Just after I wrote the last note I bought and read John Sellers' book Perfect From Now On, subtitled "how indie rock saved my life." It was a fun bit of synchronicity how his description of musical evolution from growing up in small town Michigan through university and beyond closely mirrored my own (not including going on to get drunk with Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices at his home in Dayton and following the band during their farewell tour). But he did start as a pre-teen classic rock/metal afficionado who discovered 80s "alternative rock" in the rat maze of dorm rooms.
Which leads me to my own "University Years" segment of the [more than] 25 albums [and things other than albums] note.
01. Supertramp/Gowan at the Aitken Centre, September 1985.
One element that definitely was absent due to geography during my growing up was live shows. Other than going to see Tommy Hunter with my parents the only rock band that played Campbellton during my teen years was April Wine. Twice. So coming to Fredericton and being given the opportunity to see bands was pretty magical at the time. I think this was technically the third show I went to at university, following on the heels of a free show by The Spoons during frosh week and a showcase concert that same week with headliners The Screaming Trees. Not the Mark Lanegan-led Seattle combo but the PEI band who later became the trees and were soon after clear cut, I assume. Supertramp was a big deal to people... though they had just parted company with Roger Hodgson who was their primary song writer for years. Still they put on a great show, but truth be told I probably enjoyed Gowan more. He was riding the wave of his first album and all the singles it spawned. I'm pretty sure I had the "Strange Animal" 45 if not the whole album, at least dubbed on cassette. Now Gowan plays cruise ship tours as the singer in Styx. That is one of those situations where it's unclear whether progress was made or not.
Other shows I attended in Fredericton the next few years: Helix/Headpins, Platinum Blonde, Spirit of the West (multiple times), Kim Mitchell, Alice Cooper, The Box, Thomas Trio and the Red Albino, The Pursuit of Happiness (canceled after a couple songs and more bottles thrown).
02. Joining CHSR-FM January 1986.
Access to stores like A&A and Sam's and The Magic Forest [r.i.p.] was making shopping for music a more plausible experience than the K-Mart/Woolworth possibilities I had been faced with previously. More access doesn't always translate to better choices though, and my first few months of spree-ing were just built on the shaky foundation of cheapness married to partly-Miami Vice influenced taste. How else explain buying bargain bin cassette versions of solo albums by both Don Henley and Glen Frey? Residence life did open some doors, but the loudest stereos also seem to be blaring dubious things like Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing" or "Bad Apple" by David Wilcox. But one night I discovered there was such a thing as campus radio. I turned my receiver to 97.9 FM and out blare Black Flag. Now this did not turn my world 180 degrees and turn me into a punk rocker, but it did alert me to the fact that a broader spectrum of music existed. Early in the second term another McLeod House resident, Shawn Jackson from Ottawa, and I applied for a show. [Sidebar: at the time when you joined CHSR your training consisted of then-PD Rick Thornley (maybe?) telling you this button does this, that knob does that, your show starts in about 6 minutes go pick your records.] So we threw ourselves into the Playbox and the Record Library and learned about hot new Canadian bands like 54.40, Grapes of Wrath (who had also played an excellent Hallowe'en show at the Sub), underground stuff like Deja Voodoo, Ray Condo, NoMeansNo and on and on. One of my favourite memories from a couple of years later when I had my own show was Peter Rowan flying into MCR with a new DTK records release Decade of Dreams - Parochial Zoo and demanding I play it.
03 The Cure - Head on the Door (1985)
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:difwxqe5ldte
Unlike my previous rants about how it was a bad time to get into classic rock, this was a great time to get into The Cure. This is still my favourite album of theirs. It's got some of the doom and gloom of their early mopey days and some of the best pop stuff they ever did, from "In Between Days" to "Close to Me." Unlike their breakthrough album, Disintegration, I can still listen to Head on the Door without feeling too much time slippage.
04 The Smiths - The Queen is Dead (1986)
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:w9fqxqu5ldke
I have to admit this wasn't love at first hear. The residual testosterone from my Sabbath years made it tough to get past Morrissey's woe-is-me lilting. But once I did. The Smiths seems to be one of those bands that makes fans in the unlikeliest places. People who have no time for anything remotely new wave somehow still "get" them. I guess great hooks are great hooks regardless of genre.
05 The Cult - Love (1985)
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:kifpxqe5ldte
"She Sells Sanctuary" was ubiquitous that year. You couldn't have a room party, go to a bar, get in a cab without hearing it... yet somehow you couldn't get tired of it. I went after their previous albums, including the stuff when they were still calling themselves The Southern Death Cult, and some of those tracks still stand up great. When they went all "dumb(er) Zeppelin" on Electric I found it amusing, but the bloom was off the rose.
06 Skinny Puppy - Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse (1986)
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:h9ftxqu5ldhe
The whole industrial thing really appealed to me in the mid-80s. I built up a section of my collection to include Ministry, Frontline Assembly, Tear Garden, Chris and Cosey, Severed Heads. It was a way to fill my "heavy" quotient and still branch out into the "weird" world I was bent on exploring. I thought I was really avant garde and badass, but then I was doing my radio show one day and noticed J. Hamilton rocking out to Nurse With Wound and Coil and realized that I might still be a few steps behind.
07 Kate Bush - Hounds of Love (1985/bought 1986)
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:kifoxqq5ldte
I think most music nerds go through a female singer phase. Mine included Sarah McLachlan (I know!), Jane Siberry, Suzanne Vega and others Im probably forgetting. Kate Bush had the whole entracing package for a man in his late teens discovering things: hotness, weirdness, smarts and a video with Donald Sutherland playing her dad. It strangely fits the time very well, too. A little ahead of the curve, but using the technology that made a lot of more organic artists sound foolish in comparison. I wish the same could be said of her more recent work.
