Most Influential Albums: Day Ten

 

Well, it only took me two and a half months to finish this list. I suppose that I can see the reasoning behind posting just the album covers with no explanation. But it gave me something to write about on the blog so that was good. 

When I was in my younger years, I was pretty skeptical of any music that was B.T. (before Thriller) because anything older wasn't from "my era". But at some point that changed and I started to embrace classic rock as being some pretty cool stuff. I've had a hard time putting a finger on a single artist or album that led me down that path. Eventually I settled on Queen as being perhaps the band that led me to drop my arbitrary 1982 line in the sand and experience more of what the decade of my birth had to offer. I was initially exposed to Queen through the inclusion of "Bohemian Rhapsody" in Wayne's World as well as having to perform their various sports anthems in high school pep band.

So for my final offering, I'm going with their Greatest Hits album as my final, "most influential" album. I hope you've enjoyed coming along with me on this journey.

Most Influential Albums: Day Nine

This is a bit of a departure. I really never invested much time in "church music" as a teenager. However, I decided to serve a mission at the age of 19, which meant putting the world behind. In other words, no Bon Jovi or Billy Joel or even Amy Grant. For missionaries this meant different things. For some it was a strict diet of MoTab (or in today's parlance, TabCats), for others it also included Enya. I didn't really listen to very much unless I was in a car area, which meant that the car stereo system had to be put to good use.

My first companion had a John Canaan's Our Savior's Love, which includes renditions of hymns such as "Come Thou Fount" and "Consider the Lilies" in addition to 1980s LDS classics such as "Together Forever" and "You're Not Alone". Oddly enough, this album takes me back to a specific time and place probably more than anything else on my list: early spring of 1995, driving around Poulsbo, Washington in a silver Nissan Sentra. We listened to it dozens of times and it's pretty well ingrained in my soul. I can still recall some of the vocals for those songs in my mind without much effort even though I rarely listen to them anymore. The album really helped me embrace religiously-themed music as worthwhile which was not really an attitude I had as a younger person. 

Most Influential Albums: Day Eight

Probably the first album which introduced me to the concept of a "various artists" album was 1988's Gold & Platinum Volume 4. Not unlike just listening to the radio. Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Gloria Estefan, Billy Joel, Grateful Dead, Beastie Boys...and if that wasn't enough, Kenny G and Bruce Willis!!!!  A few years later, armed with my own music collection and a dual-cassette stereo I was able to start creating my own compilations. 

I think my dad had an extra copy of this because I wound up with one that I still have in my possession. In fact, I listened to it on a recent car trip. Well, van trip. Our minivan has a cassette deck. And so we'll probably keep the van forever. 

The last song on Side A is "The Final Countdown" by Europe and in the late 80s if we wanted to rock out we would put this tape in and crank it up to 11. After all, what was gonna stop us? What would stop us from doing that right now? What would stop us from just listening to the whole album of classic late-80s tunes?

Nothing. Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now.

 

Most Influential Albums: Day Seven

 

I was a freshman in high school before I really became "tuned in" to the music world and began investing in my own collection. The Phil Collins song "Another Day in Paradise" won Record of the Year at the 1991 Grammy Awards, which was the first awards show I had ever watched. A couple of months later, we went on a band trip to play in a competition and afterwards we stopped at the Pueblo Mall where I purchased a cassette tape which I was excited to pop into my Walkman for the ride back home.

 

Of course, it's me, so it wasn't anything too fun, it was Phil's "serious" album, appropriately named ...But Seriously. I don't think I realized how incredibly successful he had been in the 1980s, from his diamond-certified, Grammy-winning album No Jacket Required to his trio of 1985 chart-toppers to the iconic 1981 song "In the Air Tonight."

...But Seriously introduced me to the world of Phil Collins. I still have that cassette I purchased nearly 30 years ago. It's a good album in its own right, regardless of his prior successes. Love him or hate him, he's one of the all-time greats. You have to love any country in which a short, middle-aged, balding British man whose album covers are just extreme close-ups of his face can become a massive pop star. Indeed, there's hope for all of us.

Most Influential Albums: Day Six

While many teens were rocking out to Use Your Illusion I and II, Amy Grant was casting a spell on me with her album Heart in Motion. The songs were catchy, fun, wholesome and also she was a major cutie. I did something I'd never done before. I purchased a VHS tape of music videos. It included videos from the Heart in Motion album as well as "The Next Time I Fall" - her 1986 duet with Peter Cetera which reached #1 on the Billboard charts.

Amy Grant was nominated for a total of four Grammy Awards in 1992, including Record of the Year and Album of the Year. I remember being apoplectic that Natalie Cole swept everything that year. Partially because I perceived "Unforgettable" as a huge gimmick and partially because Amy Grant and also Bryan Adams came up empty. At my young age did not fully comprehend the political nature of the Grammys.

I worried that this piece of personal history would cause me to lose my Man Card and so I went into denial. The abandoned video tape sat at my parents house for close to two decades until they forced it back upon me. I promptly gave it away in a family reunion auction. Then one day I was transferring my old recording of the 1992 Grammy broadcast onto DVD and came across her performance of "Baby Baby". Once again, the Amy Grant fairy dust came over me and I was like, "Okay, now I understand how that happened. No regrets."

Most Influential Albums: Day Five

Although my musical tastes generally fall within the Pop or Rock genres, I did have a brief foray into the world of rap/hip hop in the early 1990s, mainly driven by "U Can't Touch This". One of my friends and I spent a long time with a walkman and headphones playing and rewinding Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em  on cassette in an attempt to decipher/memorize the lyrics. Of course, this was before the days of the internet which would have made it much easier but not nearly as much fun.

Not much else beyond the song "Pray" is still memorable today. (I still pull out the lyric "we got to pray just to make it today" on occasion.) But the album certainly had an influence on me at the time. I acquired all his albums and watched his performance at the 1991 Grammys a hundred times or so. As a high school freshman I was in a Home Economics class and we were assigned to do a sewing project. I decided to make a pair of baggy Hammer pants in a very loud print. And I think I even wore them to school a couple of times - the early 90s were very accepting like that.

My rap phase didn't last much past the release of Too Legit to Quit. By then, it was time to enjoy the R&B stylings of Color Me Badd and Boyz II Men. However, three years ago, our ward had to prepare a dance routine for a stake activity. I suggested..."U Can't Touch This", which resulted in a 41-year-old me learning to do things I'd never learned as a 14-year-old Hammer fan. That's influence.

Most Influential Albums: Day Four

While Slippery When Wet was their breakthrough, I was probably a little young for Bon Jovi when it was released. I first listened to New Jersey around 1991 when I signed up for Columbia House and trying new things was inconsequential because after all, it was only a penny! The sound of New Jersey resonated with me right away and was my introduction to "hair metal" although it was the early 90s and rock was moving into its grunge/alternative phase. It wasn't oversexed, it wasn't angry, it was almost positive. In the VH1 series I Love the 80s, Dee Snider commented about Jon Bon Jovi's penchant for smiling in his music videos, which was not really a characteristic of serious rockers.

Bon Jovi moved towards a more serious sound in 1992 with the release of Keep the Faith, and they moved back into the mainstream in 1994 with Cross Road. I didn't necessarily keep up on all their releases afterwards, but I finally saw them in concert five years ago. I still own New Jersey on both cassette and CD. I admit that a couple of the tracks on Slippery When Wet are better than anything you find on New Jersey, but New Jersey is a much better overall album. It's not just me - thirty years later, it still holds the record for most top 10 singles off of a hard rock album.