My Sick Mind

Laura tagged me to do this meme [I'm not really sure what 'meme' means] about influential music in my life. I don't have all the mystical "here's where I was when [that] was playing" stuff that others may have. My list has more to do with songs that I can point to as guiding posts for my later-in-life musical tastes. The rules are as follows : 1. Name between 5 & 10 songs that have made an impact on your life. I’ll leave it up to you to decide how many you wish to describe. 2. Pass it onto five other people with a link back to your own post and this one as the original. 1. Donimo - Cocteau Twins . This one opened a whole genre of music to me. I can remember precisely where I was when I first heard it. On my way home from work, tuned to WXPN . I waited on the street until the host finally said what it was. That weekend I was in the record store looking for Treasure . Even now, when my soul needs soothing (almost every day) I find myself listening to...

Back in the 60s (where I come from), music magazines and radio stations created competitions between bands. The Beatles vs. The Four Seasons [I never figured that one out], Black Sabbath vs. Deep Purple, ELP vs. Yes and The Beatles vs. The Rolling Stones. You were either in one camp or the other. For someone as competitive and opinionated as I, those were sometimes life-altering choices. My mistake as a youngster was allowing the media (radio and magazines) to make me choose. Perhaps that is why I rebel against media now? As I look back on those issues, I found that I would have loved Deep Purple, but I was a Black Sabbath guy, and Deep Purple was the enemy. Luckily, I was early on The Beatles' bandwagon, so The Four Seasons never stood a chance. Thank you, media. Do I sound hypocritical? I found ELP and Yes around the same time, too. I remember seeing a Circus magazine article that proclaimed "Keith Emerson's Favorite Cup of Blood - Genesis". So, being a huge ELP f...

I have mixed feelings. As I sit here listening to old Yes music, I long for the days of album art, yet wish that we had today’s digital technology in the 1970s. I want my cake, and eat it, too. If you're under the age of 40, you may not know what I mean when I say "album art", but it was a beautiful thing that peaked in the 1970s and died with the Compact Disc . Some of you may be too young to relate to my issue, so let me take you back to the days of vinyl, and some vivid memories that make me pine for the old days. It’s the summer of 1972, I was 15 years old, and I’m in the garage of my cousin, who had a fancy stereo set up out there. Among his collection of LPs was Jethro Tull ’s “Thick as a Brick” , which is an epic work that ran from one side of the album through the other. Inside the album was a full-sized newspaper, with fictional stories made up from whole cloth, about nothing in particular over maybe 10 pages. Listen to the record and read. Really don'...