My Top Ten High School Albums (pt 1)

This is actually my column for the May Hatchet so it might seem redundant and weird to those who currently read my blog (all seven of you)I have expanded some things and let others be. Also, I would like to say that one person in particular helped me understand the lasting beauty and depth of most of these albums/ artists: Jenny. Without you I never would have heard the rubber bands behind the voice of Leonard Cohen, or understood that "Hallelujah" is not a song about the greatness of love, but of the gravity and pain of love. "A castle for a kiss upon your shoulder" is the line that always reminds me of you,though, really, all of his songs do. GLB really was our house band but your dedication far outweighed mine in the last ten years. So I owe you thanks, all of you I mention here and the many I don't. A

In the last few months I have been addicted to reading my friend’s blogs: I surreptitiously check them at work, I make us late for movies, I obsessively try to talk everyone into visiting them (usually all for naught.) But lately I have had more luck because of a simple idea that has many reminiscing, blatantly laughing at and more often than not, slowly nodding our collective (yet separate) heads in agreement with the bloggers. It all started with Marco, whose blog, How Not To Blog, (http://cangrejeros.blogs.friendster.com/how_not_to_bloger.com/how_not_to_blog) listed his top ten high school albums. (Marco is also the progenitor of the iPod shuffle game (which everyone should do) and also spurned many blog entries from people barely connected anymore.) Is it better because I knew him then? Maybe. Is it better because we haven’t had a real or pleasant conversation since those times? Definitely not. I can say that he is the reason that I fell in love with mid-career Dinosaur Jr., on Where You Been. Especially "Goin Home", which Sara and I played over and over trying to figure out what the fuck J. Mascis was saying, the song we both considered to be our song about Marco, but for drastically different reasons. To find out that this album is on his top ten made me miss him for the first time in a long time. Even though it’s small town Raleigh, and we see each other across the smoky Jackpot!, or at the Raleigh Times (often with his girlfriend who is the sister of my brother's former best friend whom Sasha and I both "dated" (i.e. made out with a lot) the summer we were fifteen. The brother, that is, not Marco's girlfriend. Shaking fist:Small town Raleigh! Again!). To read his blog and find out that he grew up into this smart, funny, slightly less self-righteous but overall lovely and graceful person is the best thing about reading blogs of people you know/ used to know. You don’t even have to be close to them anymore to feel like you are. High school albums are the ones that changed your life, the ones that decided who you are. I buy into What You Like Matters, I bet a lot of you do too. These are albums that determined what you like, at the very least they decided where you would go, who you would grow up to be. These are the albums that you lived and died by, the albums you listened to when you got your heart broken the first, the fourteenth, the one hundredth time, the albums that you spent summers driving to, longing for home away from your home, the albums that made you choose your friends and your enemies, the albums that told you you were capable of great and disastrous things. These are the songs that built a civilization and destroyed one at the same time. So here are the first five of ten, in no particular order, to be continued later.

