Not a lot to say right now – been keeping very busy and sneaking in work on the music project when I can! For now, here’s the latest article in my bi-monthly series of obscure music in different genres and sub-genres for the online music magazine Perfect Sound Forever: 70’s American Progressive Rock
Article #3 is well in the works!
I just walked into my office at home where I have thousands of CD’s and a nice stereo system, and I thought, “I should really listen to music more.” I even had a fleeting thought that I should make that a New Year’s resolution.
To clarify, I listen to music all the time, it’s just more the exception these days that I listen for pure enjoyment. There’s always some higher purpose, ulterior motive and a very methodical process to it. For years when I had a radio show, I listened to music to find songs to play on my radio show and kept detailed excel spreadsheets of what I’d already played and what I still wanted to play. Now, I’m listening for this grand project of coming up with my favorite thousand albums of all time, and more specifically, I’m working through genres or sub-genres one at a time to submit an article to Perfect Sound Forever every two months.
People who follow my blog periodically ask me if I’ve got the project finished, or want to know my top ten or top 100. They really don’t appreciate the scope of what I’m doing, and sometimes I feel like the estimate I gave of this project taking a year or two is unrealistic.
As an example, in addition to all the research I’m doing online to find albums to comb through (and there are literally thousands of those), I also have probably six monstrously sized music reference books to read reviews from and figure out what albums to add to my listening list. I only own 3 of those books so far, and I’ve read through less than half of one of them. We’re talking books that list literally thousands of obscure albums in each one, complete with full descriptions and reviews of the albums. I don’t want to listen to every album listed that I don’t already have, but a decent percentage of them, and many of those are obscure albums that were never issued on CD, and are next to impossible to find on YouTube or Spotify or Pandora, etc.
Again to clarify, it’s not like I don’t enjoy this project. I do, even though it does mean wading through a lot of mediocre and plain old “bad” albums to get to the gems that I never ever would have come across if I hadn’t taken on this project, and that’s exciting. Discovering new music is awesome, even if sometimes it feels like work.
The thought I had following the one where I felt like I should listen to more music just for pure pleasure, as opposed to as part of a larger project, is that I’m getting a lifetime of most of the unpleasant music listening out of the way. Sure it’s taking me a year or two or so, but after that it’ll be smooth sailing, and I’ll be armed with a collection of thousands of fantastic albums that I can enjoy for the rest of my life. I’ll have for the most part blasted my way through my favorite genres, and that will leave primarily new music to check out from time to time.
Even though it sometimes feels like work, it does fulfill certain things inside of myself, namely my seemingly obsessive need to work on “projects,” and my intense desire to share what I love with others. The fact that I can write articles about obscure albums I’ve found that few people know about, and eventually come up with a list that will include a LOT of albums very few people know about is very fulfilling, even though I realize only the bravest and most adventurous music listeners will actually bother to check those albums out. Still, the info is out there, and hopefully it will sustain for a long time.
Part of my intention in writing this blog was to wax poetic about some of my favorite groups and albums, and I realize that hasn’t happened yet. I just haven’t had the time, though I mean to, hope to, want to at some point. One of these days I will sit down and write an intense love letter to The Moody Blues’ “On the Threshold of a Dream,” but alas, it will not be this day.
For now, it’s back to the active listening and categorizing and researching and writing. It’s really not that bad of a gig.
When I first thought of doing a list of my 500 favorite albums (that later became 1,000 albums, in order), it seemed like somewhat of a crazy idea, but doable. After all, I have over 3,000 CD’s and had heard probably thousands of other albums. I had a hell of a head start.
The first thing I did was look at my excel spreadsheet of the albums I already owned (I’m a professed excel junkie) and went through them to determine which albums were good enough to make the list. That left me with a whole bunch of titles that I owned and had either never listened to, or hadn’t listened to enough to know if they were good enough, so I started listening to those. That took quite a long time, and when all was said and done I had about 495 albums that were worthy to make the list. That’s when I figured that a top 500 wouldn’t be enough, and I’d have to go to 1,000. It was time to start tackling the unknown.
I also had a separate spreadsheet with a want list of over 1,300 albums I’d compiled from my 30 years or so of music collecting and researching. I started listening to those online, at least the ones I could easily find. I figured I’d just listen to those, maybe do some research and come up with some others to listen to, and by the time I was done I’d be able to narrow it down to 1,000 albums and then start the ridiculous procedure of putting them in some kind of preferential order.
