4 For Life...

Nicole and I took drive up to Sacramento over the weekend to visit family. We left the L.A. basin a little after 5AM on Saturday morning and started the 6 hour, 400 mile trip north. The early hours and hum of the truck helped lull Nicole into sleep. I turned on the radio and popped in a CD, "Louder Than Bombs", by The Smiths.

I started to smile and reminisce about all the great and not so great times this album had been in my life. I started to think about what other albums have had such an impact on who I am today. I could think of four. All of them from my early years. All four of them will always be in my collection. When MP3's and iTunes go by the way side, like albums and CD's, and are replaced my music microchips implanted in our brain, the first 4 microchips I'll buy, or "download" will be these four. Check it out.

Metal Health - Quiet Riot. Alright, so maybe the first album isn't in my iTunes yet (I'm downloading as I write), this album turn my life on it's ear, literally. Before 1983, the year of the albums release, I had albums, (you remember pressed vinyl?) that my mom had bought for me. I had 45's of singles like "Rainy Night" by Eddie Rabbit. But it wasn't until we got cable and TBS and USA networks had music TV shows. I can't remember the name of the show on TBS, but USA had "Night Flight" and my brother Ray and I would watch on Friday and Saturday nights. We would even hook up the tape recorder to the TV and tape the songs we liked. Then one day a video came on, "Cum on Feel the Noise". I was mesmerized and had to have the album. I bought it, and it spun on the record player non-stop. It started the "metal" phase of my life, my brother Matt remembers well. It's quite embarrassing to think about now, and I won't go into details, but I will say this, I didn't have enough money to buy the spandex so popular during that time, but I did have every colour bandana you could find.

Some Great Reward - Depeche Mode. My friend Marc has my email name as "Depeche", Because he remembers how much I played this, and the many other Depeche Mode albums I own. But "Some Great Reward" was the first one I bought. I didn't put me over the edge in fashion sense, I still wore my bandanas and swim suit (I was competitively swimming at the time). But this tape was in my Walkman all the time at swim meets. It was the perfect album for discovering girls. Listen to it sometime. It was really one of the albums that started the "New Wave" phenomenon.

How to be a Zillionaire! - ABC. And so started my Mod phase. I remember seeing the video for "Be Near Me". It was unlike anything I had seen before and the song was so damn catchy. I remember getting the cassette tape in my stocking for Christmas (1985) and listening to it all the way to church, to my aunts house for Christmas brunch, to my Grandma's house for lunch, and all afternoon. Every time the video was on MTV (we had MTV by then) I watched it, enthralled by Mark White's haircut. For those you young'uns out there, his head was completely shaved except for his bangs, which were curled up and around, as if he used one hair curler to help it defy gravity. The next day, I cut all my hair off except for my bangs, packed all my bandanas into a box and put it in the attic, tore holes in the knees of my jeans, and grabbed a pen and graffitied every lyric I could remember on the those jeans. I went out and bought every loud coloured shirt I could find and started to wear eyeliner. This is how I looked for my high school senior photo. This look and this music, brought me to my best friends in high school, Kent and Danny. This look and this music got me my first girlfriends. And speaking of first girlfriends...

"Louder Than Bombs" - The Smiths. My first real serious girlfriend came from the "Mod" clique at school. She had friends who listened to The Smiths. I had never heard of them, but when I sat for the first time and listened to the song "Ask", something in me clicked. The lyric, "If it's not love, than it's the bomb that will bring us together," was perfect for the cold war mentality I grew up with. I think it was the first album I ever heard where the songs were more story oriented, less "verse-chorus-catchy hook". I would listen to songs like "William, it was Really Nothing" and wonder, who the hell is William? William Shakespeare? Willem Dafoe? Willard Scott? Who is Morrissey singing about? This album led into buying everything ever recorded by The Smiths and later, Morrissey. It was the song "I Know It's Over" from the album "The Queen is Dead", that got me through my first hard break up (same Mod girl that got me into The Smiths).

Since these four albums, I have bought a lot of music that I found influential, but it was these albums that more or less carved me into the person that I am now. My style may have changed many times over the years, heck, now I shop at Sears and JC Penny's for most of my work clothes. But these four albums can be played at anytime, anywhere, and I will never grow tired of them.

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