Most Influential Albums/Music

The Tragically Hip – Road Apples

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(Album ©1991, MCA Records)

After college was filled with all kinds of new music,
as I was working at a radio station and had lots of time and access to see bands. I got into Phish around this time, after pretty much ignoring them all through college as they were refining their sound. We played “Chalkdust Torture” on WIZN and I liked that, so I dug into A Picture of Nectar and enjoyed it quite a bit. I saw the Smashing Pumpkins when they opened for Jane’s Addiction in Montreal, and enjoyed them less. I had seen Drivin’N’Cryin’ open for Soul Asylum a few years earlier, and then their record Fly Me Courageous came out and I really liked that one a lot.

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Most Influential Albums/Music

Shawn Colvin – Steady On

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(Album ©1989, Columbia Records)

As mentioned previously, college was a time of lots of Steady On
musical discovery for me, as I would assume it is for most people. Lots of new people from different parts of the country with different influences and backgrounds, and lots of local music scenes, to share. Having my roommate, Steve, was a godsend in this regard, not only because he brought so many interesting bands to my attention from his pre-college years, but also because he was on the UVM concert bureau. That was the group responsible for booking all the music shows on campus – they were the concert promoters. So I got to see or work crew for a bunch of shows that I might have otherwise ignored because my roomie was working so hard to promote them.

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Most Influential Albums/Music

Fishbone – Truth And Soul

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The first 7 most influential albums have all been ones
that are now considered “classic rock,” but as I mentioned previously, college was where I started broadening my tastes and opening myself up to different genres and less mainstream bands. My roommate for three of the four years at UVM, Steve, was a big part of that, as he had such cool, varied musical interests. Thank you, Steve. But then, college is supposed to be a place where you really expand your educational boundaries, isn’t it? (It is – that was rhetorical.) Sophomore year was my big year for that.

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Most Influential Albums/Music

Guns-N-Roses – Appetite For Destruction

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So far, if you’re following along, we’ve gotten through Appetite For Destruction
high school. Van Halen joined Bruce, The Stones, The Kinks, and The Who as my favorite bands – all of whom I got to see live at least once. 102.7 WNEW-FM was my station, playing the ’60’s – ’80’s rock-n-roll before it was labeled “classic rock.” Van Halen led me to The Scorpions, Bon Jovi, Ratt, and the hair metal bands of the mid-eighties, while my sister and some of my friends were listening to new wave on WLIR, so I got to sample all of that, from Erasure to the Cure to The Cult and The Smiths. And movie soundtracks kept pop-rock alive for me, from Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” to Huey Lewis and Phil Collins’ bland soundtrack work. I heard it all, basically. Then I got to college.

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Most Influential Albums/Music/The Most Impressive Debut Albums

Van Halen – Van Halen

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Bruce, The Kinks, The Stones and The Who got me Van Halen I
through Middle School, but by 1983, I knew there was other exciting music out there. I had already picked up on snippets of harder rock, from Rush (“Tom Sawyer”) and the aforementioned Kiss to Queen and AC/DC (“Back in Black,” “For Those About To Rock”) and Ozzy (“Crazy Train”), I had yet to really dive in. That immersion into the newer, harder rock-n-roll happened in the summer before Freshman year of high school (1983).

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Most Influential Albums/Music

The Kinks – Give The People What They Want

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I used to spend a lot of time with my aunt Deane & Give The People What They Want
uncle Howie – we’ve been really tight since I was a little kid. So spending a weekend afternoon with them in NYC was a semi-regular event. One Saturday in early 1982, I was at their apartment on the Upper West Side. We had just had a burger at the Jackson Hole on Columbus and 85th St., and maybe also gone to West Side Comics to buy comic books, and we were back at the apartment listening to music.

My uncle put on side 1 of The Kinks’ Give The People What They Want. I didn’t pay much attention, until he turned the record over and the first song on side 2 came on (back when LPs were still the primary way to listen to music). “Destroyer” is one of my all-time favorite songs, and I heard it for the first time that day. By the time it was over, I asked him to play it again, and then after we finished listening to the second side, I asked if we could hear the first side again. I was blown away.

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Most Influential Albums/Music

Bruce Springsteen – The River

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I’m tracing my musical evolution with you chronologically,
so you might find it surprising that Bruce was not the first but the fourth step in that journey given my deep love of his music. And this step is due to my family’s influence. Some of you may know that my mom’s sister is a pretty successful music journalist. She spent the early ‘70’s touring with Zeppelin and then the Stones, and then settled into a job writing and editing a rock magazine (“Rock Scene”) and writing the rock column for the New York Post. Now, she’s the music contributing editor for Vanity Fair. And my mom’s other sister has worked with her the entire time, so both of my aunts were and are plugged into the music scene pretty well. They were the ones that had taken me and my then 6-year old sister to see our first legitimate concert, The Village People at MSG in 1979 (mind-bending).

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Music/My Favorite Albums

Living Colour – Vivid

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Today, I wanted to review one of the best debut albums in all of rock-n-roll, which sometimes gets overlooked – Living Colour’s album Vivid. Vivid
Some of you may know that I have a hard rock side of me that lives happily alongside the more dominant classic rock persona, and it was fairly prevalent during high school. While Springsteen, the Stones, the Kinks, and Cheap Trick were my mainstays, so were Van Halen (though only through 1984), Kiss (through 1985), Scorpions, Def Leppard, and Rush. And then I discovered Guns N Roses Freshman year of college. Another band I got turned on to just after that was Living Colour.

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Most Influential Albums/Music

Kiss – Rock & Roll Over

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This record is the first rock and roll record I ever owned. Rock and Roll OverIt came out in late 1976, and I heard it soon after when a second-grade classmate (TJ Rapaport, where are you?!) brought it in for show-and-tell. Up to that point, I had really only heard The Beatles and a lot of Motown that my Mom loved, and the folk music my Dad preferred, and the ‘70’s AM radio “rock” (David Gates, England Dan & John Ford Coley, Firefall, Eagles – now known as “yacht rock”) that was clearly the road trip compromise in our family. As you can imagine, this record blew my mind.

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