but it hurts my list in that there were a lot of great bands I spent countless hours listening to, but these listens were mainly to greatest hits or live albums. These bands have studio albums that should absolutely be included in anyone’s list of top records, but they don’t make my list because if my list is going to mean anything, it has to be honest. And if my favorite album by a band was a greatest hits or live album, I can’t include it. Live albums, of course, are typically greatest hits albums performed live. It’s not fair, and I have to sadly exclude a whole host of incredible bands because of this (what some may think is a dumb) rule.

Another rule is that I have to set aside the desire to be cool, to seem hardcore, or punk rock, or enlightened, or eclectic, to eschew classic pop or rock bombast and pretension. I could tell you my top albums were from Dim Stars, The Wipers, Joy Division, and Minutemen, but I’d be lying. (Although Double Nickles on the Dime is undoubtedly badass). I can only tell you about the fifty albums that meant the very most to me, in my life, from my own hopefully authentic perspective. Whether they seem cool in 2023 or not.

This will be a series of posts, so let’s start here with some of the artists that are left off of my list because I never really, truly, deeply got into any of their albums besides greatest hits, live, or compilation recordings. I spent countless hours with these bands, and loved them dearly, but it’s not fair to judge their best of albums against regular studio recordings of other bands. It’s my fault that I didn’t dig deeper into their catalogues. In many cases, I did dig deeper, but it was much later, and I never got into their studio recordings like I did their greatest hits or live albums. Here are some of those left out:

The Doors – This is maybe the toughest band for me to leave completely out of my top fifty, since I spent – no hyperbole – likely a thousand hours listening to Doors music over the years. And that might be a woeful underestimation. But the truth is the album that I wore down to its grooves was 1973’s The Best Of The Doors. If I had to choose a Doors album to include in this list, it would be their first album from 1967. That album is a masterpiece, and is kind of a greatest hits album in its own right, with tracks like “Light My Fire,” “Break On Through,” “Soul Kitchen,” and “The End.” I owned that album later; I listened to it a lot, and I could justify its inclusion on this list. But if I’m not honest I’m not anything, and it was The Best Of The Doors, along with several live albums, like Alive, She Cried; In Concert; and Absolutely Live that most captivated me about The Doors. If this was a list of the fifty bands that shaped my love of rock and pop music, The Doors would absolutely be on it. Hell, I read Jim Morrison‘s biography, No One Here Gets out Alive, front to back as a twelve year old child. But for actual albums, sorry Jim and Ray. You get the footnote.

The Smiths – A very hard band to leave out, because I LOVED Louder Than Bombs and I played it constantly between the ages of 18 and 23. However, technically it’s a compilation album of singles, although many not released in the U.S. before that 1987 album. I had this on a beat up cassette, a long term “borrow” from my friend Cameron, but I played the hell out of it. One could absolutely make the case for any other Smiths album making this list, but they only had four (FOUR!) official studio albums in their short career in the mid-eighties, with many of their best songs not even released on those albums. The one I had other than Louder Than Bombs was The Queen is Dead, which is a fantastic album, but it didn’t get the play that Louder did, and if I can’t include Louder, I would be remiss to include The Queen is Dead. Sorry, Morrissey, but you have dumber things to cry about.

The Who – Wow! How can my list of 50 favorite albums leave off The Who? But left off they must be, despite the fact that I wore a homemade Who T-shirt to the first day of junior high. Alas, the Who album that I wore out was Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy, a compilation of Who singles released in 1971. If I had to choose a Who album to include on this list, it would be Quadrophenia, but that’s an album I came to much, much later in life, and although I recognize its brilliance as a piece of rock opera, I never listened to it all the way through more than a handful of times. (I am proud to own it on vinyl now though. It’s a near-perfect piece of English storytelling and teenage lament.)

Elvis Costello – A real killer to leave out, this one, because his The Very Best of Elvis Costello and The Attractions 1977–86 compilation was an absolute warhorse in my CD player, and later my first iPod. Sadly, Costello was a guy I came to later than I should have, and although the case could truly be made for This Year’s Model or My Aim is True, if I’m being honest, I didn’t have those records, only this 22-track compilation of excellence, kicking off with the pure pop perfection of “Alison,” and culminating with the haunting “I Want You.” This is a brilliant collection, but it hurt my overall appreciation of Costello beyond those 22 tracks, despite how much I like many of his regular studio records.

Creedence Clearwater Revival – I played the hell out of their Chronicle: The 20 Greatest Hits compilation cassette. An amazing Northern California band with anthemic songs that will be covered forever, but I never really listened to any of their records other than this tape, and then only between the ages of about 17 and 20.

Jimi Hendrix – An interesting case, Jimi. I had his Smash Hits LP in junior high, and played it like crazy for years and years, but truly I never listened to much of his actual studio albums. Eventually I had the cassette of Are You Experienced?, which is mind-bending, but half of which (it seems) was included on his Smash Hits compilation. Are You Experienced? would be a more than worthy addition to anyone’s top fifty or top twenty list, but I just didn’t listen to it as much as I listened to Smash Hits. So Jimi, I’ll stand next to your fire, but I can’t put you on my list.

Squeeze – I can’t tell you how I wore out their Singles: 45’s And Under cassette, but I never, ever had another Squeeze album besides that one. What the hell? I couldn’t even tell you any of their studio albums, or the names of any members of the band, but that Singles cassette, with “Pulling Mussels from the Shell,” “Cool for Cats,” “Goodbye Girl,” “Tempted,” “Black Coffee in Bed,” “Take Me I’m Yours,” “Up the Junction…” I could go on and on from memory. A shockingly talented British band, but they fall into the “doesn’t count because greatest hits” category of my superlist.