Jeff Buckley
Grace
Columbia
I was fifteen. It was the day after the 1994 Lollapalooza where I met (and kissed! On the cheek! And talked about aliens and the bigger meaning of Lollapalooza and music and sex and summertime! Oh yeah, baby!) with PERRY! FARRELL! Okay, let’s stop here for a moment. The only reason I did not include Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual De Lo Habitual on my list is because I started listening to it in 1990 due to my older broham’s excellent and influential taste in music. It changed my world. It was the first album I couldn't stop listening to. From the Spanish introduction and merciless drumbeat of "Stop!" to the gorgeous wandering wildebeest of a song "Three Days", to the great symposium on love poetry that is "Classic Girl" it was my First Album That Mattered. Fast forward through four years of watching The Gift, (over and over and over) of watching every interview on MTV News, (whassup pre-Internet and YouTube!), of reading every article in Rolling Stone and Spin (ugh). Four years, y’all. For real. And then I meet him. Perry. Perry! Fucking! Farrell! It was almost too much to take. You see Sasha and I were out of town when tickets went on sale and it sold out before we could get them. So, dressed in Catholic school girl skirts and converses and, I shit you not, a little boy’s Jurassic Park shirt from K-Mart we went to the parking lot of then Walnut Creek and planned to scam our way in. It did not work. We tried the period excuse. We tried sneaking in through a faulty place in the fence. We tried being cute. It did not work. We sat on a curb, dejected, hearing the bass and picturing the spectacle of George Clinton. It sucked, okay? I was in a little boy’s size Jurassic Park T-Shirt and a plaid wool skirt in fucking August, okay? So I thought I was hallucinating when I saw this man, this beautiful, beautiful man, walking towards us. I hit Sasha over and over again on the shoulder trying to get the words out. Sweat ran down my back but I felt suddenly chilly, faint-headed. I rasped out, "It’s Perry. It’s Him" (I was on a first name basis with my obsession to my friends, so she knew what I was saying.) He came over to us like an angel, asking "Hey girls, what’s the story?" We quickly informed him of our hi jinks, the scamming of the security dudes, the fact that we were out of town when tickets went on sale. He talked to us for twenty minutes, at least, about bat-shit crazy stuff, as mentioned above. Eventually he told us that we should just walk in with him. We did so obligingly, and with two forties and a bottle of Mad Dog in our rainbow embroidered, hippie backpacks. The ones they sold ad nauseam at places, well, like Lollapalooza. We entered the gates. And he kissed us both on the cheek and said, (seriously) "Run free girls!" We did. We screamed as we ran up that big hill just as the Beastie Boys came on stage playing "Sabotage" and it is one of those indelible moments. The ones you die with. The ones that remind you that you lived. So the next day. Sasha had alcohol poisoning (we ran into some older boys we knew and spent the majority of the night after the concert at the Art Museum, lying on wet green grass, exhilarated with our caveat, craving some kind of closure to an unbelievable day. The kind that can only come from making out with future movie stars and Army vets on the pastoral green of the Art Museum hill.) We were both exhausted. I really wanted to go to Cup a Joe’s (Hillsborough) to see this guy that some music writer at the Independent would not stop going on and on about. I went with my older brother, the same one that gave me RDLH, and poor, sick Sasha. I will say that I never saw a band play at Cup a Joe’s before or since this show, but it happened. Before the show we saw this gorgeous man wandering around in a white T-shirt and well-worn jeans, bare foot (!) tapping on the various mics. My friend and I told my brother stories from our unbelievable night before, alternately laughing and groaning. We were in near hysterics when his band began to quietly play. And then he began to sing. He was five feet away from me, maybe less. And that’s when I heard Jeff Buckley sing the opening, haunting notes to "Mojo Pin". The world fell away from me. I could have touched him, I wanted to touch him, he was so close. Instead, I sat, mouth gaping, watching him, feral and musical in his body in a way that I had never seen, I could smell him. He smelled like sex and coffee and misery and Old Spice. He smelled like the future. "Born again from the rhythm/Screaming down from heaven." Talk about a church revival, I was a fucking believer. I bought my copy of Grace from him, personally, after the show. I have since owned at least three copies. When I think about this album I think of so many things, (obviously). But most of all, I remember hearing him sing the whole thing to me. Barefoot, beautiful, damaged and dangerous, the greatest boyfriend I never had and yet, that everyone had. An album you can make babies to, or live and die a thousand times a day as any teenager can, to. The Next Album That Mattered, and too much for me to ever contain here.

Tori Amos

Under the Pink
Atlantic
Shut up. I know it’s not cool but I don’t care. When I thought of high school albums this was one of the first to come to mind. I listened to this album every night for two years, listening and listening until Boys for Pele came out. I did American History homework to this album and wrote WAY too many journal entries to this album. I listened as I pined for Andy, a boy who lived in Ohio that I spent one crazy magical night at the beach with. Sara and I listened the night we found the Sheraton, having just deposited Laura off at the airport, unwilling to let summer end, green bean bag frogs on our heads as we accidentally on purpose got lost on the roads behind RDU. We hummed "Yes, Anastasia" as we grabbed salt and pepper shakers from room service trays left outside hotel room doors and took pictures of one another wandering down deep, hushed, carpeted hallways. We listened in the Ford Tempo, paying $.25 a mile for very mile that could not be attributed to school or work, the night we picked flowers form a median on forty for our mothers the night before Mother's Day. I listened the night my parents wanted to put me in a mental hospital but couldn’t agree which one. From the isolation and postcard imagery of "Pretty Good Year" to the razor-sharp, icily tongued "Waitress" to the overt and welcome celebration of female masturbation and religious ecstasy of "Icicle" ("getting off, getting off/ while they’re all downstairs/ singing prayers sing away/ he’s in my pumpkin p.j.’s/lay your book on my chest/ feel the word/ feel the word") this was an album meant for serious and angry women. The shoe was fitting. There I was. One more thing, there is a live recording of Tori in Raleigh, on the tour to support this album. She starts to play her cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit", Cobain having died just a few months before. I scream, recognizing that melody anywhere, even on piano, even as she plays it. There is a recording of that concert that got released as a bootleg, and it’s funny and weird to hear myself screaming for that song, in the hands of her, at that moment. I’m glad it was captured, I’m glad I can’t ever deny my love for this album, or that time in my life.

