Lip to label

What’s your all-time favorite album?

How can I have an all-time favorite album when I’ve been so many different people for (ahem) fifty-plus years? No, I don’t have a multiple personality disorder, but I can assure you that my sixteen-year-old self lived in a different world than my fifty-eight-year-old self.

So here are the albums that I practically wore out throughout my life – lip to label.

8 years old: Pink Floyd – Dark side of the Moon. This is the nice thing about having older siblings. You’re introduced to cool music at an early age.

12 years old: Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat. Some of the adult themes went over my head; one night stands, gun smuggling, etc, but I loved the Spanish-influenced guitar.

13 years old: Rush Farewell to Kings.  I had just started playing bass guitar and… Geddy Lee. Nuff said.

15 years old: Yes – Relayer. I discovered Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and weed.

16 years old: Duran Duran – Rio. Because I was still playing bass and John Taylor was a great bassist and HOT!

19 years old: The Damned – Phantasmagoria. It was a little goth and a little alt pop, plus the album cover was killer. Bob Carlos Clarke became one of my favorite photographers.

I can insert a few others in between, but I can’t remember where exactly in my timeline: Billy Squire – In the Dark, Guns and Roses – Appetite for Destruction, Alphaville – Forever Young, Thomas Dolby – The Golden Age of Wireless, Deep Forest (first album). Siouxsie & the Banshees – Tinderbox. Keep in mind that I didn’t always hear about a particular album until a few years after it’s release. We didn’t have the internet back then, and radio stations towed the corporate line.

After that, things get a little murky. Today, I barely know what an album is. Songs just magically stream on my devices. It’s cool because I can listen to a large variety of music from artists big and small, but it’s missing the magic of that weekly pilgrimage to the record store to buy the latest vinyl. You’ve only heard one or two songs on the radio, and it was like musical roulette as to whether the rest of the album would be good or bad. That was part of the fun.

Plus, you could clean your weed on the gate fold albums.