Cat Stevens – A brilliant singer and songwriter, I logged many hours with his Footsteps in the Dark: Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 collection from 1984. This album contained a handful of songs from Tea for the Tillerman and Teaser and the Firecat, both of which would have been powerful additions to anyone’s top fifty, and I did spend quite a bit of time with Teaser later, but it was his Greatest His Vol. 2 album that really stayed with me when I was younger, and got a lot of airplay, so Yusuf must go.

Talking Heads – This is a really, really, really tough band to leave out of my top 50, since Stop Making Sense was a seminal album (along with U2‘s War and The Cult‘s Love) that broke me out of my classic rock / heavy metal mindset and into a whole new world of…whatever you want to call it: Alternative? modern rock? post punk? when I was about sixteen. The exclusion of this album is making me rethink my desire to leave off greatest hits and live albums from my list, but let’s finish what we’ve started here. We have to let Talking Heads stand on their own, not on the soundtrack to Jonathan Demme‘s classic concert film. My choice today would be Remain in Light or Speaking in Tongues, but if we’re talking about my fifty favorite albums of all time, those two came much later and they didn’t worm their way into my brain the way Stop Making Sense did. And if we can’t include Sense, we can’t include Talking Heads, one of the greatest bands in the history of rock and roll.

This list of bands I’m leaving out because of greatest hits or live albums could go on forever. Bob Marley – Legend, Sly and the Family Stone‘s Greatest Hits, The Kinks, Jethro Tull, The Beautiful South, Billy Joel, Janis Joplin, UB40, James Taylor, Aerosmith, James Brown, Kiss, Cheap Trick. The list goes on and on. As I said above, these bands gave me hundreds, thousands of hours of amazing music, but they’re left out of the top fifty.

Other bands cause me different problems than the greatest hits/live issues. B-52’s, for example. Their first album was their best, and I gave it many listens, but I’m not embarrassed to say I listened more to Cosmic Thing with its hits like “Love Shack,” “Rome,” and “Deadbeat Club.” Both are great albums, but they miss the top fifty. Devo has a similar issue. Are We Not Men is the better album, but Freedom of Choice got many more plays by me, starting when I was in about sixth grade.

KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions had a couple of albums that got a lot of rotation in my world, and to this day, KRS-One live in concert at Harlow’s in Sacramento may be one of my top five live music experiences, but The Teacher doesn’t rate an individual album in my list, although he’s without question one of the five most influential and talented people in hip hop.

Sonic Youth is a problem, and not because I over-listened to their greatest hits album. (They have no hits, greatest or otherwise.) It’s really because I listened to Sister, Daydream Nation, Goo, and Dirty in almost equal measure. I can’t decide which one is best. They are brilliant records, but none of them got that “I’ve played this album thirty times in a row and I’m not sick of it” treatment. Sonic Youth is like your cool, crazy uncle who you can only take so much of. You love him to death, you’re stoked when he’s around, but then you need a little break.

The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed are another situation. I had The Best of The Velvet Underground: Words and Music of Lou Reed when I was an older teenager, and I listened to it a handful of times, but it didn’t grab me until I was much older, and it was Lou Reed on his own that had more of an impact. Magic and Loss is probably the Lou Reed album with which I spent the most time, as it ruminated on death and existence, entirely “hit-free.” I went backwards from there, from New York to Transformer, back to the VU stuff. Lou Reed is brilliant, but there’s no certain album of his or VU‘s that I feel compelled to include here, despite their obvious merit.

This leads me to the trickiest omission of all: Bob Dylan. I like Dylan, I dig his music, I respect his position as elder sage in the history of rock, folk, and activism/counter-culture. A true poet’s poet. But I’ve never been in deep love with the actual music. I like it well enough. “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Visions of Johanna,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Watchtower,” “Baby Blue,” “Queen Jane,” “Desolation Row…” I could fill up pages and pages with his great songs. But for whatever reason, Dylan’s music itself, although I like it, never quite grabbed me by the lapels and shook the shit out of me, the way these top fifty albums did.

Other absent bands are glaring. I’ve spent a lot of time with the music of Santana, Morphine, Elliot Smith, Queens of the Stone Age, Tom Petty, Neutral Milk Hotel, Chris Isaak, X, Redd Kross, Michael Jackson, Green Day, Van Morrison, Cadillac Tramps, Nick Drake, Thee Oh Sees, Steve Earle, Nine Inch Nails, Elton John, KMFDM, and Stevie Wonder. These artists all have great albums, but none that made my top fifty, or even the next fifty. But various people near and dear to me would put many of these groups in their all time top five, if not G.O.A.T. It saddens me to demote them to honorable mentions.

Finally, I should confess there are a bunch of artists that I just never fell in love with, or don’t particularly like all that much, despite their obvious artistic merit, based on smart and cultured people loving their stuff. Some of these that I just never quite fully connected with (though most have their moments for me) are: Prince, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Alice in Chains, Beck, Frank Zappa, Tupac Shakur, and Soundgarden. This list, sadly, can go on and on too.

Thanks for reading this far. We’re going to get to the top fifty albums, I promise. When I put the list together, frantically adjusting and revising over the course of several weeks at first, then months, then years, I felt I needed to do something with the albums that kept getting dropped out of the top fifty. So in Part II next week I’ll chronicle the next fifty albums – #’s 51 to 100 – in alphabetical order: not ranked at all, before I get to the top fifty. I’m curious to hear what anyone has to say about what is left out of that 51-100 group, because if it’s left out, it either made the top 50, or it didn’t make the top 100 at all. Let me know what you think!

Until then, stay tuned and rock on!

Click here for Part II