Laughing out loud at that "cork" memory. Failed attempt by a middle-of-the-road wine producer circa 1999. But we were not deterred.
Lots of good memories of listening to Let It Bleed. Monkey Man in many of them. Foremost is the days I lived upstairs above a pizza/sub joint in downtown Atlanta during the college days. The stairwell to the rear entrance to the place passed directly in front of the exhaust fan above the pizza oven - a direct portal to the kitchen. There was one semester when night time singing of "You Can't Always Get What You Want" into the fan as loud as we could (myself and whomever I was with) occurred weekly. The cooks did not like that reminder that they were making pies while we were not!
Great story about the pizza place - don’t recall hearing that one before! As for the plastic cork, they seem to have been more or less replaced by screw caps these days - along with the stigma of screw cap wine. Progress?!
Sticky Fingers is #2 on the Stones list (and yes - lists are fun!) or, wait, Let It Bleed is pretty damn good. Your song choice from SF anchors it in that position. I love the 'Ten Years Gone' lyrics you quoted. 'On the wings of maybe' - powerful indeed.
I posed the desert island and one album question to a group of work friends a couple years ago and 'Paul's Boutique' made that list!
I remember Ween from the early days but do not recall Al Green and DJ Shadow making it into the mix back then. I just had a flashback of the first plastic "cork" we encountered (circa 1999) we were trying to remove from a bottle of red and the screw was just stretching the plastic with absolutely no progress towards it coming out of the neck. I think we just pushed the devil into the bottle in the end.
Now that you've mentioned it, I definitely remember the awkwardness of that 'cork' - but I also have a sudden, though vague, recollection of straining a bottle of red through a coffee filter? Was that due to the plastic 'cork' or the result of another corkage issue?!
Desert Island disc lists are always intense because they're for posterity. As if that really matters. But it's serious at the time of making: when I lived in the little house on Turnpike, (very) late one evening I had a sudden inclination to rid my collection of any CD that I'd be embarrassed by if found at my death. A little bit morbid perhaps, but, hey - it was a different time. Anyway ... I ended up getting rid of about three that at the time I just didn't like - and all three had a single that has wormed its way onto a Bus playlist. So, lists? Certainly of the moment in many ways. But Paul's Boutique remains a Top 10 every time.
Nice post inspiring a look back at music that wormed in deeply. I do not know Ween, DJ Shadow nor the Al Green album but will certainly check them out since they made your list. OK - every Led Zep phase has to include Physical Graffiti. Dark Side of the Moon was the first CD I purchased so that establishes its significance. First album ruined by too many bumps of the turntable - Springsteen's Born to Run. Favorite collection on a road trip - Tom Petty's Wildflowers. Essential below the belt rock-n-roll - Exile on Main Street. Stranded on an island with only one album to play? The Who's Quadrophenia. There is so much other great music out there. Thankful for poets, songwriters and musicians!
All five of your albums are brilliant - Dark Side is, well, seminal. I will never forget the first time I really heard it, Exile is my favourite Stones album (though 'Can't You Hear Me Knocking' from Sticky Fingers popped up on the playlist tonight and I had to play it three times) and Physical Graffiti is amazing from start to end, not least because of 'Ten Years Gone' which has one of my favourite Zeppelin lyrics: 'Blind stars of fortune, each have several rays/On the wings of maybe, down in birds of prey/Kind of makes me feel sometimes, didn't have to grow/ But as the eagle leaves the nest, it's got so far to go'. 'On the wings of maybe' - that's genius.
I do like Born to Run, but Wildflowers is - not only a great road trip collection - probably one of the top 20 albums ever written. Possibly nudging close to top 10 and possibly (possibly) outranking the Springsteen by a place or two. Oh, lists. Love them!
Can't decide my desert island disc yet, though Paul's Boutique would be a serious contender.
And, just for the record, though you obviously don't remember them, Ween, DJ Shadow and Al Green would have been on some sort of rotation back in the day - possibly light rotation, but present nonetheless. Though not during our chess sessions - those were soundtracked by the mighty Steely Dan!
