Last week, I wrote a bit about the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die and looked at the first and last albums listed in the book from the decades of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. This week, we’ll continue into the book’s listing for the Eighties, Nineties and Oughts. As my knowledge of those three decades is markedly less extensive than it is of the earlier decades, instead of listing the first and last albums listed for those years, I’ll write about the earliest and latest albums in those sections about which I know something.
And the second album listed for the Eighties is one that I know at least a little: Searching For The Young Soul Rebels, the 1980 debut release by Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Named for the drug Dexedrine, the group offered a Northern Soul R&B/pop-rock that’s likely best known for the single “Come On Eileen,” a 1982 release that topped the U.S. charts. Searching . . . offers similar fare, studded by horns and sweet bass grooves that provide lead singer Kevin Rowland a lever and a place to stand. It’s well worth extended listening. The band’s albums Don’t Stand Me Down and Too-Rye-Aye are also listed in the book.
Nestling in five spots before the end of the book’s section on the Eighties is a 1989 release I know even better: Bonnie Raitt’s Nick Of Time. At the time of its recording, Raitt’s career looked wobbly; her time at Warner Brothers ended after the general disinterest in 1986’s Nine Lives. But her move to Capitol – and the selection of producer Don Was – brought Raitt to heights undreamed of since she began recording in the early 1970s. Nick Of Time preserved Raitt’s trademark folky and bluesy rock – with just the right amout of grit – and became the best-selling album of her career. It went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and earned Raitt three Grammy awards, including the award for the Album Of The Year.
About ten albums into the section for the Nineties, I find Sinéad O’Connor’s 1990 release, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. Uncompromising, opinionated, sometimes confessional and sometimes bitter, O’Connor’s second album offered a clear look at life through the eyes of the young (22 at the time) Dublin-born singer. The track that raised the album’s international profile, though, was the one cover version on the release: A yearning take on Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.” The album was nominated for four Grammy awards, including for Album Of The Year (and won a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Performance), but O’Connor refused to accept the nominations and the award.
Nothing cited in the book from 1999 is very familiar to me – most of my musical attention in the second half of the Nineties went to buying LPs from the Sixties and Seventies – but among the albums listed for 1998, I find one of my favorite albums of all time: David Gray’s White Ladder. Recorded in 1998, released to little attention in 1999, the record was re-released on Dave Mathews’ ATO Records in 2000, which is when I discovered it. Buoyed by the single “Babylon,” the album topped the charts in the U.K. and Ireland, went to No. 35 in the U.S. and was on the Billboard 200 for a year. White Ladder is one of those albums that I’ve listened to frequently enough that when one of its tracks comes up on the iPod, I can hear in my head – in the brief silence after – the next track on the album. (Where does it rank for me among albums all-time? I imagine that if I actually sorted out my top one hundred, it would be somewhere in the top twenty-five.)
Not too deep into the listings for the year 2000, I find an album I know but not at all well: All That You Can’t Leave Behind by U2. There are very few bands in history that at any one time legitimately deserve the title of the best band in the world. U2, for a time during the Nineties, was one. (The Beatles in the Sixties and the Rolling Stones during the late Sixties and early Seventies come to mind, as well. There are probably a few after that, but I’m not going to dig into that any further today.) For a while in the 1990s, I listened to a lot of U2, but that habit faded away as the new century came along. Why? I don’t know, but All That You Can’t Leave Behind isn’t as familiar to me as the band’s earlier albums. Three of those earlier albums – Achtung Baby, The Joshua Tree and War – are also listed in the book.
Nothing from 2005 – the book’s end point – is familiar, but I see that 2004’s Smile by Brian Wilson is listed. Resurrected and revised from the Beach Boys’ abandoned 1966 project, Smile was hailed as a spectacular piece of work when it finally came out in 2004. I spent some Christmas money on it that year and listened to it once. Now, I am a packrat. I save lots of ephemeral stuff. I have LPs and CDs on my shelves that I will likely never listen to again, but I keep them anyway. I sold my copy of Smile, and that should say plenty. Smile is the only album by Wilson alone cited in 1001 Albums . . . but three releases by the Beach Boys – The Beach Boys Today!, Pet Sounds and Surf’s Up – made the 1001.
So, having wandered through twenty-four years of music, I’ll call
on David Gray. Here’s the original version of “Babylon” from White Ladder.
(The U.S. version of the album includes a second version of “Babylon” as a
bonus track.)
– whiteray
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