I got the idea to somehow incorporate the project with Perfect Sound Forever, an online music magazine I’ve done some articles for before (Ya Ho Wa 13 Interview, Popol Vuh Article). I figured if I was going to go to all this trouble, I might as well share the results with the world somehow, as well as with my facebook friends and people who used to listen to my radio show, The Interdimensional Vortex (IDV Archives).
I contacted Jason Gross from PSF, and he wasn’t into me necessarily just writing about my project or listing the albums once I was done, but he came up with a great idea that would dovetail nicely with what I was already doing, which was to write an article about obscure titles I discovered that deserved greater recognition, since that’s more in line with what the magazine is about. I suggested doing a series of articles with obscure titles by genre. He also suggested I keep track of the project in general in a blog, an idea I had already been planning on anyway, and which you’re reading right now!
I already finished the first article for Perfect Sound Forever. I thought it would be coming out in their December/January edition, but it actually got published in the October/November edition. The article is HERE. The second article is almost finished and will come out in December.
By the time I was ready to start writing the first article I had already gone through most of the 1,300 albums and was busy researching to discover more titles to listen to. What I did for the previously unheard albums was to categorize them (again in excel) by color once I listened to them:
I started to realize that the project would be a lot more involved than I originally thought. With a deadline looming for the first article, I switched gears to focus exclusively on krautrock albums (check out the article to learn more about what krautrock is). I started with going to the online reference website www.rateyourmusic.com, where almost every album in existence is cataloged, and people can rate them and write reviews on them. I figured I’d just listen to all the krautrock albums with a certain amount of starts and above and go from there. Somehow after a while I got the crazy idea just to listen to ALL the krautrock albums in their database. This was pretty ridiculous, as there were hundreds of them, and the idea had always been to try and listen to all the music from my favorite genres that was highly regarded, or at least highly regarded by some. Now I was planning on listening to the entire genre. While often listening to the most lowly rated albums was like trudging through sludge, occasionally I would find a gem among the rubble making it worth the effort.
Let me stop and explain that when I listen to an album, I don’t listen to the whole thing, not even close. That would take absolutely forever. What I do is I listen to an album long enough to decide which color coded group it belongs to. Many albums are so bad that I know within 5 minutes of listening to the first song and skipping around that it will go in the red trash file, or the yellow file for an album decent enough to check out in the future, but that would have no chance of making the eventual top 1,000 list. It’s actually more the exception that an album will be light green, dark green or blue, and for those I’ll listen to more of the album (sometimes all the way through) to make that determination.
The danger with doing things this way is the whole aspect of an album growing on me. Some albums simply don’t reveal their treasures the first time through, and it can take 2 or 3 or even several listens to realize its true greatness. The problem with listening to 5 minutes of an album is I could be missing out on something that I might love further down the line. That said, I’ve trained my ear to listen for potential, to listen for a certain quality that isn’t something that knocks me out right away, but that potentially could if given more of a chance. Those end up being the light green albums that I’ll go into more later on. Could I still be dismissing something out of hand that I’ll love later on by making it immediately red or yellow? Probably, but I’m assuming that will be the rare exception that I’ll have to live with.
As I was getting close to finishing all the krautrock albums, it occurred to me that there might be krautrock albums that WEREN’T in the rateyourmusic database, or that were labeled as a different genre making them much harder to find. I then went to a krautrock facebook group I belonged to filled with tons of hardcore krautrock fans. I asked them to give me as many titles as possible of obscure krautrock groups and albums, and soon I had a few more dozen albums to listen to.
By the time I got done with that, as well going through a book about krautrock groups and albums called The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, I figured I had listened to MOST of the albums from the genre. I probably still missed a few, but it was close enough, and way more than enough to write an article. I figured if I discovered other stragglers later on, I could do a miscellaneous article in a year or so to catch the great albums I had missed the first time around from various genres.
I had come up with a good 40+ titles that were green or blue that I could potentially write about. This was a conundrum as it was too many titles to write about in one article, so I figured I’d have to do two articles on this one genre alone, and krautrock is a more limited genre (relatively short time period and just one country) than many others I’d be writing about. Feelings of overwhelm were starting to set in.
