Category: Music

22 years old…

Hooverphonic: 2 Wicky (1996)

No doubt before a lot of my readers were even born, but there was a lot of really good dance music that came out that year, and specifically that summer. Ironically it also marked the death of the genre called disco, only to have it go underground for a bit and be reborn even stronger as “dance music” in the 80s, defining the sound of the entire decade.

At least that’s the way I remember it.

Sylvester: Step II (1978)

Of course I had to pull it out and give it a spin tonight! (One of the few pieces of my original vinyl collection to miraculously survive the purge in the late 80s.)

Madonna: True Blue (1986)

Along with Pet Shop Boys’ Please, this was the soundtrack for our initial move to San Francisco that summer.

Chicago: Chicago X (1976)

This was the go-to soundtrack for my first semester of college. Of course, it didn’t help that you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing If You Leave Me Now.

Carpenters: A Song For You (1972)

https://youtu.be/OhrkuFw_R_g

Grace Jones: Fame (1978)

MAKE IT STOP! (Don’t get me wrong—I love this song, but it’s been on endless repeat in my head since yesterday afternoon!

Grace Jones: I’m Not Perfect (1986)

https://youtu.be/r3BzfM5K_oA

Sade: Stronger Than Pride (1988)

Alan Parsons Project: Eye In The Sky (1982)

I’ve never heard an Alan Parsons Project album I did not absolutely adore.

a-ha: Hunting High and Low (1985)

Roxy Music: Avalon (1982)

Another one of those albums whose recording quality took my breath away.

Elton John: Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (1975)

This was probably the most-anticipated album release of my youth, and has remained my all time favorite EJ album my entire life. The entire album is pure genius from beginning to end. My favorite song from the album, Better Off Dead, is posted above.

Produced by Gus Dudgeon, it was recorded at the Caribou Ranch in Nederland, CO from June – July 1974. After the successful Caribou album, the prolific musician returned to the Caribou Ranch recording studio in the Colorado Rockies to record his next release. The concept album is an autobiographical account of Elton John and Bernie Taupin and the struggles they faced at the beginning of their musical careers. The single Someone Saved My Life Tonight, is about John’s half-hearted suicide attempt while he was engaged to a woman, faced with choosing her over his musical career (and still struggling with his sexual orientation at the time). His friend and former band mate Long John Baldry convinced him to break off the engagement (whom John’s refers to in the song as “Sugar Bear”). The album also marks the last time that John recorded with drummer Nigel Olsson and bassist Dee Murray until the Too Low For Zero album in 1983. Captain Fantastic makes history when it becomes the first album to ever enter the Billboard Top 200 at number one. For the original LP release, a limited number of promotional copies are pressed on translucent brown vinyl, with each album jacket autographed by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. The album is remastered and reissued on CD in 1995 with the stand alone singles Philadelphia Freedom, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, and Elton’s cover of the John Lennon penned One Day A Time (B-side of Lucy), added as bonus tracks. Out of print on vinyl since 1989, the album is remastered and reissued in 2017. Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy spends seven weeks (non-consecutive) at number one on the Billboard Top 200, and is certified 3x Platinum in the US by the RIAA.

A couple weeks ago I went to take this album for a spin and to my absolute horror realized that I did not have it in my collection! HOW COULD THIS BE? Well, thanks again to discogs.com, I was able to score a mint, unopened copy for a very reasonable price and was reminded of how much better it sounds on vinyl than on any digital medium.

I also perhaps need to revise my opinion that Nightclubbing was Miss Jones’ greatest album. If you take a step back, you realize that like two sides of a single coin, Nightclubbing and Warm Leatherette are intimately connected. You can’t have one without the other; if you were throw together into a double album you have an absolute masterpiece.

Carpenters Carpenters (1971)

This was the first (but not the last) Carpenters album I bought. My love of the Carpenters probably should’ve been a good hint for my parents, y’know…

Dad never cared for Karen’s voice. I remember he once said, “She sounds like a cat in heat.”

May seems to be a month where a lot of good music from days gone by was released.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E38Ob5hut8&list=PLrpyDacBCh7BSproKDoZBGbLZGArqIF5s

Donna Summer: I Remember Yesterday (1977)

The summer when you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing I Feel Love. Good times.

Grace Jones: Nightclubbing (1981)

Her best, IMHO. And if you haven’t, you really need to hear it on vinyl played through a good system.

What I still find amazing is how Pull Up To The Bumper—whose subject matter and lyrics, while certainly tame by today’s standards and definitely not about parking a car—got as much mainstream airplay as it did.

Sade: Stronger Than Pride (1988)

Feel old yet?

Kraftwerk: Computer World (1981)

The Carpenters: Now and Then (1973)

Gawd, I’m old…

Grace Jones: Warm Leatherette (1980)
And the world was never the same.

