My favorite music year

Periodically The Onion AV Club runs a recurring feature called 'My Favorite Music Year.' In this feature one of their staff writers rhapsodizes about the year a bunch of the favorite music came out. This is my take on that feature.

My favorite music year was 1978. But don't think I'm stuck in 1978, I enjoy new music and I'm constantly on the prowl for new bands and singers to enjoy. However, in 1978 some of the albums that shaped who I am today came out.

Among them was this album:
Smart, funny, deeply acerbic, and musically brilliant are just a few ways to describe the late Warren Zevon. I had already come to know about him through is session work for Linda Ronstadt who I adored at that time. This album had his biggest hit Werewolves of London on it, and it was deservedly a hit but to me Excitable Boy and Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner were even better songs. Mr Zevon died a few years back and there's been a void in our music scene ever since.
I've written how this album changed my life before on this blog and if you want to root around through my archives you can read about it. This album came out when all you heard on the radio was disco, sugary pop songs, and bloated prog rock shit. The music I heard on this album was so totally different, so new, so captivating that it hit me between the eyes like a hammer. It woke me from my late '70's slumber and pointed me in a new direction.

Fronted by every straight 16 year old boy's sexual fantasy, I was 16 in '78, Debbie Harry, Blondie was a breath of fresh air. They had radio friendly hits but they also rocked. And no one was sexier than Ms. Harry. Her breathy vocals made me swoon with teenage desire.

In Elvis Costello I saw someone who looked like me (a geeky gawky guy with huge black horn rimmed glasses) and had issues with women like I did back then (I was desperately shy and when I did make a move on a girl I was usually turned down which made me more self conscious and less likely to try again later). He was all attitude, snarling about lost love, shitty jobs, and had a general sour outlook on things, and I loved it. It was like he was speaking to me about me. It took me many years to fully appreciate this album but I finally do. Like many of his other works, it's classic.

Nick Lowe is the flip side to my Elvis Costello worship. He's more poppy, more fun, and more accessible. I loved his sound, his look, and his production of other rock and roll albums, he produced many of Costello's early albums and his fingerprints are all over many other artists of that time. I didn't come to know this album until many years after it came out, my introduction to Nick was 1979's Labour of Lust. When I finally got this album on cassette, I wore that cassette out from paying it over and over again. Due to fears of a backlash by Christians in this country they changed the name of this album when they released it over here in the USA, they changed it to Pure Pop for Now People. It's a stone cold classic.
On this album Springsteen finally lived up to the hype the press had heaped on him a few years earlier. Gone were the wordy ballads about fucking in the mud, catching the bus while drunk, and hanging out on the boardwalk in New Jersey. In their place were finely crafted songs that didn't take twelve stanzas to tell the story. And the songs were backed by blistering guitars, heavy duty bass lines, and tight drums. I still get a chill when I hear the 'Badlands', 'Adam Raised a Cain', and 'Prove it all Night.'

Other seminal albums that I love that were released in 1978 include:
Waylon & Willie (Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson), Easter (Patti Smith Group), Squeeze (Squeeze), FM Soundtrack (various artists), Street Legal (Bob Dylan), Peter Gabriel (Peter Gabriel), Some Girls (Rolling Stones), More Songs About Buildings and Food (Talking Heads), Who Are You? (The Who), One Nation Under a Groove (Funkadelic), Time Passages (Al Stewart), Dire Straits (Dire Straits), Outlandos d'Amour (The Police), Give 'em Enough Rope (The Clash), and Midnight Oil (Midnight Oil).

I could have just as easily went with 1979 but for the fact the Blondie and Springsteen released their classic albums in 1978.

What's your favorite music year?

Just What I Needed

A while back I tagged D Cup at Politits with a music meme. She graciously complied and wrote about some songs that were big when she was a high school senior. I teased her saying that she chose all sappy sugary songs. She replied that she had been handcuffed by the meme and that she had written about the soundtrack of her life already and that I should read it one day, so I did. I read it yesterday and I enjoyed it. She mentioned one song in it that played a huge part in my life so I decided to write this post about that song. Yes, I am stealing ideas for a post from D Cup, but I've found that I've gotten most of my good ideas in life when I look at women and their boobs.

The first time I experienced culture shock was when my Mother passed away and we were sent to live with my aunt and uncle. I had lived all of my young life up to that point in Detroit, but after Mom died we moved to Howell, Michigan where my aunt and uncle and their savages, oops, I mean children lived. Howell was only an hour out of Detroit but it was worlds away to me. I had known only the city life up to that point but there I was living in the country, with cows, and horses, and hay fields, and big ass gardens, and ponds, and forests, and wide open space.

