The most influential record albums
I don’t usually participate when someone invites me to play along with some social media game.
So when Reade Mitchell tagged me in a Facebook post on April Fool’s Day, I considered it a joke. Reade’s post asked me to “[c] hoose an album that greatly influenced my taste in music; one album per day, for 20 consecutive days. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.”
Whenever someone posts the cover of an album that’s important to them, it’s one of the ways social media can knit a community together. So I decided to do it.
At least part of it. After the first two posts I left off the chain letter aspect of the challenge. Instead of nominating other individuals to take part, I invited everyone. Show us the records that matter to you. We will judge you by them.
One of the things that was great about coming of age in the ’70s and the ’80s was that a lot of people had vinyl albums that they displayed in crates and on bookshelves, sometimes arranged alphabetically by artist and chronologically by issue date like Shrevie (Daniel Stern) did in Barry Levinson’s 1982 film “Diner,” sometimes scattered haphazardly over coffee tables and stacked on floors. They were fun to rummage through, and provided important insights into the character of their curators. Were there more Stones records than Beatles albums in the collection? Did the collection run more toward “Greatest Hits” compilations? (The sign of a poseur to my cohort.)
I remember scrutinizing the record collections of my friends’ parents, a lot of whom had been teenagers in the ’50s. Sometimes you could chart a trajectory — the Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee albums giving way to the Kingston Trio, then to countrypolitan crooners like Jack Greene and Patsy Cline.
JOHNNY MATHIS FAN
One of my friend’s mothers had gone to high school with Johnny Mathis — by her lights he was the handsomest boy in school and the best athlete too (he went to San Francisco State on a basketball and track scholarship). She had all his
albums, personalized with chatty inscriptions of two or three paragraphs.
My collection started to take off in 1974, when I was reviewing records for regional publications. It wasn’t unusual for record companies to fly critics to New York or Los Angeles or London just to play them a newly released record, so it wasn’t anything for them to send me boxes of LPs more or less weekly. I kept the ones I wanted and sometimes sold the ones I didn’t (I think it was Lester Bangs who once observed that rock critics didn’t sell records, they sold records back) so I could buy more of what I wanted.
By the time I graduated from high school I had two walls of my bedroom insulated with albums — the largest collection of anyone I knew except for a local Catholic priest who not only had 11,000 jazz and rhythm & blues records but a magnificent McIntosh tube amp, a Thorens TD 124 turntable and a pair of KHL-1 loudspeakers.
I supplemented my first adult salary with a 9 p.m. to midnight shift on a southwest Louisiana AM station that became a blues station after dark. Phil Phillips — real name John Philip Baptiste, who sang the No. 2 hit “Sea of Love” and claimed he was never paid a penny for his performance — followed me on air. There were lots of promo copies for the taking.
RECORDS MATTERED
The commingling of albums marked an important point in a romantic relationship. In those predigital days we believed one’s records mattered. We talked about music, we fought about it. When we visited other towns and cities one of the obligatory stops was a local record store, where the inventory was always slightly different from the record stores back home.
I embraced CDs early, in part because they took up less space than the old albums but mostly because the music was more important than the delivery device. While some early CDs sounded synthetic and faintly sterile, I’m convinced much of what vinyl enthusiasts perceive as the warmth of their preferred medium is really just a pleasant kind of distortion.
At the volume I listen to music now, I’m not bothered by Spotify’s less-than-full-fidelity streaming, though I prefer lossless. WAV files are the format most of the new music I consume comes in these days. (I’m still on a lot of publicists’ radar; they send a link to a site where I can download the songs as watermarked files.)
HANDFUL OF RELEASES
Albums were important to me until physical media became obsolete; now I pay close attention to a handful of releases per year. That Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” and Pearl Jam’s “Dark Matter” were both released a week ago to some fanfare seems a little anomalous. (Last week also saw the release of T Bone Burnett’s “The Other Side,” which I wrote about.)
Few artists are really album artists these days; they put out coherent collections of songs that have a kind of internal logic and resonancy. Pearl Jam and Tay-Tay do so, though in Swift’s case it seems like a nostalgic gesture. She’s a romantic who misses the days she never knew, when people showed up at record stores on Tuesdays to pick up the latest Joni Mitchell or Elton John record. (She’s also a canny marketer who understands the OCD of completists who need every iteration of a given product.)
Albums are still released, but the lingua franca of the music industry — or that segment of the music industry that targets young people — is once again, as it was in the ’50s and pre-Dylan ’60s, the single.
THE LIST
All this informs the album covers I posted (and continue to post; 20 albums weren’t nearly enough) on Facebook. I like looking at the albums that other people think are important; some people might like to see what I’d post in response to the prompt. But first we have to overthink it.
The point is to be honest, to resist presenting the coolest
version of yourself. The key clause in the challenge’s boilerplate is “influenced my taste in music.” That doesn’t mean the best albums by one’s favorite artists, or even one’s favorite albums, but the ones that pushed and pulled you in certain directions.
I also decided I wouldn’t think too much about what album cover I’d post each day. I made a few rules; chief among them was that no artist would be represented twice, and the albums wouldn’t be overly obscure. (I considered mentioning the Picket Line Coyotes’ “We Shall Annex The Sudetenland” or “Upholstery Van Songs,” but they’re aggressive regional works that were only distributed as merch table cassette tapes.) And I’d try to be faithful to the spirit of the exercise by posting albums that shaped the way I approach listening to music.
1. My first album cover was for T Bone Burnett’s 1982 album “Trap Door,” actually not an album at all but a six-song “extended play” released in advance of Burnett’s full-fledged 1983 “Proof Through the Night,” which is — and again, there’s a distinction between beloved and influential — one of my favorite albums of the ’80s.
