Now that the 25 things about me list seems to be passing out of Facebook ubiquity, we've moved onto the list of 15 most important albums. I'd like to pose a slightly different question: what albums were both essential to the development of your musical collection and an embarrassment today? What well worn favorites do you hide from the prying eyes of all but your most intimate friends? What clunker was constantly atop your own personal playlist?
The following are three admissions against interest.
1. Emerson Lake & Palmer, Works Volume 2. The first order question is this: can someone be strongly influenced by an ELP album and feel good about it? I will assume, without deciding, that the answer is yes. But pulease! Did I have to choose this collection as an all-important introduction to grown up (read: high school) music? And did I really have to give my jazz-loving, much-older brother a copy for Hanukah in 1978 – because I thought he'd appreciate Keith Emerson's rendition of Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag? (He gave me a copy of the Blues Brothers Briefcase Full of Blues, a highly respectful niche pick, all things considered.) In a very Oscar-like turn, this album goes number one in recognition of the fact that it led me to buy other embarrassing albums like Works Volume I.
2. Utopia, Oops Wrong Planet. Todd Rundgren's late 1970's band. Would I be doing even more damage if I admitted that I'd been humming the songs as recently as 2006 and dug the old vinyl out for a couple of plays during my last months in Alabama? Probably.
3. Chicago X. I suppose I'm going to claim an excuse on this one. This was actually only the third album I'd ever purchased for myself – and one of the other two was the K-Tel's 1975 Music Express. (Everybody gets a couple of gimme's on K-Tel collections - weren't these discs just puberty, operationalized?) This Chicago album was probably no better or worse than other Chicago albums released around a similar time. But this was a more systematic problem of mine: I discovered mediocre artists right when they were getting fully washed up. Why couldn't I be the savvy 14 year old who fell in love with The Sex Pistols? If only my parents had enrolled me in an afterschool program at the Art Institute of Chicago…
Well, I already outed myself on Facebook by putting ELO's "Out of the Blue" on my top 15 most crucial albums. Yet, Filler, you seem to demand more self-debasement.
OK, how about this?
Chuck Mangione, "Feels So Good" (http://www.google.com/musicl?lid=6baZE-LgqrF&aid=nj9aPebd33B) and "Chase the Clouds Away" (http://www.google.com/musicl?lid=1klTwqbFkvL&aid=nj9aPebd33B). We had a turntable in the basement and I can remember spending hours listening to the title track of the second of these albums just to listen to the triangle in the background, which for some reason I found quite magical.
I'll probably be back with more.