As I started listening to those 40 albums, I came to the difficult realization that only about 10 of them were really good enough to write about, so I’d settle for one article with maybe 15 titles after I grabbed some from my initial list of albums I already owned. Most of those, however, were too well known for the idea of writing about only truly obscure albums, so in the end I wound up with 12, a nice even dozen, and that took a long time and a lot of listening to narrow that down and listen to each one enough to write about. I probably spent as much time on those last 40 as I did on the several hundred it took me to get down to those.
To discover all the albums in the genres I want to listen to, I’m not only looking online on websites like Rate Your Music, Prog Archives, Gnosis and a variety of blogs, etc., but I’m also tackling some pretty enormous reference books.
Thankfully, there are people out there who have REALLY thoroughly researched my favorite genres and have published huge tomes covering thousands of albums in each book, sometimes focusing on the really obscure titles (like Patrick Lundborg’s excellent Acid Archives that covers thousands of underground American albums from the 60’s and 70’s in a variety of genres, mostly psychedelic, folk, etc.), and other ones that cast a slightly wider net (like Vernon Joynsen’s Fuzz, Acid & Flowers, which focuses on psychedelic and hippie music from America in the 60’s & 70’s, and his UK companion Tapestry of Delights). I still have to purchase Vernon Joynson’s Dreams, Fantasies & Nightmares, which covers other English speaking countries and South America, and Richard Morton Jack’s Endless Trip (USA) and Galactic Ramble (UK). Mind you, these are MASSIVE books, some the size of unabridged dictionaries, so they not only will take a long time to go through, but are often really expensive, especially the ones that have gone out of print.
For these books I’m being a little more reasonable, and only adding titles to the ‘to listen’ list for albums that sound like they’re within the genres I like, and which are reported as having at least some merit. I know that might not make as much of an anal completest as it would seem I am, but this will allow me to finish this project in a year or two, as opposed to ten.
And then there’s the issue of albums that can’t be found on Youtube or Spotify or other free places online to listen to music. For those I’ll have to learn how to download music, something I’ve always resisted before. Some really difficult titles I will have to accept that I just cannot find to listen to period, and that will have to be ok.
So, as you can see this is a pretty out of control enormous endeavor that I can only keep together by staying focused with what’s in front of me and not getting bogged down by the massiveness of the overall project. I feel, however, that I was always meant to do this. I’ve always wanted to discover as much of the great music I can from the genres I love as possible, and I’ve always done tons of research to find more albums, which is how I came up with that list of 1,300 albums to check out in the first place. That was through using a lot of online sources, including the online versions of some of the reference books that no longer exist online. I still have a ton of reading, researching and listening to do.
There is light at the end of the tunnel, and as it turns out, along the way. When I’m able to focus on what’s right in front of me, which is most of the time, mostly it’s a lot of enjoyable listening to music, and I’m able to listen to music while doing other things, as otherwise I’d never have the time. Also, I’ve discovered a TON of great music I didn’t know existed! It’s amazing and humbling after 30 years of being a huge music fan to find so many incredible albums I’ve never heard before. I already have about 80 new albums (well, new to me) that will definitely make the list from what I’ve listened to so far, and over 500 more that could potentially make the list once I listen to them more. I assume that when I’m done I’ll have at least 200-400 new albums that will definitely make my top 1,000 list, and thousands more that have the potential of making the list that will demand further listening. In the end, this will be a list of 1,000 very high quality killer albums.
There’s a lot of steps left. You probably think I’m insane. I kind of am, but I’m also persistent and pretty organized and not afraid of a massive project that seems impossible.
Everyone has a unique personal evolution that’s brought them to the genres of music they enjoy today, except for people who just “like everything.” I’ve never understand those people, as I’ve always been ridiculously opinionated about music. Often I’ve come across one of those “likes everything” types and played them some of my favorite music, only to find as it turns out that they don’t really like everything. They just like everything except for the weirdo music that I love!
There are very specific musical genres I passionately love, and others I passionately hate, although obviously I don’t sit around torturing myself with music I can’t stand (contemporary country, rap and mindless top-40 being the most egregious offenders).
The first group I loved outside whatever music my parents had around was Kiss. I fell for them fast and hard at the ripe old age of 7 back in 1976. One time I sent away for an all-Kiss magazine that cost maybe $1.50 and was devastated when it never showed up. It actually DID show up, but they really meant it when they said 4 to 6 weeks for delivery. That was an eternity for a kid.