Well, I've listened to ... well, in truth, listened to good parts of ... each album. Nothing really lit me up, I'm afraid. But it made me think about what I'm after in an album and I realize I'm a sucker for narrative, lyrics. Still thinking ...
You don't have to be lit up by any of these, as long as you're lit up by something! Looking forward to your list. As a 'sucker' for narrative and lyrics, I'm thinking you might be leaning Neil Young, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan? Possibly Nick Cave?
You're reading my mail again... or listening in on conversations. I'd watched the documentary about Weir and then went on a Weir guitar playing rabbit trail. It has inspired me to take some of my own music and find new chord voicings and inversions, something Weir does seemingly effortlessly.
Well, I guess there's some sort of synchronicity going on! I watched the Weir film after watching Long Strange Trip - which is a great one, too, with an excellent soundtrack of some great live recordings (my favourite 'Althea', I think). When I was watching The Other One and saw how Weir - at 16 - just happened to meet this guy and join a band at a certain time in a certain city in a special movement fuelled by a certain drug and suddenly he's soundtracking the counterculture ... I was amazed and relieved that sometimes it just happens to the right people. Just not often enough.
Endtroducing… seminal work. Can I suggest also “Our Pathetic Age”, a 90m double album. 1st set is instrumental (sample based too) but the piece is made for me by the 2nd set which includes vocal collaborations with Nas, Pharaohe Monch, De La Soul, RTJ, a bunch of Wu Tang royalty… the list goes on.
Great post! There’s some music I need to listen to - especially intrigued by DJ Shadow. I posted about Led Zep IV a few days ago and turned reminded me to dig out III (I feel one of my period Zep phases coming on!)
Screw caps just ensure the contents disappear more quickly!
Might as well just have a 750 ml can with a pop top!
Laughing out loud at that "cork" memory. Failed attempt by a middle-of-the-road wine producer circa 1999. But we were not deterred.
Lots of good memories of listening to Let It Bleed. Monkey Man in many of them. Foremost is the days I lived upstairs above a pizza/sub joint in downtown Atlanta during the college days. The stairwell to the rear entrance to the place passed directly in front of the exhaust fan above the pizza oven - a direct portal to the kitchen. There was one semester when night time singing of "You Can't Always Get What You Want" into the fan as loud as we could (myself and whomever I was with) occurred weekly. The cooks did not like that reminder that they were making pies while we were not!
Great story about the pizza place - don’t recall hearing that one before! As for the plastic cork, they seem to have been more or less replaced by screw caps these days - along with the stigma of screw cap wine. Progress?!
Sticky Fingers is #2 on the Stones list (and yes - lists are fun!) or, wait, Let It Bleed is pretty damn good. Your song choice from SF anchors it in that position. I love the 'Ten Years Gone' lyrics you quoted. 'On the wings of maybe' - powerful indeed.
I posed the desert island and one album question to a group of work friends a couple years ago and 'Paul's Boutique' made that list!
I remember Ween from the early days but do not recall Al Green and DJ Shadow making it into the mix back then. I just had a flashback of the first plastic "cork" we encountered (circa 1999) we were trying to remove from a bottle of red and the screw was just stretching the plastic with absolutely no progress towards it coming out of the neck. I think we just pushed the devil into the bottle in the end.
Now that you've mentioned it, I definitely remember the awkwardness of that 'cork' - but I also have a sudden, though vague, recollection of straining a bottle of red through a coffee filter? Was that due to the plastic 'cork' or the result of another corkage issue?!
Desert Island disc lists are always intense because they're for posterity. As if that really matters. But it's serious at the time of making: when I lived in the little house on Turnpike, (very) late one evening I had a sudden inclination to rid my collection of any CD that I'd be embarrassed by if found at my death. A little bit morbid perhaps, but, hey - it was a different time. Anyway ... I ended up getting rid of about three that at the time I just didn't like - and all three had a single that has wormed its way onto a Bus playlist. So, lists? Certainly of the moment in many ways. But Paul's Boutique remains a Top 10 every time.
