The 5 albums that changed my life

Partly inspired by Dusty's excellent and always entertaining Playground of Doom blog -- as well as my own realization that I just don't care as much about talking about movies as I did when I started this thing a year ago -- I've decided to retool "Blood Has Been Shed Jerry" into a general all-purpose review and pop-culture blog.

The fact is these days I've been reading books and listening to music -- and following the trials and tribulations of one Ms. Lindsay Lohan and one Mr. Mel Gibson -- way more than I've been watching movies.

So, in that spirit, here's my first music blog.

Every one of us has four or five albums that affected us so thoroughly when we first encountered them that they've become infused into our DNA. These albums may be undisputed masterpieces. There are plenty of people of my parents' generation who would point to The Beatles "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" or Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks" as the records that define that era for them, and no one would argue.

But sometimes these are just records that found us at the right time and, regardless of quality or critical consensus, managed to find some soft spot in our souls to poke at. Maybe they got us through a breakup, or helped us get our sea legs at a new job, or defined one wild and crazy summer. We could be talking about (in the case of one ex-girlfriend of mine) Abba's "Greatest Hits." Or Metallica's "Master of Puppets." Or maybe the soundtrack from West Side Story. Doesn't matter. We cling to these records like they're a ratty old stuffed animal or a poop-stained security blanket, and it doesn't matter to us that Rolling Stone only gave them two stars.

This list is probably a combination of both masterpieces and security blankets. I'll let you decide which are which.

Here are the Five Albums That Changed My Life, ranked chronologically by when I discovered them.

1. Pink Floyd - "The Wall" (1979)

This is it, the big daddy, the one that looms above all others for me. Nothing has ever come close.

First, a bit of context. This has been my favorite album for over 25 years. That's only impressive when you realize that I'm 32 and you do the math.

That's right: I was rocking out to "Comfortably Numb" and running around jumping on the couch and screaming "WE DON'T NEED NO EDUCATION" when I was six. That's what happens when your brother is 12 years older than you.



I got my first Walkman cassete player when my parents and I road-tripped the country one summer around when I was in the first grade, and the first three tapes I had were Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Green River" (just missed this list by a nose), some greatest hits collection by Chuck Berry ... and "The Wall." These tapes were my introduction to the very concept of rock and roll. The first two were purchased at the same Walgreens or whatever where my dad got me the Walkman (presumably to shut me up in the back of the car).

The third came from my brother some time after we got back, recorded off his scratchy double LP and wrapped up as (I think) a Christmas present.

To this day, I can't really say what it is about this record that shook me so thoroughly. I've explored Floyd's catalogue backward and forward in the years since, and I can very articulately (and pretentiously) deconstruct "Dark Side of the Moon" for you, go on and on about its varied sonic landscape and its obsessions with mortality and insanity. I can tear into "Wish You Were Here" and blather about how it's a mournful meditation on fame and (yep) insanity. I can talk about poor lost Syd Barret and the shadow his acid-fueled meltdown cast over the rest of the band. I can talk about Roger Waters and his daddy issues. I can tell you exactly why I think David Gilmour is a better guitarist than Clapton.

I could also bore the piss out of you by going through this record song-by-song and telling you everything I think you need to know about it. Did you know "The Trial" wasn't Roger Waters' idea, but rather a last-minute suggestion by producer Bob Ezrin? Oh, you don't care? Sorry. I'll stop here. Just listen to it, and then try to tell me that when Roger Waters shrieks about worms eating his brain in "Hey You" or when Gilmour tells you (in the voice of the psychotic Pink) to wish "our colored cousins" a safe trip back to Africa in "Waiting for the Worms" that the hair on the back of your neck doesn't stand up.

I love many, many Pink Floyd albums ... but it still all boils down to "The Wall" for me. This is probably in no small part simply because it was the first, and a gift from my brother, who when I was six was infinitely more badass than anyone else I knew. But he also gave me The Scorpions "Blackout" and Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing," and I'm not going to sit here and tout those as a life changers. "The Wall" has stuck with me through the years and through all my different phases (the jazz phase in the eighth grade, the death-metal phase in college, the alt country phase from two or three years ago). It won't let me go.

The emotional core to the album is distilled in Roger Waters' scream that immediately preceeds the "we don't need no education" refrain from "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II). There's something about it that just cuts into me like a blade.

For a band so often dismissed as space rock, there's an open-wound, primal howl quality to "The Wall" that was (and is) unlike anything I'd ever encountered before. It's both deeply personal and acidly political. It's theatrical as well as introspective. It's about rage. And pain. And, yes, insanity. It's not Elvis being a hound dog, The Beatles wanting to hold your hand, or Bill Haley rocking around the clock. It's not even the Sex Pistols sneering about the Queen.

