About ten years ago or so—maybe it was twelve, maybe fifteen – I saw an entry at a forum or a board or a blog asking folks to make a list of ten formative albums, albums that helped make us the listeners we turned out to be.
Of course, I got to work, and never being one to follow directions entirely, I ended up with a list of twelve albums:
Honey
In The Horn
by Al Hirt (1963)
Goldfinger (soundtrack) by
John Barry (1964)
Abbey
Road
by the Beatles (1969)
The
Band
by The Band (1969)
Stephen
Stills
by Stephen Stills (1970)
Seventh
Sojourn
by the Moody Blues (1972)
Brothers
& Sisters
by the Allman Brothers Band (1973)
Dark
Side Of The Moon
by Pink Floyd (1973)
Blood
On The Tracks
by Bob Dylan (1975)
Silk
Degrees
by Boz Scaggs (1976)
Tunnel
Of Love
by Bruce Springsteen (1987)
Tango
In The Night
by Fleetwood Mac (1987)
Yeah, the list stops at 1987. It’s not that I don’t like anything that’s come out in the last thirty-five years. I have lots of tunes in the RealPlayer and the iPod and on the CD shelves from the last three-and-a-half decades. But I don’t know that any of those albums guided my listening, taking me in new directions or bringing me something I hadn’t heard before. Well, maybe Darden Smith’s Little Victories from 1993 and maybe Revelator, the first album – from 2011 – by the Tedeschi Trucks Band. But we’ll leave those for another time.
If I recall correctly, when I made that list of twelve albums, I did stop at ten, at least briefly. And the release dates of those first ten albums cluster in a neat thirteen years, marking my progression from a ten-year-old fifth grader to a twenty-three-year-old post-grad student.
But I realized fairly quickly that I had to account for a major life change in 1987, one that expanded all areas of my life and led me to explore not only music coming out at that time but also music I’d ignored (benignly) for years. Bruce Springsteen and Fleetwood Mac were among those artists I’d not given much attention; I’d heard their work on the radio and at other folks’ homes, certainly, but I’d never explored their work.
So, Tunnel Of Love and Tango In The Night serve two purposes on that list of twelve: They mark the first times I’d given serious attention to Bruce Springsteen and Fleetwood Mac, and they also mark the dividing point of 1987, one of the three or four years of my life that sit at a place of before and after.
Of course, in the succeeding years, I went a little mad and found myself acquiring a complete collection of Springsteen’s work and a nearly complete set of Fleetwood Mac’s many albums (and I did the same with numerous other artists, too). And I recall which tracks on those two albums pulled me in, setting me on those courses (just as I can recall which tracks first pulled me in on the other ten albums on that list above, perhaps a source of future posts here).
On Tunnel Of Love, it was “All That Heaven Can Allow,” a track I featured here last March. And on Tango In The Night, it’s the title track. I recall playing the album for the first time in my apartment in Minot, North Dakota, half-listening as I went through the mail or the newspaper, and suddenly sitting upright as I heard that title track, hearing something that pulled me in and – without my knowing it – laid out a new course for me in my musical life:– whiteray
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