Kiss was all innocent fun for me; enjoyable rock songs, amazing superhero costumes and make-up, wild stage antics, etc. It wasn’t until years later that I realized how incredibly sexual a lot of their lyrics were (“You pull the trigger of my… Love Gun”), but somehow I got through remarkably unscathed, and you can still find me occasionally listening to their best of “Double Platinum” album with great enthusiasm and nostalgia.
Outside of the odd tune I heard on the radio or saw on TV that I ended up buying the single for (like Rod Stewart’s “If You Think I’m Sexy,” Cheap Trick’s “Surrender/Dream Police,” Devo’s “Whip It,” and of course the theme song to “The Greatest American Hero”), I pretty much listened mostly to Kiss for years.
When I was 12, my best friend Robbie encouraged me with some very gentle peer pressure to get tickets with him and his friends to see Ozzy in concert. Somehow I convinced my mother to drop me off to wait in line for tickets at the New Haven Coliseum at 5 in the morning. I had never even heard one note of Ozzy Osbourne’s music in my life. By the time I went to the concert, however, I was quite fluent in his music and pretty much thought he was God.
That began a period of deep love for hard rock and heavy metal that lasted for a good 3-4 years, and I saw most of the popular bands of the genre in the early to mid-80’s; Van Halen, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Ozzy, Dio, The Scorpions, Def Leppard, Black Sabbath, even Kiss, although by the time I saw them they had just taken off their make-up, two of the original members were gone, and it was a big letdown. And then there was RUSH.
I first heard Rush on the radio in 1981/1982 and I fell in love with their music immediately. Seeing them was something special – they not only played great complex rock music, but they were incredibly skilled musicians, had highly intelligent lyrics and played songs live that were very close to their studio counterparts. They’re the only band from that period that I still love and avidly listen to today, although I will occasionally pull out some Van Halen when I want to just purely rock out.
When I was 15 I started smoking pot, by 16 I graduated to LSD, and with that came deadheads that suddenly seemed to be everywhere. I didn’t get the Grateful Dead at first. I didn’t dislike them, I just didn’t really get it, but it was played around me incessantly. At some point I started recognizing some of the songs, and then almost overnight I became a huge fan. I also started getting into The Beatles, which I was certainly familiar with, but hadn’t really been ready for until that point. And then with The Grateful Dead came all manner of 60’s music and other classic rock; Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, The Moody Blues, Janis Joplin, David Bowie, Simon & Garfunkel, etc. The transition happened very quickly, and finally this felt like the music I was really meant to get into, that was mine, and it was so much more satisfying than the more primal heavy metal, even if it wasn’t the music I grew up with.
By the time I was 17 I quit drugs (for good, thank God), and then I started REALLY getting into late 60’s psychedelic music, going beyond the most popular groups and discovering groups (with the help of books, magazines and talking to friends and people who worked at record stores) like The 13th Floor Elevators, The Velvet Underground, The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, and other unusually named bands that only made one album like Freeborne, Lazy Smoke, Kak and Gandalf.
I have a very clear memory of being in the car with my mother when I was about 19. I told her with a great deal of smug satisfaction that I pretty much had all the great music that had ever been recorded. What little I knew.
Soon after, a friend of mine gave me some tapes of his favorite 70’s progressive rock albums. I had some experience with prog rock already – I had some Yes, some early Genesis, The Moody Blues, but outside of The Moodies, who were very accessible and also quite psychedelic, I didn’t really understand it. I listened to the tapes, and while I wasn’t loving them, I had a feeling I shortly would, and I even told people that soon I would get heavily into the genre. It was a weird thing to proclaim, as I found the music a bit overly involved and hard to grasp and absorb, but there was something extremely intriguing about it that made me feel like if I just persevered, I would soon be rewarded.
The damn soon broke and I “got it.” I fell in love with intricate, involved music that went in all kinds of crazy directions, with music that wasn’t only inspired by rock, blues and Eastern music like psychedelic was, but also by classical and jazz as well. I thoroughly enjoyed Yes, Genesis, King Crimson and other brilliant English prog rock. I wrote away for music catalogs advertised in the back of Goldmine magazine (no internet yet) and ended up ordering a slew of progressive rock albums based only on their glowing descriptions. To my shock, I got a bunch of progressive rock sung in different languages, but it didn’t matter and I was soon a fan of PFM, Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso, Le Orme, Ange, Harmonium, etc.