Forgot the smelly stoners and the laser shows at the casinos. This is rock and roll reconstituted as a bloodletting.

I love it. Twenty five years later and I still can't get enough.


Bob Hoskins rules

2. Jim Croce - "Photographs & Memories: His Greatest Hits" (199-?)

I imagine all of you out there, eyes wide and shaking your head and going "WHAAA?" But before you judge, listen to this:



Now tell me that isn't the prettiest goddamn thing you've ever heard. And if a lump doesn't rise in your throat when Jim tells the operator that "you can keep the dime," I'm sorry to tell you that your heart is nothing but a shriveled prune hanging limp and useless in the dank black cave of your chest.

Still not convinced? Try this one:



If that didn't bring a tear to your eye than there's nothing I can do for you. Go torture a puppy or whatever else it is you do for fun.

Croce was one of those sort-of folkie early 70s singer-songwriters like Harry Nilsson, Cat Stevens and Harry Chapin. He was born in South Philly, rocked possibly the world's single greatest mustache and had himself a pretty solid little career there for a few years. And then he died in a plane crash in 1973.

There wasn't much that set him apart from the singer-songwriter pack beyond the fact that he was just better than the rest of them. Most of you, if you've heard of him at all, probably know the humorous uptempo slices of urban life like "Bad Bad Leroy Brown" and "You Don't Mess Around With Jim." Good stuff, sure. But for me he really only came to life with his heartbreak ballads. He was an excellent singer with a warm, lived-in voice and an instinctual sense of melody that could pluck emotion from your heart with the precision of a surgeon's fingers.

This stuff borders on schmaltz, to be sure. But there was something so genuine, so unironic, about him that, whenever I hear a song like "Operator" or "Lover's Cross," I simply believe him in a way that I don't with almost any other singer-songwriter from the era.

As far as the album itself goes, it was just one of those cheapo compilations that my dad bought one day at Price Club back when I was in middle school. He played it when we got home, and I fell in love with it and pretty much stole it from him after the first listen (this was the era of Nirvana and New Kids on the Block. The fact that THIS was my favorite CD for about three years should tell you everything you need to know about my social standing in those days).

I even remember the track list:

1. Bad Bad Leroy Brown
2. Operator (That's Not The Way It Feels)
3. Photographs & Memories
4. Rapid Roy (The Stock Car Boy)
5. Time In A Bottle
6. New York's Not My Home
7. Workin' At The Car Wash Blues
8. I Got A Name
9. I'll Have To Say I Love You In A Song
10. Lover's Cross
11. One Less Set Of Footsteps
12. These Dreams
13. Roller Derby Queen

Eventually I made it to college, got a lip piercing and dyed my hair black and started listening to extreme European death metal. I went to about a million shows by bands like Cephalic Carnage, Broken Hope, Wicked Innocence, and Macabre. I got punched in the throat, punched another guy in the throat, had a fat guy fall on my knee and bend it backwards, watched a dwarf throw a metal folding chair across the mosh pit and knock a guy out. I was (excuse me while I puff myself up for a moment) a hardcore motherfucker.


Yep

But late at night, by myself, I would lay in my dorm and put my headphones on and go to sleep to Jim Croce.

Sometimes I still do.


If you don't like this you're probably a Stalinist

3. Korn - "Korn" (1994)

Back in 1995 I was in Rare Bear Records in Santa Fe picking through the used CDs when I came across the album you see above.

This was well before "A.D.I.D.A.S.," "Freak on a Leash," the lame-ass duets with Fred Durst and The Pharcyde, the "nü metal" label, the hip-hop pretensions and posturing, the Family Values stadium tours, and the constant MTV/TRL rotation. Korn had not yet become the cartoon godfathers of one of the lamest movements in popular music that we've ever had the misfortune to suffer through. They had yet to give birth to (shudder) Staind, (shiver) Papa Roach, and (vomit) Crazy Town. They were next to unknown. There were no band photos that I recall in the album booklet. Radio and MTV was having nothing to do with them (I later heard rumors that the "Blind" video showed up on Headbangers Ball a few times, but I never saw it).


I so wanted to look like Munky when I was 17

The CD was priced $5.99 and I thought that creepy-ass photo was pretty cool, so I bought it. I didn't get to listen to it until I got home (CD players in cars were still a novelty back then), and by the time I'd made the drive I forgot all about it. Then, a week or so later while cleaning off my desk after school, I found it in the pile and threw it into my CD player, not really expecting much.

