For what it’s worth here is my Classic Band Life:
(1) Led Zeppelin
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This was probably the “big one” amongst my friends in senior high, or at least the one we all agreed on. We all bought a couple of the albums and shared our resources. The more motivated bought guitars and tried to perfect the riffs (as well as they could on $30 acoustics). I remember borrowing Chuck’s copy of II and somehow dropping my Beta VCR corner-first in the middle of “Ramble On.” Even now I can still listen to pretty much any of the albums (except In Through the Out Door) start to finish, despite my turbulent relation ship with the fourth album as outlined in another note.
Then and now I think my two favourites are III and Houses of the Holy. If nothing else Page and Plant were great students and synthesizers of music’s legacy from American blues to British arcane rural folk. Those two albums best combined the strum and stomp of the bands dialectic. Houses broke out of the mold even further, experimenting with funkiness and psychedelia that they’d take even further out, but in a more sprawling, unfocussed way on Physical Graffiti.
(2) Pink Floyd
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I think The Wall the album and the movie hit my consciousness at the same time. Because of that the two were wrapped together irreversibly as one document. As a teenager I was admittedly completely floored by the album’ ambition to be a lament for lost identity, a rail against cold and faceless institutions and rock’s power to both free and isolate its poets. Then I bought Ummagumma. That was an entirely different Pink Floyd. Ragged, experimental and unafraid to be pretty and rustic or weird and interstellar. It wasn’t until much later that I found out about Syd Barrett (didn’t have the internet in 1982 to instantly get a band biography) and the pieces began to fall together. These days I have to say that I much prefer Piper at the Gates of Dawn and the Barrett solo albums to the rest of the bands catalogue. I put my time in with Animals and Wish You Were Here but even as a young man found Atom Heart Mother and Meddle pretty bloated and boring. I followed Waters out through The Final Cut and his solo Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, watching him disappear farther and farther up his own ass. Gilmour kept the band and turned it into a toothless soft-rock version of itself, allowing folks to keep going to see a touring band play “Money” and “Comfortably Numb.”
(3) The Beatles
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I have to admit a large reason I never paid much attention to The Beatles in high school was that a clutch of “smart girls” (all of them lovely young ladies it turned out… and learned too late) were absolutely obsessed with them. Reason enough for me not to be. A little later I dabbled. I think I only ever owned the “White” album, the “Blue” two record set of later singles (1967-70) and a flea market copy of Hey Jude. I’ve heard all the albums over time, of course, but it’s still the White Album that resonates. It’s a band at the top of their pop game taking the triumph of their two 1967 studio classics and a whole bunch of drugs and wiggy philosophy and mulching them until a rainbow of noise flies out. It has a little bit, not only about each of the members of the band, but about everything they’ve done up until that point, and the elements both bleed together and create little fences. Such as John’s studio cut-up “Revolution #9” and Paul responding by going off by himself to record “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey.” I think my only continued reticence to adopt The Beatles as a favourite has more to do with their legacy than the band themselves. British experimental pioneer Keith Rowe of AMM summed it up by accusing them of being responsible for some of the worst music since rock’s invention. By which he didn’t mean their own, only that they set the pop template in stone for the last forty years and countless bands have used that to create the most mediocre and unnecessary derivatives ever since. What these bands fail to appreciate is that what The Beatles made to look effortless was actually quite difficult… it was just a trick of fate that the first band to do it would ultimately always be the best at it.
(4) Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, The Who, The Rolling Stones
I have to come clean and say that I’ve yet to give these titans a fair and thorough listen. For one reason or another they just haven’t fallen across my path at just the right moment for me to want to put in the work. Now it’s not to say that I haven’t probably listened to hours and hours of any of their discographies, that’s unavoidable, but never with the chronological start to finish back and forth in depth detail gleaning attention I gave to KISS or Black Sabbath (I’m not particularly proud of that). In my defense, the years that I was doing my intensive introductory appreciation of rock The Who released It’s Hard, The Rolling Stones released Emotional Rescue (which I bought), Dylan released Shot of Love and Hendrix was dead. In case this isn’t immediately evident the above illustrates how badly these once and future kings suuuuuccked in the early 80s. I keep assuring myself that at some point I will dive headfirst into all four discographies. Hendrix is easy because there are only a couple of actual releases from his time on earth. The Rolling Stones are easy-ish because they haven’t put out anything worth listening to since the early 70s. The Who more or less likewise. Dylan is the hardest nut to crack. He’s had more highs, lows and outright balls-ups than most four bands combined… and for that reason he is the most intriguing.
(5) The Doors
I thought they were useless back then. Still do.
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