Grant Lee Buffalo
Fuzzy/Mighty Joe Moon
Slash, Slash/ Reprise
I know I’m cheating, but fuck you. I first saw GLB on a cable access channel here in Raleigh, on a show that played Music Videos that weren’t ever going to see MTV. "Mockingbirds" was the song, the video all black and white Wim Wenders imagery and the first lesson in the dark arts that we came to know as that most Southern of magics, nostalgia. I was at Sara’s house, and her little brother, affectionately referred to as Dog, was the one to hear/see the video first and point out how awesome it was. We immediately took on GLB as our "House Band", if you will, in that, in our friend group, all us loved them unequivocally and no one "owned" them more than anyone else (except Dog, of course, whom we never gave credit to until now, I suppose). GLB was the sound of our crumbling innocence, the sound of the South under Reconstruction, filled with dread and hope and adolescent confusion and lust. Procuring pictures of hopeless convicts, log cabins filled with desire so great the building threatened to collapse, tattoos and handy-cams and birds on a wire, it shook all of us. The sound of buying books from Reader’s Corner at midnight off the donation shelves, of ordering delivery waffle fries and roast beef subs from Sub Conscious so I could flirt with the cute (thirty-something) delivery guy. It was the essence of adolescence, with a better vocabulary. I still get drunk and listen to these albums, and often cry for all that went wrong, for all that songs like "Stars and Stripes" made us want, for the beauty and despair in "Mockingbirds", the strange folksy beauty of "The Last days of Tecumseh". It’s like licking a sore place on the inside of your lip, painful and private and glorious in that in the end its yours alone.

Wu-Tang Clan

Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
Loud
Melanie’s white Tempo (I rode in a lot of these in the early to mid nineties). Wu-Tang on the stereo, skipping school to get Mountain Dew freezes at the Wolf Mart. Rescuing turtles at the man-made lake by Enloe, scamming the security guards (another theme?) with Krispy Kreme doughnuts or stories about going to Planned Parenthood (seriously going to Hell). Being in awe of her and Sasha going to the (very rough) show at the Ritz, being as they were ninety pound white girls in a crowd of serious hip hop guys and holding their own. "M-E-T-H-O-D Man" ("Hey! You! Get off my cloud/you don’t know me and you don’t know my style") "C.R.E.A.M.", "Protect Ya Neck", "Tearz", "Can It Be All So Simple", "Bring Da Ruckus", smoking cigarettes, saving our souls, having serious fun and exploring the best that hip-hop had to offer. This is the cruising album, the drunken cigars at Luke’s house, the angry and tearful from break-ups but mostly the celebratory I’m feeling like a bad-ass album from high school, and it still holds up.

