| The List:
1999 100% Fun Abbey Road After the Gold Rush Anodyne At Yankee Stadium August and Everything After Beach Boys Greatest Hits Best of Chess Blonde On Blonde Blood On the Tracks Bloodshot Bridge Over Troubled Water Bring The Family Car Wheels On a Gravel Road Chirpin' Crowded House Darkness On The Edge Of Town Deja' Vu Diamond Dogs Dusty In Memphis East Side Story Exile On Main Street Exodus Feeling Strangely Fine Fisherman's Blues Goodbye Jumbo Gratitude Grooves In Orbit Heat Treatment History of Funk Hollywood Town Hall I Feel Alright Impossible Bird It Takes A Nation Of Millions... James Brown 20 Greatest Kiko Kind Of Blue King of the Delta Blues Singers King of the Electric Blues Let It Be Listening Skills Program London Calling Marshall Crenshaw Memphis Record Mingus Ah Um Monkees Greatest Hits Moondance Music From Big Pink My Aim Is True Nevermind Pleased To Meet Me Purple Rain Rust Never Sleeps Shoot Out the Lights Skylarking So Alone Speaking In Tongues Squeezing Out Sparks Sticky Fingers Sun Sessions Talking With The Taxman... The Essential Count Basie Vol. 1 The Great 28 The Harder They Come The Next Hundred Years The Ramones The River The Ultimate Otis Redding This Year's Model Time Out Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers Trace Velvet Underground & Nico Wanted!: The Outlaws War White Album Who's Next Yes Related Ramblings: |
Editor's
note: This website represents a high school graduation gift I gave my son in June 2003 - a collection of music, along with the notations you'll find on this site. A lot of folks offered up ideas, general support and in many cases contributed selections. When they asked about the final product I couldn't adequately sum it up in a few sentences. A few of those friends got copies of the original CD of this site, and I told others I would eventually post it on the web. Little did I know how sloppy my HTML coding was; the site wouldn't go up with significant clean-up, and as many of you know, I'm easily distracted by laziness. So, here it is, almost a year after I put it together. It's posted with Ben's permission. I think I checked all the links. The only ones I know won't work are the ones to the audio of the singles. (While it was legal to put them on the CD I gave Ben, it's not legal to post them to the world at large. Also, I don't have that much web server space available.) As you'll note, there's no reason this project has to end - if you've got something you think the young man must have in his collection, and are passionate enough to write something up about it, I'll search the used bins for a copy. You can send any comments to me at bwareham@visi.com. -Bill Wareham August 22, 2004 Happy graduation.  Sometime
three, four, maybe five years ago it occurred to me that you'd head off
to college in a few years, and while I knew you'd have a pretty good
music
collection, I also knew you probably wouldn't spend much on stuff you
had
access to in my collection. The revelation came at a time when I had
filled
most of my collection with back-catalog "must-haves," so,
with a nod to
Nick Hornby, I started making a list and shopping on your behalf.
It's been a revealing and fun exercise. I made certain arbitrary rules; some I kept (no more than two albums per artist), some I discarded (no "best of" compilations.) It started out as something like "The 100 Greatest Albums," but that conceit died a quick, justifiable death, not so much because I realized my opinion didn't make a selection "great," but because you already had several discs on that particular list; Sgt. Pepper comes immediately to mind. (It took a while longer to realize that I wasn't going to come up with 100 albums I'd feel comfortable imposing on someone.) The list eventually got labeled "Essential Records" in the database I made, but looking over the albums now, I couldn't honestly call some of them "essential" in the sense that I think anyone but me has to have them. I have always loved digging through records, and now discs. I
get satisfaction
from the feeling that the music found me. I'm certainly willing to walk
into the store, go straight to an artist's section, pull out the latest
release and buy it, but it's just not the same. So, even though I was
never
sure how I'd label this collection, I had no trouble pursuing the
mission.
I could name it later. It's about the music. What does that have to do with this list? A couple of things, I guess. For one, I think for a long time my pre-Southside Johnny perspective on music prevented me from getting anything except a kind of pseudo-intellectual enjoyment out of old recordings like those of Robert Johnson. ('Man, he must've been cool because guys like Clapton and Page say so.') The other thing is that music and the technology that delivers it seem so intertwined that we sometimes mistake one for the other. But what Southside Johnny seemed to realize is that the technology moves so fast that the link is ultimately illusory. I started collecting this music for you on CD under the assumption that you'd have to haul a bunch of discs off to college somewhere, and I'd have to find another copy of anything I'd want you to take from my collection. Turns out we could buy a hard drive and copy my entire collection and you could take it to Northfield with you in a pocket of your backpack. So what is this list, really? So congratulations on making it this far, we're very proud of you. |
|
Back
in the 1970's Rolling Stone or some other magazine did a feature on
rock
stars' sound systems. I don't remember much about most of them, except
that I recall a lot of chatter about woofers, tweeters, watts and total
harmonic distortion. Then there was Southside Johnny Lyon, who played
his
music on a stackable record changer hooked up to a guitar amp. This
impressively
lo-fi set-up didn't even play in stereo. Johnny explained with a shrug
something to the effect that it was the songs and performances that
moved
him, and he could hear the beauty in them even if the fidelity fell
well
below conventional current standards. 
that
I finish this and hand you a bunch of pieces of plastic and some
notations
to go with them. It means when you head out of here you'll have a piece
of me (and mom, and a few others) to take with you.