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!
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.
Police Horse 