Leonard Cohen/ Nick Drake/ Morphine

The Best Of/ Five Leaves Left/ Good
When I was 17 I traveled by train with Sara up to Rochester, New York, so that she could see her New York friends and also so she could fall in love with a boy, Michael, who now is soon to be her brother-in-law. (She married Dave and then she introduced Michael to Dave’s sister and now Michael and Jess are engaged and the world grows smaller and I start to lose my mind). This makes small town Raleigh look like The Big City.
Anyway, Michael is like another big brother to me, one that turned me on to Television, the Magnetic Fields, Mathew Sweet, Luna, Richard Hell, XTC, and countless others. But then there are the albums of that summer, the magical summer in Rochester when Mike’s parents were gone, it seems, the entire time, though I definitely ate Chicken Vermouth with them at least once. The summer Mike turned 22, with a beer ball (basically a pony keg in a weird plastic ball-like sleeve) and us girls from N.C. there to visit him and fall in love (Sara) and fall in like eternally (me). More than anything I remember listening to records with Mike, on his bed with the blue bedspread while dusk fell on Northern New York in late summer and the fireflies collected at the end of the street. It was all so beautiful we thought it would last forever and also knew it could vanish immediately. Ashing cigarettes into a Pepsi can, while night took over day, waiting for cover so we could lay on the 18th hole at the country club down the street and drink warm Budweiser in a can on the wet green grass and dream of the next day, of something better than that moment, knowing it didn’t exist. I’ll admit that for the first six days I was there I was in love with him. How could I not be? He was and still is one of the most beautiful men I know, dark and angular and all hip bones and long leg strides. Not to mention, he had the most amazing taste in music of any person I had ever met. I was used to being the go-to, queen bee of music in my friend circle, then I met Mike, and I have been trying to catch up ever since. I mean, look at this entry alone, and I found all this in one summer, sitting on a single bed in a barely man’s bedroom in Rochester, New York, believing that the fairy tale couldn’t get any better. I’m glad I fell out of love with him and fell into terminal like, as it has been one of the greatest and most challenging relationships of my life. I inevitably fuck it up, but he forgives me, and I love him for it. The smoke filled rooms of Leonard Cohen’s lyrics invaded my brain like heroin, leaving me helpless and sad upon many beds and couches in my lifetime. If you know him you already know the power of hearing your first Leonard Cohen song. Not to mention, Neil Diamond covered "Suzanne", so that makes it a classic no matter what. (more on that soon). When I hear this album I am lost amid the green wax candles dripping and the fact that you can hear rubber bands boinging in the background to "Master Song" (I know it’s not on this album but come one), the realization that Jenny got Leonard Cohen better than all of us, and I hope she finds him soon. Nick Drake, however, remains mine and Michael’s, the one artist and sound that remains completely personal no matter that he’s been featured on a VW commerical. When I hear "River Man " it still makes me shake in my boots, if you will, still makes me remember discovering Rhino, discovering music from before me that was amazing and personal and relevant and not sold to the McCulture. I remember putting in Five Leaves Left in the CD player in the car on the way down to Florida on my last family vacation, at least ten years ago, my brother upset that I was taking out his Phish CD (how the mighty brohams do fall!) or some such horseshit, and then he and my mom completely wowed by the shear vulnearbility and beauty in Drake’s voice. And then I told them the story of how I came to love him and they fell quiet and we grew closer as the sun set in Georgia and I thought of Michael and Sara and our summer and how it couldn’t get any better. Do you choose Pop music? Or does it choose you? When I am sad and listening to Nick Drake and Cohen over and over I wonder but don’t care.
Morphine is the last band whose albums changed my life that summer. I still hear them everywhere, in the new Menomena album, on the angry sax of Sweep the Leg Johnny, literally on the soundtrack to Spank the Monkey. The heavy bass/sax combo combined with the detached, ironic story telling ability of Mark Sandman (how can you not love them?) all contributed to my never dying love for this band. Pre-White Stripes or Comets on Fire or any other band I dare you to think of, these guys were doing it stripped down and heavy and strikingly beautiful. I remember coming back from that summer and winning the respect of one of the many indie-rock kings of Enloe by my professed love of Morphine and he burned me all of the rest of their albums. Vincent Chung thank you, wherever you are, hopefully I’ll see you at the reunion this summer. To say the least they complete the triumvirate of bands that decided who I would be because they were truly good music, some of the first that would continue to color the palate of my life, for the rest of my life. That summer would not be complete without the picture, the sound of "Good" on Michael’s stereo as we debated about love, the nature of it, the inevitability of it while we were all, unaware of it, in the middle of it: living, dying, breathing, eating, sleeping music for the first time in our lives. Do you choose pop music? Or does it choose you? As Lloyd Dobler would say, I don’t care, it doesn’t matter, I’m just glad you’re here.