I also stopped being a Roman Catholic over night and I became a United Methodist, so that meant my church no longer talked so much about Mary and Jesus and eating the actual body of said son o' God every week after we had confessed our sins, instead now we got cubes of Wonder bread and grape juice once a month and we heard oodles and oodles about how neat it was going to be when Jesus came back. It took me quite some time to get used to all those changes.

But wouldn't you know it, by the time I was just settling in and getting used to life in that racist part of the Michigan countryside, it turns out that Howell was a big hub for KKK activity in Michigan, they pulled the rug out from under my pre-teen feet and my aunt and uncle packed us all up, except for one of my older brothers who ran away so he could stay in Michigan, and moved us south to Lee County , Va.

That is Lee County in the extreme southwest tip of VA. If moving from Detroit to Howell was a culture shock, then moving from Howell to Lee County, VA was a seismic culture shock. All the images I had heard or seen about the south were negative. I had seen many documentaries in school about the south and all of them had been shot in black and white and they showed people living in tar paper shacks that were drenched in fog all the time. I actually believed for a time that the south was in black and white for real and that everyone went around barefoot while toting a rifle and a jug of moonshine. But what I found was a landscape that looked like this:

In addition to the mountains there were valleys where people lived and farmed. We lived on a 100 acre farm where we raised cattle and corn and tobacco. The area where we lived though seemed like it was about 20 years behind the times. This was the mid 1970's when we moved to Lee County but some people's attitudes and beliefs were mired in the 1950's, but I have since found that there are people who are stuck in the past no matter where you go. If one expressed an admiration for Sanford and Son, then one was a damn dirty n**ger lover. If one wasn't a rock ribbed right winger then you were a Communist. If you didn't go to church two or three times a week then you were a damn dirty Jew or a Communist or a n**ger lover or all three combined.

Other things were bizarre to me as well. The accent for one. It was in Lee County that I learned that a word like 'bell' was not one syllable but two or sometimes three. Flowers were not called flowers, they were 'flairs.' One of my new friends kept telling me about a great wrassler he loved named Ric Flair, I kept correcting him and telling him the man's name was Ric Flower. That is until one day he showed me a photo of Ric Flair and I saw the caption beneath and I saw that his name really was Ric Flair.

Ladies and gentlemen, Ric Flair!

The food was different too. I learned to eat things like pinto beans, collard greens, biscuits and gravy, and red hot dogs.

Red hot dogs freaked me out for awhile then I got used to them. Soft drinks were no longer called 'pop, they became 'soda.' We no longer shopped for groceries at IGA or A&P. We went to Piggly Wiggly or Cas Walker's. Cas Walker had two great TV ads that ran constantly, one was of some kids whacking on watermelons with sticks while someone sang in the background that Cas Walker's melons were 'thumpin' good' and the other was an ad that proclaimed to the world that 'You can beat our prices but you can't beat our meat.' I swear with all my heart I am not making that last one up, I nearly died laughing the first time I heard that commercial.

So it was into that cultural backwater that I, a young impressionable and somewhat smartassed and inquisitive lad, was tossed to live. Gradually my midwestern accent began to fade and I accepted my fate for a time. I had TV, Rolling Stone magazine, and National Lampoon magazine, to keep me abreast of what people in the civilized world were doing. So I fell into a kind of stupor. I went along with what was going on and I just plugged along.

That is until the day that I heard the first single off this album:

It was spring/summer of 1978 and I was riding around the back roads of Lee County with my cousin in his mother's baby shit brown Ford Granada and both of us were high as kites. We were listenting to the AM radio in the car and we had it tuned to the station out of Pennington Gap, which was the biggest city in Lee County. From out of nowhere a song came on called 'Just What I Needed.' It was unlike anything I had ever heard or was hearing on the radio at that time. It was catchy, sounded unique, and so, and I do not use this in a bad way, weird. It was not the typical bombastic rock song of the day, like so many of the songs by Boston, Kansas, Styx, Rush, and others were. It also was not disco or folky singery songwritery. It was so shockingly different that I almost was knocked out of my pot induced haze.

I knew that after I heard it nothing would be the same in my life. I knew on some deep level that 'Just What I Needed' represented a new path, a new direction, and that it meant that I would not be stuck in Lee County forever. It was like I had just heard the way out. I had no idea how I was going to get out but somehow then I knew that I was on my way.

It was a little later that I signed up to go into the Air Force right after I graduated high school, which thankfully I did not end up doing. The day after I graduated a little over a year after I heard that song, we packed up and moved out of Lee County. I was never so happy to see that place in the rear view mirror. Getting the hell out of there was just what I needed.

So to the guys in that incarnation of The Cars, I just want to say thanks and that your song did more for me than you will ever know. You rock Ric. Ric Ocasek lead singer of The Cars that is.