Around the same time, I also got into late 60’s/early 70’s folk like Joni Mitchell and Cat Stevens and psychedelic folk bands like Fairport Convention and The Incredible String Band. I also slowly fell in love with free jazz artists like Sun Ra and John Coltrane, another genre I had heard some of, but felt was beyond me until it finally clicked. I got heavily into Krautrock and bands like Can, Amon Duul II, Faust and Popol Vuh. Krautrock was a 70’s amalgam of psychedelic and prog rock with some unique German weirdness. I got into 70’s and early 80’s electronic music like Tangerine Dream, Vangelis and Jean-Michel Jarre. I was basically making mindblowing musical discoveries at breakneck speed.
By that point, I had pretty much completely eschewed contemporary music for years, as it all seemed so banal, bland, derivative and lacking any real soul. I came to the conclusion that there was a real golden age, a renaissance of creativity in music that stretched from the mid 60’s to the mid to late 70’s that was pretty much over. While I still do feel that way now to a large extent, by the 90’s I did get into some contemporary genres like shoegaze (Cocteau Twins, Lush, etc.), ambient (Pete Namlook, Paul Schutze, etc.), electronica and trip hop (The Future Sound of London, Portishead, Zoviet France, etc.) There’s even the odd group from today I enjoy like Radiohead and Sigur Ros, but most of my musical attention is still taken up by the 60’s and 70’s.
From the point I started getting into 60’s psychedelic music, I started getting pretty obsessive about wanting to hear EVERYTHING from the genre. Eventually that was made easier when the internet showed up and people were able to combine notes and share music. I started creating a CD compilation series of my favorite 60’s psychedelic songs of all time called, wait for it… The Mind Festival! I never actually put the compilations onto disc, but I did plan them out in detail and even created artwork for a full 40 volumes (about 45 hours of music), and that was just my favorite songs from that one genre! By the time I finish with my current project and get back to it, there could be 80 volumes. I do plan on finishing that project eventually… probably… you know, maybe.
And that leads us to this current massive project where I’m endeavoring to listen to as many albums as possible from all the genres I love to figure out my top 1,000 albums of all time AND rank them, but more on that in my next blog entry. Did I mention I was slightly obsessed with music?
I’m really into music. I know that isn’t exactly a revolutionary statement, as everyone’s really into music, right? My “into music,” however, seems to be quite a bit more obsessive than a lot of people. Ok, a lot of people are obsessive about music – I’ve come across literally thousands of them. As you read on, however, you’ll see that I’m perhaps in the upper echelon of musical obsession, bordering on OCD.
Now, I’m not a musician, but I have been a DJ. To paraphrase from the movie “High Fidelity,” I consider myself a professional music appreciator.
At some point a year or three ago, I came up with the idea of listing my top 500 albums of all time, in order. I’ve always been obsessive about creating music lists, and this to me seemed like enough of a challenge that it’d be worth my time, as it’s not something most music fans would attempt.
To come up with a true top 500 album list of all time, however, it would stand to reason that what I would need to do is to listen to every album in existence. Obviously, that’s about as realistic as seeing every item at the Smithsonian Institute. Thankfully, that isn’t required, as 95% of the specific genres of music I truly love are from the 60’s and 70’s. For the most part, I have a somewhat finite pool of albums from which to pick, even though there are some post-70’s genres I enjoy, and there will be a goodly few albums from there in my list as well. For the most part my project is doable, if intense, idealistic and perhaps a tad overly-ambitious. Sounds like me!
No matter how much time I spend on this project (and I’m guessing I’m roughly a year or two from finishing it), I’ll never really listen to EVERY album from every genre I love, not to mention that last I checked new music is being made all the time, but I figure I’ll have listened to enough to come up with a fairly definitive, if obviously completely subjective, list.
In future blog postings I’ll talk about my musical history, how the idea for this project came about, how I’m going about tackling it, how exciting it is to discover literally hundreds of great albums I’ve never heard before, as well as a list of albums I already know will make the list, babbling euphorically about my favorite groups and albums, why this might end up being a list of 750 or 1,000 albums in the end, as well as the tie-in to a series of music articles I’ll be writing shortly for the bi-monthly online music magazine Perfect Sound Forever (the first article should appear in the December, 2014/January, 2015 edition).
For now, that will have to be enough. The next task is inviting all my facebook friends to follow the blog, as what good is a blog without a following, and what good is coming up with a list of my 500 favorite albums of all time if I can’t share it? Great music is meant to be shared. My hope is to expand some musical horizons and share the joy of a whole mess of fantastic musical discoveries.
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