08 The Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks (1977/bought 1987)
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:39fuxqrrldfe
Now, I never became a punk fan of note... and one good proof is that I discovered the Sex Pistols after watching Sid & Nancy. I remember bring that movie over to friends' places in Campbellton and then using it's philosophies to embrace bad behaviours. At our most punk moment we took all the knobs we could pull off our friend Russell's car (including the lighter) and threw them across the street while he was working his hot dog cart outside Ben's Tavern. He wasn't impressed, but couldn't leave his post. The true secret to Bollocks' status as a punk album is that it really isn't a punk album. In the same way that Nirvana's Nevermind isn't a punk album, or a grunge album. Both just feature the trappings of a genre to be named later but contain tons of elements borrowed from everywhere... which makes them stronger, and better, than most of their peers.
09 Public Image Ltd. - Album (1985/bought 1987)
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:w9fpxqr5ldte
Do yourself a favour, listen to Never Mind the Bollocks... then listen to Public Image Ltd. self-titled debut. Now try to digest the fact that Johnny Lydon (Rotten) went from a freshly broken up punk cabaret to this all in the same year. Though it eventually played a few too many hands, early PIL was one of the most startling transmogrifications of punk rock into "other" possible. The Clash burst forth with a lot of ideas over their early albums, but PIL were artier, snottier and just plain weirder Album was packaged as a generic "no name" release, with the cassette version being called Cassette, the CD Compact Disc, etc. At this point co-founders Keith Levene and Jah Wobble weren't around. In their place was the bizarro combo of Bill Laswell, who produced alongside Steve Vai on guitar and Ginger Baker (you know, from Cream?) on drums. Weird? Weird.
10 Husker Du - New Day Rising (1985/bought 1988)
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:hifoxq85ldse
In the winter of 1988 I lived up in Skyline Acres part of town. Every morning there was a trudge through the shortcut over the highway and out behind the Aitken Centre to get to school. There were certain cassettes that made wading through the snow possible... and the two most memorable were Ministry's Land of Rape and Honey and Husker Du's New Day Rising. It had the sheer adrenaline of their earliest work and some of the strangest tracks they'd record ("How to Skin a Cat" wtf?). But side one especially was just the boost I needed to grit my teeth against the cold.
11 Bauhaus - Burning from the Inside (1983/bought 1988)
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:3ifixql5ldke
I think I'd heard their cover of "Ziggy Stardust" on MuchMusic's City Limits (remember?) and then found this album, which was one of the first CDs I ever bought after purchasing a portable CD player from Magic Forest. Panasonic... no antiskip necessary... weighed about two pounds... and it cost, I think, $320. Lasted until around 1992 though... and I put it through a lot. Anyway... Burning from the Inside was the last album Bauhaus did, and much of it was done with the group in neutral corners. You can hear what would become Tones on Tail and later Love and Rockets, and about as far out as Peter Murphy would get before going solo. Bauhaus remain an anomaly, though. Claimed by the Goths for their vampire chic fashion, but musically they had a rhythm section as attuned to dub as glam and a guitarist that played noise as much as melody... and a front man who like to sing while suspended from his feet above the mic. So much goddamned fun.
12 Sting - The Dream of the Blue Turtles (1985)
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:w9ftxq85ldhe
Just so you know I didn't go all super-cool, I followed out my love of The Police (who I tumbled into backwards starting with Synchronicity) out into Sting's solo career. Believe or not it really didn't suck as much as present output would indicate. On paper the idea of a Brit hiring a bunch of shit-hot American jazz musicians to help him interpret his weighty thoughs sounds pretentious... and it it... but however you look at it the playing is tight and the songs are good and I didn't buy the lute album twenty years later so fuck y'all.
13 Jane's Addiction - Nothing's Shocking (1988)
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:fbfoxqu5ldje
I clearly remember checking the recent arrivals in the library at CHSR and coming across this album. The cover demanded attention. And then putting it on... what the hell? It was heavy, it was metal, there were solos, but the drumming was funky and there were horns in places and hippie tracks like "Summertime Rolls" and songs from the p.o.v. of serial killer Ted Bundy and songs about pissing on yourself and "Pigs in Zen" and crossdressing. Ho-lee Shee-it. It and the follow-up, Ritual de lo Habitual remain incredible milemarkers in modern music... tarnished a little by substandard output by it's progenitors (Dave Navarro's solo album? ugh). As is sometimes the case with groundbreaking groups it is the least visible member of the band who was the most instrumental in elevating it... in this case bassist Eric Avery. Zen, indeed.
14 Cowboy Junkies - The Trinity Session (1988/bought 1989)
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:kifrxqe5ldse
This marked a sort of turning point... call it maturity if you must. Other than my femme singer fetishes most of the music I was drawn to still had a certain agressiveness at its root. Cowboys Junkies were about as far from aggressive as you could get. And though it had Margo Timmins breathy voice at its centre I can assure you that was not what hooked me. Rather it was just the easy and assuredness of all the other parts. How it seemed like no one was expending any energy, but when you listened closer you heard how complex it actually was. The Junkies never really maintained their profile in Canada. Other groups like Blue Rodeo and Tragically Hip stepped into the spotlight they had ignited... and that's ok too.
By the by:
Of the twelve albums listed I still have seven. Can you guess which one I don't currently have?
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