Nice post inspiring a look back at music that wormed in deeply. I do not know Ween, DJ Shadow nor the Al Green album but will certainly check them out since they made your list. OK - every Led Zep phase has to include Physical Graffiti. Dark Side of the Moon was the first CD I purchased so that establishes its significance. First album ruined by too many bumps of the turntable - Springsteen's Born to Run. Favorite collection on a road trip - Tom Petty's Wildflowers. Essential below the belt rock-n-roll - Exile on Main Street. Stranded on an island with only one album to play? The Who's Quadrophenia. There is so much other great music out there. Thankful for poets, songwriters and musicians!
All five of your albums are brilliant - Dark Side is, well, seminal. I will never forget the first time I really heard it, Exile is my favourite Stones album (though 'Can't You Hear Me Knocking' from Sticky Fingers popped up on the playlist tonight and I had to play it three times) and Physical Graffiti is amazing from start to end, not least because of 'Ten Years Gone' which has one of my favourite Zeppelin lyrics: 'Blind stars of fortune, each have several rays/On the wings of maybe, down in birds of prey/Kind of makes me feel sometimes, didn't have to grow/ But as the eagle leaves the nest, it's got so far to go'. 'On the wings of maybe' - that's genius.
I do like Born to Run, but Wildflowers is - not only a great road trip collection - probably one of the top 20 albums ever written. Possibly nudging close to top 10 and possibly (possibly) outranking the Springsteen by a place or two. Oh, lists. Love them!
Can't decide my desert island disc yet, though Paul's Boutique would be a serious contender.
And, just for the record, though you obviously don't remember them, Ween, DJ Shadow and Al Green would have been on some sort of rotation back in the day - possibly light rotation, but present nonetheless. Though not during our chess sessions - those were soundtracked by the mighty Steely Dan!
Dang, this is interesting: I’m gonna need a few days to listen and think about my top 5, but I’ll be back with you. And there’ll be no overlap!
Looking forward to your selections. And these aren't necessarily my top 5 - I've got to do some serious thinking if I'm to produce that list!
Well, I've listened to ... well, in truth, listened to good parts of ... each album. Nothing really lit me up, I'm afraid. But it made me think about what I'm after in an album and I realize I'm a sucker for narrative, lyrics. Still thinking ...
You don't have to be lit up by any of these, as long as you're lit up by something! Looking forward to your list. As a 'sucker' for narrative and lyrics, I'm thinking you might be leaning Neil Young, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan? Possibly Nick Cave?
You're reading my mail again... or listening in on conversations. I'd watched the documentary about Weir and then went on a Weir guitar playing rabbit trail. It has inspired me to take some of my own music and find new chord voicings and inversions, something Weir does seemingly effortlessly.
Well, I guess there's some sort of synchronicity going on! I watched the Weir film after watching Long Strange Trip - which is a great one, too, with an excellent soundtrack of some great live recordings (my favourite 'Althea', I think). When I was watching The Other One and saw how Weir - at 16 - just happened to meet this guy and join a band at a certain time in a certain city in a special movement fuelled by a certain drug and suddenly he's soundtracking the counterculture ... I was amazed and relieved that sometimes it just happens to the right people. Just not often enough.
Endtroducing… seminal work. Can I suggest also “Our Pathetic Age”, a 90m double album. 1st set is instrumental (sample based too) but the piece is made for me by the 2nd set which includes vocal collaborations with Nas, Pharaohe Monch, De La Soul, RTJ, a bunch of Wu Tang royalty… the list goes on.
I'm not aware of that album - but will definitely be checking that out as soon as some space on my playlist frees up! Thanks for the recommendation!
Great post! There’s some music I need to listen to - especially intrigued by DJ Shadow. I posted about Led Zep IV a few days ago and turned reminded me to dig out III (I feel one of my period Zep phases coming on!)
Thanks! It was actually your Zeppelin 4 post the other day that got Zeppelin 3 onto this list - it kickstarted a Zep phase here, too!