In The Beginning, There Was Dick Clark

[(Back by individual demand, a cross-post from Facebook, which is where you'll find me online when I'm not at the other place...]

Think of 25 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in (sometimes, they just sucked, but you listened to them anyway) and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world - don't just name your 25 favorite albums. When you finish, tag whoever you want, including me. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill.

I'm going to try to do this in chronological order, following the instruction to the letter. We'll see how that works out.

1. In the beginning, there was Dick Clark. Not "American Bandstand," necessarily, the late '70s/early'80s version of which I have very little firsthand memory. My mom had a 6-disc set of The Best of AB that covered the dawn of rock n' roll through disco. In my head, I still tend to blend everything from Fats Domino through the disco version of Beethoven's Fifth into one big muscial smoothie called "The Past" because of listening to all six records repeatedly.
2. Another compilation of Mom's, this one of whatever was on country-pop's hit parade circa 1978: the Oak Ridge Boys, the Charlie Daniels Band, Louise Mandrell, Johnny Paycheck...
3. Glass Houses, Billy Joel. I think my sister owned this. His last album with anything that could be considered a gritty edge, I guess, and it was the first time I ever pored over a lyrics sheet, figuring out pop-culture references without reference to my family.
4. The Grease movie soundtrack, of course.
5. Another compilation, this one a K-TEL disco mix that the teenage girls on the next street owned and played in their garage much to the delight of one ten-year-old gay boy. Blondie, Gloria Gaynor, Amii Stewart, Peaches and Herb... perfection!
6. The Xanadu movie soundtrack. I think this record spans the widest gulf between good soundtrack/bad movie, don't you? Yes, Olivia Newton-John has a lot to answer for, which brings us to..
5. Olivia Newton-John's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2. Yes, the first album I ever bought with my own money. (I'd been buying 45s for a couple of years, including the aforementioned Olivia, Joan Jett, Journey, Hall & Oates, and Queen.)
6. The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack, given to a very impressionable high school freshman by his upperclass girlfriends. "And nothing can ever be the same."
7. Danny Elfman, So-Lo
8. Anything Goes, soundtrack to the 1962 Broadway revival with Hal Linden and Eileen Rogers. We listened to it endlessly during my high school's production in which I played Billy.
9. The B-52's, Cosmic Thing. My 1989 reintroduction to pop music after a five-year hiatus of band/theatre/choir geekdom. Also my very tardy intro to what was called "alternative music," a genre or obsession that was to give me great pleasure for a number of years.
10. Mary's Danish, ...there goes the wondertruck
11. They Might Be Giants, Flood.
12. Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine.
13. Pet Shop Boys, Discography.
14. Madonna, The Immaculate Collection.
15. Siouxsie and the Banshees, Once and Twice Upon A Time, The Singles. (See, playing catch up with something that, if my own '80s had gone differently, I would've been paying attention to all the time. I could easily throw in Catching Up With Depeche Mode, The Cure's Staring at the Sea, Dead or Alive's Rip It Up, Squeeze's 45's and Under, and a dozen others, but you get the idea. Incidentally, I think this is why I'm still reluctant to devote the time it takes to fall in love with new albums: I tend to have a singles mentality when it comes to pop music.)
16. Yaz(oo), Upstairs at Eric's
17. Erasure, Wild!
18. The Smiths, The Queen Is Dead
19. The Smiths, Louder Than Bombs
20. Until The End of the World movie soundtrack
21. Whatever recording of Mozart's Requiem I used for review when the UCSB men's chorus did it in '93.
22. ABBA, Gold
23. Bjork, Post
24. Saint Etienne, Good Humor
25. The Magnetic Fields, i

Yes, I have a good friend who says my musical taste is "mired in the '80s," and from this list you can see why. All I can say is that we do tend to pay the most attention to pop music that was produced in our teens and twenties, or it seems like we should. Also, as I mentioned, I just don't sit down and listen to whole albums anymore, but I've been delighted by singles by many of the indie and mainstream pop acts of the last ten to fifteen years - I just don't get to know their albums, anymore.

Similarly, even though I know it's likely that the best pop albums ever were produced between 1964 and 1974, you won't see Sgt. Pepper's, Let it Bleed, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Are You Experienced, Dusty in Memphis, or Johnny Cash Live at San Quentin on my shelf. The iTunes library is a much more mixed bag, in all directions.