The One Album That Changed it All FOR YOU

Peen Simmons

Peen Simmons

Let’s Get Obtuse!
Based on this:

http://markweinguitarlessons.com/fo...-the-one-album-that-changed-everything.87455/

Album: The Beatles by Los Beatles

Why: I literally listened to this thing every day circa ‘92 and ‘93. It’s an encyclopedia of pop/rock song styles and myth making. Possibilities in sound and style. Probably the first thing that got me to appreciate a lived-in, ramshackle feel on record. It’s the lens through which I (for better or worse) view most rock-type music. An attractive nuisance for budding Anglophiles.
 
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I grew up on the Beatles, so they're probably a bigger influence overall, but I don't remember not knowing the Beatles catalog since I started on it so young, so I never had that all-at-once "holy shit" moment hearing, say, Sgt. Pepper for the first time.

But the first time I heard this album, in 2000, it blew me away. I thought it was the best fucking thing I'd ever heard, and I still kind of do.

They have been a bit hit or miss lately and Wayne is apparently a monumental prick, but for me they'll never top this one, and it's been a major influence on my songwriting aesthetic and has been since the first time I heard it.
 
Album: Live on the Double Planet by Michael Hedges

Why: I spent the first half of the 80s on an Air Force base in West Germany and the musical landscape was extremely narrow—a bunch of teenagers and young enlisted guys, and anything that wasn't metal or hard rock or sufficiently masculine was derided and dismissed. All that other stuff was "fag music." And Eddie Van Halen could play the fastest and the most notes so he was clearly the greatest guitarist in the world. :facepalm:

Hedges sprained my brain. There was no point of reference in my limited experience for the kind of thing he was doing and he completely derailed whatever path I may have been on. By March of '87 I'd seen Leo Kottke and Michael Hedges play a double bill together and I was done. Judas Priest and Dio and whatever the hell else I was listening to suddenly seemed comically childish.

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First heavy metal album I heard as a 10 year old and I was hooked. Still play this occasionally for nostalgic reasons and each time it reminds me what an awesome guitar duo Murray and Smith are.

it also made me pick up the guitar myself
 
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Before I really got into this record I was playing strum along easy folk tune versions of songs. There was no internet, and music books of the day were not great. This album opened my eyes. Complex chords, cool rhythms, chord inversions, circle of fifths, what pentatonic scales are good for other than memorizing, and so many other cool things. This was my bridge from campfire strummed guitar to being a real guitar player, or at least trying to be a real guitar player. I spent countless hours trying to figure out what he was playing and WHY he was playing it. It really opened my eyes to the bigger picture. I think a big part of the impact was that it was the exact opposite of the Mel Bay method books. It was cool, exotic, and frenetic. The day I figured out his major chord inversions and how to use them as embellishments to rhythm was an awesome day. I still remember it. I played simple chord progressions with the added flash the entire damn day until my fingers were raw.
 
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This album set me onto jazz 20 years ago. My first notable musical influence will always be Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" from Fantasia, which I saw at the Sunrise Theater in Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream in 1982. My primal rock influences will always be Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, GNR, Metallica, and Pink Floyd. God Street Wine will always be my favorite band. Zappa will always be the guy who expanded my mind. And 1997 will always be the year I burnt out on SRV. Because in 1998, this record took all of that stuff, chewed it up, and spit it out.
 
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I was 15 years old, standing on a beach listening to a portable radio and Fake Plastic Trees came on the air. The song blew my mind. I bought the album the next day, and I still think it's one of the best musical releases of my lifetime.
 
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Tiltsta said:
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Before I really got into this record I was playing strum along easy folk tune versions of songs. There was no internet, and music books of the day were not great. This album opened my eyes. Complex chords, cool rhythms, chord inversions, circle of fifths, what pentatonic scales are good for other than memorizing, and so many other cool things. This was my bridge from campfire strummed guitar to being a real guitar player, or at least trying to be a real guitar player. I spent countless hours trying to figure out what he was playing and WHY he was playing it. It really opened my eyes to the bigger picture. I think a big part of the impact was that it was the exact opposite of the Mel Bay method books. It was cool, exotic, and frenetic. The day I figured out his major chord inversions and how to use them as embellishments to rhythm was an awesome day. I still remember it. I played simple chord progressions with the added flash the entire damn day until my fingers were raw.
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Yep. All of a sudden the guitar was no longer an accompaniment instrument. It had a voice that could carry the whole lot of us...
 
In 4th grade a girl at my school, whose father was a record company exec, brought a stack of new albums and started passing them out on the playground. I was late to the rush and of course all of the Beatles and cool albums were already picked through. I got this one and an album by Ravi Shankar. I took it home and listened to it hundreds of times in my childhood and early teens. The lyrics were abstract, adult, and foreign to me on a first listening, but they absolutely sparked my imagination. Dylan with Shankar was like an early introduction to drugs (or mind expansion) without the drugs.

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Arguments could definitely be made either way as to whether it changed it all for the better or for the worse, taste-wise, but I have a very distinct memory of being in middle school and hearing that part in Fight Fire with Fire where the pretty acoustic part gets trampled by the bombast and just being floored.
 
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This is the record that made me believe that it didn’t matter I was playing a crummy 60s Japanese SG copy and didn’t have any formal musical knowledge. I could make music!
 
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I was 10 years old when my sister came home with Toys in the Attic and I can still remember sitting on the floor of her bedroom listening to it in awe...that was the album that introduced me to hard rock and it was the impetus for me to start playing gutar...

But it was this record...

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...that taught me to look beyond the standard rules and formulas for music, that music could be organic and abstract...
 
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