I was on Facebook the other day when I noticed one of my "friends" posted a list of albums for no particular reason - it was like "15 albums in 15 minutes" or some crap like that. It got me thinking, though of the albums that have shaped my taste in music and, by extension, my guitar playing.
I could easily list the top ten or so albums I'm listening to right now, but that wouldn't be the point. A list like that would tell me where I am now. I'm more interested in how I got there. The list below should answer that question. Now, not all these albums will be good. Some may be downright embarrassing. I'll go back as far as I can, at least until the first time I actually noticed guitar playing in songs and realized I needed to play. Here they are, in chronological order, at least in chronological order of their appearance in my life.
1. U2 - Under a Blood Red Sky. I actually saw this album before I bought it on cassette. MTV played the live concert video in 1983, one year before the album was released - remember when MTV was about music? It was live at Red Rocks and I remember watching it and thinking it was one of the best concert videos I'd ever seen, and I saw, like, at least three at the time. Maybe two. I loved their sound back then and I was particularly enthralled with The Edge's playing. It was then that I realized two things: I wanted to play guitar and I wanted a black Stratocaster just like The Edge. The video for "Sunday Bloody Sunday" was taken from this concert.
2. Van Halen - 1984. This album - and I do mean album, as in vinyl - holds a special meaning to me as I actually won this from a local radio station. It was the first time I ever won anything that way and I was 11 years old so I was super stoked. I was already a big fan of "Jump" and I loved when the video came on MTV (there's that MTV-music thing again). I still love the guitar solo in "Hot For Teacher." A little embarrassing, I know, but what the hell.
3. Def Leppard - Pyromania. This album was released in 1983, but I remember really getting into it in 1984. These guys were the shit back then. I wanted to be Phil Collen. I jazzed for an Ibanez Destroyer, just like the one in the "Photograph" video. I almost bought a Union Jack muscle tee. Listening to this album and watching the videos also made me really want to play guitar.
4. Guns N' Roses - Appetite for Destruction. The years between albums three and four on this list were bleak ones. Hair metal took over and saturated the airwaves with wimpy pop metal and enough Aqua Net to put another hole in the ozone layer. I tired of the whole scene quickly and for a while I didn't listen to music. This was my first guitar downtime, when I stopped lessons and hardly played for years. Then G'N'R came along like a tube-saturated breath of fresh air. No more hair spray, no more pretense, no more happy metal. These guys were raw, gritty, and they rocked. No pink Superstrats and girly effects, just an old Les Paul and a cranked Marshall stack and a lead singer who screeched his way through every curse in the book. Unfortunately, overexposure led to me tiring of this album and the band itself rather quickly, but for a while they were my favorite.
4. Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy. This album is on the list because of one song, "Over the Hills and Far Away." It has special significance because not only is it a great song, but it was the first song I learned on my own using tablature from a guitar magazine. It meant that I could learn songs without having to take lessons. This could be construed as a bad thing, because lessons are important, especially for a young player, but my lessons sucked because at the time all my instructor did was listen to songs I'd bring in, figure them out and then show me how to play it. Quite bogus.
6. Tesla - Mechanical Resonance. In my never-ending quest to find something other than hair metal in the mid-80s, a friend of mine gave me a copy of this album. While they were on the fringes of hair metal, they had a simpler, no-nonsense style both in their look and their playing that set them apart. Guitarist Frank Hannon's use of acoustic guitar and mandolin also gave this album a distinctive sound. But, as it happens so often, their next album was less than stellar and their subsequent acoustic album gave them the overexposure needed to put the nail in this coffin.
7. Rush - Exit...Stage Left. While Moving Pictures is my favorite Rush album, it was Exit...Stage Left that first introduced me to the band that would have the most profound influence on my musical tastes and my guitar playing. I can't begin to explain the effect this band had on me. They saved me from a life of musical indifference and introduced me to a whole new genre of progressive rock music. Rush led me to Yes and later to Spock's Beard, The Flower Kings and Dream Theater. I lived, breathed and ate Rush for the next four years, to the point where one of my bandmates complained that we were turning into a Rush tribute band. Honestly, I wouldn't have minded.
8. Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon. My first exposure to the greatness that is David Gilmour actually came from the video to "Comfortably Numb" from their Delicate Sound of Thunder concert video. I didn't buy that album or video for whatever reason, but I did find an old cassette tape of Dark Side of the Moon that belonged to one of my older sisters and was left abandoned in the attic. Later in life, I would come to appreciate the entire album for its songwriting and arrangements, but at the time all I cared about were the incredible guitar solos in "Time" and "Money." Say what you want about Clapton, but to me, Gilmour is God.
9. Stevie Ray Vaughan - Texas Flood. Back when MTV Unplugged was a half-hour show hosted by the always annoying Jules Shear, they had an episode with Joe Satriani and Stevie Ray Vaughan. I taped that episode and watched it at least 500 times. At the time, I was more impressed with Stevie than Joe - possibly because Joe did more singing and less playing - and I went out and bought Texas Flood. I wasn't particularly taken with the entire album - sometimes blues gets repetitive to me - but a few songs stood out, especially "Lenny," which is still one of my favorite songs.
10. Soundgarden - Louder Than Love and Pearl Jam - Ten. I'm lumping these together because they were both highly influential to me. The Seattle sound was just what I needed at the time in my quest to continually find new things to listen to. I was lucky enough to have a friend in Seattle who tipped me off to these bands long before they became a sensation - he even sent me a copy of Louder Than Love recorded on a shitty cassette tape. Soundgarden and Pearl Jam were my favorites, but I also listened to Nirvana, Alice in Chains and The Screaming Trees. Despite public opinion to the contrary, each band had their own unique sound - Soundgarden and Alice in Chains were metal, Nirvana was punk, and Pearl Jam and The Screaming Trees were pure classic blues rock - but they all represented the same thing. They were the antithesis of hair metal. They focused on the music and stripped away the pretense, much like G'N'R did but on a much grander scale. They proved that regular guys can get together and make great music. But like in the 80s, they ushered in an era of bad music. Just like Van Halen, The Scorpions and even Iron Maiden ushered in the era of poppy hair metal, the Seattle bands ushered in the era of post-grunge music, where all bands had singers that sounded like Eddie Vedder, tuned their guitars down like Soundgarden, and sang about drugs and melancholy like Alice in Chains. What a shame.
Honorable Mention - Joe Satriani - Surfing with the Alien. I bought this album because Joe was (and is) such an incredible guitarist. I absolutely loved "Always with Me, Always with You" and it still gives me chills when I hear it. I tried to learn it back in the day but gave up because I thought I wasn't good enough to learn it. This album, for how good it is, represents a huge mental block for me and a lack of confidence in my abilities as a guitarist. I think it tells a lot about why I'm not as good as I should be for having been a guitarist since I was 11. Because of this, I vow to learn as many Satch songs as I can, starting with the one that I gave up on.
So that's it. There have been other bands and albums during and since that time, but those are the top 10 - well, 12 if you're really counting - that influenced my playing and my musical taste back in my impressionable youth. You can hear some of those influences in the music I listen to now. I can add a few other honorable mentions - Empire by Queensryche, Nevermind by Nirvana, Somewhere in Time by Iron Maiden - but the ones in the list were the most important.
One thing I noticed while writing this is how many times MTV came up. I'm part of the MTV generation, back when MTV was about music and not about dumbed-down reality programming. It makes me wonder where the new generation is getting its influences from.
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