7 songs that changed my life

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

Joe requested we write lists of 7 songs that changed our lives. Coming up with 7 was impossible. So I (more or less) separated it by age group. For better or for worse- here it is…

1. Ages 0-10
   

‘I heard the Bells on Christmas Day.’ I didn’t really like music early on in my life. But I liked Christmas Music. My dad’s brother was mentally retarded and I recall picking him up at the house he lived in every holiday season, driving to North Jersey listening to Christmas Music on the radio. I had no idea at the time but I eventually realized that these songs and carols were often anti-war songs. This didn’t mean much to me at that time. ‘I heard the Bells on Christmas Day’ had its words written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It was about his son who had been wounded in the Civil War. 

1. Ages 12-14
   

‘Bloodstains’ by Agent Orange. As a dice baseball obsessed kid in Upstate New York I really wasn’t sure where I fitted in or who I wanted to be. You may say ‘you were 12-why do you need to know who you were?’ I don’t know why but that is the way it was. Or at least the way it felt to me.  I heard this song on Mark Sullivan’s Radio Show on WRCU-FM, the Colgate University Station. I stumbled upon this accidentally but I’d never heard anything like it before. The power, the speed, and the volume. The anger and the angst. So there is music beyond the America’s Top 40 (which I ignored since I could not relate to that.) But somehow, even if it was merely something as visceral as the speed and volume this was something I could relate to. At this point I couldn’t intellectualize it, and perhaps I still can’t. But this changed my life. It was the turning point. There was no looking back.

1. Ages 16-18
   

Minor Threat ‘Look Back and Laugh’, Urgent Fury ‘Cog’, Husker Du ‘Whatever’.
Things started happening fast. Minor Threat made me understand Hardcore. They spoke to me in the same language I spoke in. This led me into New York,  to the Hardcore Matinees at CBGB’s. A NY band that only played one matinee that I recall (Easter Sunday with New Republic) was the mighty trio known as Urgent Fury. Their singer/bassist Abe Rodriguez was the voice of an alternative Hardcore that went beyond the NYHC goonishness. He expressed dissatisfaction with the scene and with the aggressive military stance of the U.S. government. If more then several hundred people were aware of Urgent Fury they could have been America’s answer to the Clash. The song ‘Cog’ warned me of the next stage of my life. While playing tribute to the worker. “Slaving hard for a minimum wage as a master thief steals your life away and your life goes by chained to a desk a production line and you get no rest oh this is for the working man take a bow take a bow mr. working man”. Husker Du internalized all those feelings of being uncomfortable in ones body, of post-adolescence, the fear of disappointing your parents. Bob Mould was specifically speaking of issues of sexuality, but it could be related on a much deeper level. The album ‘Zen Arcade’ where this track is taken from was really my soundtrack to High School. Husker Du was the perfect lead in to what came next…

1. Ages 18-20
   

Rites of Spring ‘Deeper Than Inside’, Embrace “Building’, Beefeater ‘Need a Job’. All 3 of these bands come out of Washingon, DC’s Revolution Summer of 1985. I was only reading about this from afar in Maximum Rock n Roll and then when the records starting coming out in 1986 I was seeing the places Hardcore could go. What once seemed  a movement geared for High School kids was now showing major growth, taking in new influences and taking the sound into new directions. The music was growing up. 

1. Ages 20-22
   

Crass “How does it feel (to be the mother of a thousand dead)’ and ‘Sheep Farming in the Falklands’.
It could be said Urgent Fury politicized me. Crass radicalized me. This was totally an English thing but it was so clear it felt like it came from my backyard. This music came out during the Falkland Islands War and it was  a shock listening to a band so openly attack its government. This was going beyond folk music or even political punk. This band was all but openly calling for Revolution. Again, I heard this music a couple years after the fact but its power never wavered. That the vocals could be so raw yet so poetic. From obscenity to …to images of flowers in fields. What could come next? (Ah, that is exactly what they were asking). What is criminally ignored about Crass is their music. People focus too much on the lyrics (and oh ok, i’m sure this is a band where the lyrics came first) but its music was weird and experimental and you really didn’t know where things were headed. This band has been totally ignored in the punk histories and this is wrong.

1. Ages 23-29
   

Happy Go Licky ‘White Lines’, Slint ‘Good Morning, Captain’
Out of nowhere Happy Go Licky rose up from the ashes of Rites of Spring. With the exact same line-up as RoS they had totally changed their style. A complete 180 from the sincere proto-emo of RoS, they surprised everyone with a 5 song 12” packaged in a manila envelope. This changed my concept of the idea of the song. As there were NO songs per se, just “jagged dancceable” (in your death disco) ”sheets of noise”. (as Mark Anderson described it in the book ‘dance of days’.) Happy Go Licky rarely practiced, they relied on intuition and smarts and an art school aesthetic that colored it all in. They did not record in a studio, the tracks on the ep (later expanded into an amazing cd on dischord with 21 tracks,  some repeated in different versions-they never played the same song the same way twice) are culled from their 6 or so live shows. these songs are moments that occured and will never occur again. ‘White Lines’ is actually a cover of the Melle Mel song. But HgL idea of covering a song was the bass player would play the bassline as best as he could from remembering the original and the rest of the would let their guitars shriek and yell out lyrics of the song they could remember- “take me higher baby”, “freebase”, “crystal eyes”, “blown away”. almost like a cut up of the lyrics. It was an amazing thing.
Another out of nowhere band was Slint. They showed how to strip down the sound to its bare essentials. I think Steve Albini said Slint’s drummer, Britt Walford (later in first lineup of The Breeders, the one that made the amazing ‘Pod’ album) was the thing that made him a great drummer was that he knew when not to play. ‘Good Morning, Captain’ takes you on a slow burn for 6 months, you hear a long story of a shipwreck or a dream until suddenly the music rises and Brian McMahon starts screaming “I MISS YOU!!!” over and over again as the song fades to its cruel end. 

7. Ages late 20s to present
My Bloody Valentine ‘To Here Knows When’, Dead C ‘Helen Said This’
This is a song I heard in 1991 when I bought the ‘Loveless’ album. But this is a song I carry with me wherever I go. The guitars and vocals are blur into one and the music shifts and leaves you woozy. Its the sound of a dream and I can’t think of anything else like it. So many bands tried to emulate them and though many great bands (and a whole bunch of lousy ones) came in their wake, no one sounded like them.
This Dead C track is another song I heard before 30 but I cannot get away from it. There is nothing so raw. Guitar as noise, drums like falling down a staircase and Michael Morley imploring “Helen she said/Helen she said/Helen she said/I don’t need you…