It's hard for me to admit, knowing what we all know now about where this would ultimately lead ("I did it all for the NOOKIE, the NOOKIE..." seriously, Fred, fuck you), how powerful that first spin was. When coming up with this list I knew I needed to pick at least one metal album and I was really tempted to go with Faith No More's "Angel Dust," which was my favorite CD from a much better band. But if I'm to be truthful, nothing I stumbled across in high school came close to this album's ability to inflict pure blunt-force emotional trauma.

I remember sitting there on the edge of my bed with my eyes wide and my jaw hanging open as Jonathan Davis shredded his vocal chords and tore his heart out and (metaphorically ... I think) cut his wrists open and bled pus all over my virgin eardrums. It was like listening to the musical equivalent of bowel cancer ... and I mean that in the best possible way. Remember, this was still the grunge era, Green Day was just hitting the big time, Kurt Cobain had just eaten his shotgun, and Eddie Vedder and Trent Reznor were the closest we came to having bonafide tortured artists to look up to. So "Korn" was a total revelation. I didn't realize music could be so ferocious, so ugly, and yet so nakedly vulnerable at the same time.

When, on the bullied-kid memoir "Faget", Davis screams "I'm a FAGGOT/I'm a FAGGOT/I'm NOT a FAGGOT/You motherfucking QUEERS", my head spun around like Linda Blair's in The Exorcist.


Jeez

This wasn't macho, homophobic posturing and it wasn't pouty, Cure-style moping. This wan't Trent suffering beautifully in Sharon Tate's Hollywood Hills mansion. This was a guy in real pain, possessed by an all-consuming rage that seemed to bubble up like magma from the furnace of his soul. His voice was a howl from the abyss. He sounded like a dog being fed through a wood chipper.

And -- like millions of high school kids discovering The Who or The Stooges or Black Sabbath or Hüsker Dü or Nine Inch Nails or (these days probably) Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance for the first time -- I was overwhelmed by the feeling that "this guy gets me."

Keep in mind that I was really just a sort of tubby, somewhat socially awkward kid with a mullet and a good family. The perspective of years has made me see that, even if he got me, I certainly didn't get him. I had no idea what pain really was ... certainly not the kind of pain he was screaming about. But there was a rawness and a truthfulness to the record that rattled me way down in my bones. When you're 17 and looking for someone to put a form to whatever weird tornado you have going on inside you, that shit matters.

"Korn" introduced me to the possibilities of what heavy music could do. It didn't have to be a bunch of posing tough-guy bullshit. It could be an open wound. I imagine that what I felt the first time I listened to the CD was a little bit of what Johnny Ramone must have felt when he discovered The Stooges' "Raw Power."

I'm in my thirties now, and I still listen to this album occasionally, once every two or three years maybe. It's hard to plug back into what it meant to me when I was that pissed-off misfit kid. I can still enjoy it, sort of, in a pure nostalgia sort of way. But Korn lost me with their follow-up, "Life Is Peachy," which felt like a pale attempt to recreate the first album, and by the time they got to the sad joke that was "Follow the Leader" I was pretty much over them.

But I remember that first spin. The moment was fleeting, sure. But it was real.

4. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "No More Shall We Part" (2001)

My first encounter with Nick Cave was Metallica's cover of "Loverman" on the "Garage Inc." album. I loved it, so I ran out and bought the Bad Seeds' "Let Love In" (1994) and "Murder Ballads" (1996). And I found myself a new hero.

These two albums are pretty spectacular. They're melodic but harsh, rooted in both blues and punk rock, and Cave displays a singularly dark lyrical sensibility that I -- coming off of my years as a death metal fan -- plugged into right away.

These albums, to me, were more punk than punk, more death rock than Cannibal Corpse could ever be. They reconstituted the whole idea of goth and made The Cure and Joy Division completely irrelevant.

So at first I wasn't entirely sure what to make of "No More Shall We Part." Gone, it seems, was the snarling provocateur who delivered such classic lyrics as "I'm a bad motherfucker don't you know/ But I'll crawl over fifty good pussies to get to one fat boy's asshole" (from "Stagger Lee" off of "Murder Ballads").


Heh

Nope. That Nick Cave seemed to have departed. Now he was crooning stuff like this:



I hadn't yet heard this album's predecessor, "The Boatman's Call" (1997), which was his follow-up to "Murder Ballads." "Boatman's Call" and "No More Shall We Part" are transitional records. Cave had (mostly) kicked his heroin habit and had his poor heart broken by P.J. Harvey. These were records made by a broken man trying to rediscover himself.