As I wrote several days ago, I’m really grooving on Deep Dive Corp. right now. My favorite so far has to be Support Your Local Groover, and Back and Forth is my most-played cut from the album. Check it out!

Growing up, I was surrounded by classical music. Both my folks loved the great composers. Beethoven was their favorite. Bach, not so much (I had to discover his genius on my own). And while there were exceptions (Streisand and Herb Alpert immediately come to mind as being heard during my childhood), classical was by and large my gateway to the world of music. It probably also explains my love of movie soundtracks since the vast majority of them are orchestral in nature.

To my parents’ horror, I discovered rock in high school. I blame most of it on my buddy across the cul-de-sac from us, who not only turned me on to hi-fi equipment but a lot of awesome music as well. His collection spanned everything from Chicago to Deep Purple, and while I didn’t like all of it, I did latch on to many bands that remain favorites to this day.

I’m of the belief that the music you come to love in your 20s is the music that will resonate the most with you as you go through the rest of your life. With me—coming out and clubbing—it was disco and all the myriad mutations that came after. It’s what still comprises the vast majority of my vinyl collection, and it seems each song has a special memory attached to it.

It wasn’t until I hit my 40s that I discovered jazz via the wife of one of my employers. The gateway drug was Michael Feinstein, which in turn led me to seek out the “original” versions of the songs he sang. This lead me to Ella, Billie, Sarah, and countless others. I embraced it with a fervor matched only by my love of disco and dance music. It was augmented during our time in Denver with discoveries I made via KUVO.

I’ve always been a fan of electronic music, a genre that tends to cross over all others (rock, jazz, dance, and even classical—thank you, Wendy Carlos and Isao Tomita). Jean-Michel Jarre to this day gives me chills.

While not strictly electronic in nature, it was a few years ago that I started getting into what I guess could loosely be called “Ambient” and “Chill House”. (Y’know, those ridiculously priced CDs that often have “Ibiza” in their names. ) Anyhow, as I’ve written before, one of my favorites in the Ambient genre has been Loscil, but there’s also Biosphere, Weatherman and many others.

Very recently I discovered (via My Husband and I) the group Deep Dive Corp and I’m really grooving on them at the moment. It’s the type of music I put on when I want to write or be productive. It definitely gets in my head in that regard.

So while I superficially identify with Sarah’s comic above, I guess it’s not really true at all. Even after all these years, I’m still discovering new music that can play me in so many different ways.

I Feel Love notwithstanding, I really did not like this album when it first came out. Based on my acquisition of Giorgio Moroder’s From Here to Eternity earlier that summer and Donna’s own I Feel Love that was being played everywhere, I was expecting the entire album to be in that same hard-thumping electronic vein, and it most definitely was not.

What we got on Side 1 was sixteen minutes of 50s-inspired bebop that flew in the face of everything Giorgio (or for that matter, Donna) had done previously. And now I believe that was the whole point.

As the years have gone by, those A-Side tracks have grown to become my favorites, magically transporting me back to sun-dappled autumn afternoons in my dorm room at the University of Arizona. I may not have liked the album, but damn I played the hell out of it because it was Donna!

The B-side contained three more tracks (a more traditional mix of soul/disco that were good, but not as good as the flip side) before culminating in the still-amazing I Feel Love.

 

Happy Birthday to Thomas Dolby, one of my most admired musical artists from the 80s with whom—like Madonna—I share a birth year. And among all his work, Europa and the Pirate Twins—even more than She Blinded Me With Science—remains my favorite.

A few weeks ago I found myself wondering, “Was Billy Idol’s White Wedding ever actually released on white vinyl?”

Which would only make sense, right?

A quick trip to Discogs answered that question, and $15 later it’s in my collection.

Along the same, “I wonder if…” lines, the other day I was listening to The Peter Jacques Band’s Fire Night Dance (all four cuts on the LP massive disco hits back in 1979) and started wondering if they’d done anything thereafter. Once again I headed over to Discogs, and discovered that indeed, they had a followup release in 1980 called Welcome Back. Were they gone?

Anyhow, the album cover looked familiar, so I either had it in my collection back in the day and somehow neglected to catalog it at the time, or it was one of those I’d heard in the clubs, saw in a record store, and decided it really wasn’t worth spending $5.99 on.

I went over to Spotify, not really expecting to find it there, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it—along with a couple other releases that I’ll explore at another time.

In tone and tempo, in a lot of ways it reminds me of Rice and Beans, another group from the era I only became acquainted with a few years ago. It has that definite not-disco but also not-quite-dance-music sound of the early 80s. It’s not bad. It’s not great. Welcome Back and Exotical L.Y. are catchy tunes. But I definitely understand why at the time I didn’t add it to my collection—or if I did, it slipped under the radar when the time came to catalog it.