My first copy of “Trap Door” was one of the aforementioned promo copies, and I heard it at a time when I was actively writing and performing my own music. Its effect on me was profound. Burnett’s blend of folk-pop was shimmery, radiant and intelligent. His snarling cover of the Marilyn Monroe standard “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” was revelatory. I have always wanted to write an upbeat song as perfect as “I Wish You Could’ve Seen Her Dance.”
2. The second day, I chose “Sonny & Brownie,” the 1973 album by blues musicians Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee that I listened to almost daily in the early ’80s when I was writing (and sometimes performing) with Pete Ermes. Pete — who died about 16 years ago — was a Jewish kid who’d studied classical piano and wanted to be Elmore James. I just wanted to figure out how to pack so much feeling and depth into simple folk songs.
3. On the third day, I raided my parents’ record collection for Frank Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours,” that might be the first concept album ever, and one of the signal aural experiences of my childhood. There’s a lot of Sinatra I can take or leave — the Reprise stuff sounds dated and shticky to me now — but if we’re talking influential and important, there are not many that fit the criteria better.
4. Paul Simon’s “Hearts and Bones” from 1983. Apparently this is Simon’s worst-selling solo album, but it contains some of his more wrenching work, specifically the title track which is one of the loveliest and crushingly affecting kiss-off songs ever. Originally conceived as a Simon & Garfunkel album, it’s a deeply confessional, personal record, the pinnacle of a certain kind of singer-songwriterism.
5. Joni Mitchell, “Court and Spark” from 1974. Not my favorite Joni album — that would be 1971’s “Blue” — but the one that first arrested me. Before I heard “Court and Spark” I thought of Mitchell as the writer of “Woodstock.” This was my gateway drug into her oeuvre.
6. Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going On,” 1971. I wrote about this extensively on its 50th anniversary a few years ago; it seems a remarkable achievement that transcends the soul genre, insinuating itself into a mythic American tradition that encompasses William Carlos Williams and Aaron Copland as well as Bob Dylan and Beyoncé.
7. Bill Evans Trio, “Waltz for Debby,” 1962. I was a relatively late convert to jazz, well past 30 before I realized it was more than some kind of hipster code. This lyrical and deeply empathetic record was one that opened the door.
8. Randy Newman, “Sail Away,” 1972. I could have listed 1974’s “Good Old Boys” or 1970’s “12 Songs” instead, but “Sail Away” marked my first exposure to Newman, his orchestral poetry and dark, unflinching view of human nature and American self-deception. Every song on this record is strange and beautiful.
9. Rod Stewart, “Every Picture Tells a Story,” 1971. I could make a case for this as the greatest folk rock album of the ’70s. No one ever squandered a greater gift on the trite and inane than Rod Stewart did.
10. The Beatles, “Rubber Soul,” 1966. The first Beatles album that attracted deep listening. I might like “Revolver” better, but this was where it really began.
11. Nick Lowe, “Jesus of Cool,” 1978. It was released as “Pure Pop for Now People,” one of the advertising slogans for Radar Records, which released it in the U.K. I could have gone with Elvis Costello’s Lowe-produced “This Year’s Model” instead, but Lowe’s post-hippie sensibilities informed my tastes more than Elvis’ “angry young man” posturing.
12. Robert Johnson, “King of the Delta Blues Singers,” 1961. These sides, recorded in a San Antonio hotel room in 1936 and 1937, are nothing less than the foundation of Delta blues, which was weaponized in Chicago blues and energized the post-war generation in England that transformed our rock ’n’ roll.
13. Pete Townshend, “Empty Glass,” 1980. It was exactly what I wanted to hear at the time it was released, a thoughtful and spiritually alert critique of punk.
14. Lou Reed, “Berlin,” 1973. It would probably be cooler to cite a Velvet Underground record rather than this odd and dirge-y record that the great Robert Christgau decided was “lousy” on its release, but I’ve loved it for 50 years, and it led me back to the Velvets. In 2010 someone asked Reed if he felt vindicated by the critical rehabilitation of the record, which had been seen as a disaster when it was first released.“For what?” he said. “I always liked Berlin.”
Me too.
15. Janis Ian, “Between the Lines,” 1975. There’s a lot more than “At Seventeen,” to this album. Ian’s an underrated songwriter, and the guitar chords she uses are delicate and complex, airy in a way that fits the magnificent arrangements of Ron Frangipane.
16. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “Damn the Torpedoes,” 1978. Their third album, their masterpiece. The record that made me finally buy an electric guitar — though I still haven’t got a Rickenbacker 625/12-string like the one Petty’s holding on the cover.
17. The Clash, “London Calling,” 1979. Released a few days before the start of the decade, this is the best album of the 1980s.
18. Warren Zevon, “Warren Zevon,” 1976. Zevon was a 10-year music-biz veteran when he released this monster (his real debut, if you consider, as you should, 1969’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” was so much juvenilia). Tuneful, unnerving and the template for a certain kind of California songwriter pop.
19. Stevie Wonder, “Innervisions,” 1973. The strongest of Wonder’s remarkable streak of albums in the early to mid-’70s. Way up on the list of the best albums ever made and undeniably effectual to all the 14-year-olds who heard it upon release.
20. Rolling Stones, “Exile on Main St.,” 1972. I considered myself more a Stones guy than a Beatles guy in the ’70s; and the Stones had to have a place on this list. I’ll concede “Sticky Fingers” (1971) and “‘Let It Bleed” (1969) may be better albums, but this was the one that blasted through my headphones longer and louder than the others.
I left off the Kinks, Merle Haggard, and Liz Phair’s “Exile in Guyville,” which may be the only post-1990 album that deserves a place on this list. But these all matter. I’ve shown you some of mine.