Therein lies the brilliance. Cave -- always a shameless raider of classic Americana -- found his solace this time in gospel, and even though there's nothing I would call overtly "Christian" about this record, he does tap into a spiritual depth that was largely lacking from his early work. "No More Shall We Part" is at once introspective and soaring, ruminative and anthemic.


Indeed

After the dirge-like "Boatman's Call," Cave also managed to find some joy in the music again, and he buckled down and tackled his songs with a discipline he'd never shown before. As sad as it is, there's something truly wondrous and minimal about a song like "The Sorrowful Wife." When the guitar crashes in halfway through, my breath never fails to catch in my throat.

He even regained a little of his swagger on songs like "15 Feet of Pure White Snow."


Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow
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I've had nightmares that looked like this video

It took me a while to really "get" this album. But when I did it grabbed me by the nuts and shook me around like a pitbull. Finally I saw Cave as not merely a provocateur, but as a bonafide poet.

He opened my eyes to whole genres of music I had never really been interested in before. Classic country, Southern gospel and blues, Irish folk ... Cave drew from all of it and crafted a record that is, to me, nearly perfect from start to finish.

5. The National - "High Violet" (2010)

Sometimes an album itself is not life changing, but rather the soundtrack to change. Maybe you're breaking up with someone, or recovering from an illness, or reading a book that stirs your soul, or experiencing a renewed burst of creative energy. Or, in my case, maybe it's all of the above.

Whatever the event or events may be, if you happen to be listening to something new at the time, it can imprint itself upon the experience and become so intertwined with it as to be completely indistinguishable.

These are the records that get you through the shit you need to get through. They may not open your mind exactly, but they give you what you need when you need it.

The life changers, the "Sergeant Peppers" and the "Blood on the Tracks," are your teachers.

These records are your friends.

Such is the case for The National's "High Violet" for me. I hadn't even heard of these guys until maybe three months ago. The review in Rolling Stone sounded kind of interesting. Inspired by both Joy Division and Bruce Springsteen? Shit, I thought, I gotta check that out.

So it's kind of hard to say whether or not my love for this record is really based on merit. But whatever. This is the best record I've come across in nearly a decade. And I'll be damned if they don't sound like Springsteen crossed with Joy Division.

A five-piece from Cincinatti now based in Brooklyn, The National is fronted by a guy named Matt Berninger who, if I remember correctly, was something like an investment banker or a stock broker who pretty much joined the band on a lark.


My new man crush. I could stare into those eyes for days...

Something about Berninger's voice haunts me in a way that I can't say I've ever really experienced before. It's like Nick Cave's, only dipped in honey and lined with velvet. There's an easy casualness to his singing style -- like a guy mumbling over a cup of coffee just after crawling out of bed -- that somehow makes it so much more affecting.

And, lyrically, he's able to grab onto an image or phrase and toss it off in a way that makes it sink in like little droplets of absinthe. "I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees," he sings on "Blood Buzz Ohio." I have no idea what the hell that means, but I'll be damned if it doesn't stir something.

And when he croons "I don't want to get over you" in "Sorrow" .. yeah, I get that. As, strangely, I do when he says "I was afraid I'd eat your brains, because I am evil" on "Conversation 16." That's the singularly weirdest lyric on an album full of singularly weird lyrics. But he sort of throws it out there and moves on, leaving you to shake your head and wonder if you really heard it. And the more you listen it, the more you nod and say "yep. Been there."

Musically, I wouldn't say The National pave any new ground. But the melodies match Berninger's voice perfectly, creating something rich and dark that simmers with a barely restrained heat like a pot just coming to boil.

I've so far avoided diving into The National's back catalogue because I know that there's no way the older albums will hit home like this one did. Only the upcoming years will tell if "High Violet" sticks with me the way the others on this list have. I mean, there was a time, between the ages of 10 and 11, when I truly believed that Queensryche's "Operation: Mindcrime" totally was the story of my life thus far. So who knows how I'll feel in a decade?

But I know that when I look back on this time, Berninger's voice will be what I remember.

Honorable mentions (in no particular order)

Led Zeppelin - "IV"
David Bowie - "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars"
Metallica - "Master of Puppets"
Faith No More - "Angel Dust"
Massive Attack - "Mezzanine"
Creedence Clearwater Revival - "Green River"
Johnny Cash - "Live at Folsom Prison"
Tool - "Undertow"
The Beatles - "White Album"
Leonard Cohen - "Greatest Hits"