Johnny Cash At San Quentin LP

     Bought this album today at Toad Hall in Rockford. Short story to demonstrate how times have changed. In 1991 I walked into Toad Hall and asked if they had this album. They hadn't heard of it. Today, twenty-five years later I heard not one, but two bands in separate locations play a Johnny Cash song, then bought this album from the very place where they hadn't heard of it all those years ago. I was living in the Park Motel the week that Johnny Cash died. I can't remember a celebrity death before or since that stirred people upso much. In those roughly fifteen years he had gone from becoming a legend to punk rockers and country music fans to a cultural icon.

     Cash was the lone exception of the Outlaw Country music gang that my grandparents allowed to be played in their home. They even banished the Eddie Rabbit song "I Love a Rainy Night" because it contained the line "It makes me high," but somehow John Denver slid through. Maybe it was the glasses. Nobody ever had the heart to tell them almost everyone in country music, even their beloved Porter Wagoner, was at the very least a pill-popping alcoholic. 

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Warren Zevon Excitable Boy Iconic Inner Sleeve

     My parents and aunts and uncles all had large record collections, but there are a few artists that for some reason none of them seemed to listen to. Warren Zevon is one of those artists. Of course I would have recognized "Werewolves of London" if it came on the radio, but most of his other music I never became a fan of until I was in my thirties. 

     Today I procured Zevon's "Excitable Boy" album at Culture Shock here in Rockford. The thing that jumps out at me is the inner sleeve is a really bold concept, whereas the cover seems really boring. The album itself is anything but boring. I'm really happy to have added it to my collection. 

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Synchronicty: The Album That Made Sting a Superstar

The Police Synchronicity album was one of my favorites as an adolescent. 

The vinyl album collection in our household was rather impressive. So much so that I wonder if my father still has it. Maybe shoved into a corner of the basement. I was always hounding my father to join one of those record clubs, and eventually he did, and let me pick some of the albums. This was the first one I chose. Oh No, It's Devo was probably the second. 

I'm not sure how many boxes our communal record collection filled, but it was many. I haven't exactly bought a phonograph to play any of the new old records I'm collecting, and I'm not sure if I will, or if I'd play them at all. At least not the ones I am collecting that are first pressings. I don't miss the whole experience of playing vinyl records, and because I have a tin ear I can't really tell the difference between a vinyl record and a digital file all my musician friends keep explaining to me. What I love about these albums is the artifact itself. The cover, the liner notes, the various record label stickers I remember from my formative years. Mercury and Casablanca have to be two of the most evocative labels for me. For some reason I can tell you what record label released an album in 1975 from fifty feet away, but I have no idea what I ate for lunch. 

The Synchronicity album is almost marred by the huge success of the Every Breath You Take single. The songs Synchronicity I and II are the ones I listen to mostly these days. But this was the album that made The Police, especially Sting, superstars. 

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My Vinyl Collection: Santana "Abraxas"

Like the demon Baphomet, Abraxas is largely an amalgamation of various myths, usually involving a god/demon creator that is neither bound to the concept of good or evil, but outside the dialectic altogether. Unlike the myth of Abraxas, Santana's "Abraxas" album is an amalgamation of some of the greatest rock jams of all time. Which is why it is the fourth album I have added to my vinyl collection. It satisfies multiple requirements, including kick-arse album art. I remember just staring at this album when I was younger. It is my uncle John's favorite album, and although it was not in our family collection, he brought it over almost every weekend. 

Santana "Abraxas

Simultaneously frightening and alluring, I spent many afternoons as an adolescent wondering just what the hell is going on in this scene. What is Abraxas? And what did it have to do with the music I was hearing?

“We stood before it and began to freeze inside from the exertion.  We questioned the painting, berated it, made love to it, prayed to it: We called it mother, called it whore and slut, called it our beloved, called it Abraxas…”*

* (Excerpt) from DEMIAN by Herman Hesse (Harper & Row)

One conception of god neither good or evil, but outside of both parameters is the Gnostic god/demon Abraxas. Just a creator being, possibly evil, but certainly nothing like the Christian conception of a loving, personal god. The Zoroastrians and even the Hebrews also had sects that believed in a similar being responsible for creating us, but largely indifferent, or possibly even evil.

None of the metaphysical mumbo jumbo seems to have anything to do with the album, which contains the classics "Black Magic Woman" and "Oye Como Va." I bought it on date night at the new pie shop/record store that used to be a Barnes and Noble and is now the Rockford Public Library. 

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My Vinyl Collection: The Moody Blues, In Search of the Lost Chord

The second acquisition in my new old vinyl collection arrived last week. It's "In Search of the Lost Chord" by The Moody Blues. There are several factors that made this my second choice to add to my new collection: I like the album, the cover art is great, and I have a lot of personal history with it. 

In Search of the Lost Chord by The Moody Blues. 

I'd heard most of the songs on this album on AOR radio long before the bus trip where it became a permanent part of my adolescent experience, but being a concept album, In Search of the Lost Chord really needs to be heard in its entirety a few times to sink in. And it's an easy experience. It can be done over any mellow-inducing substance. My favorite has always been a cup of tea. A rainy afternoon is usually best, but I suspect other weather conditions would be equally effective. 

When Jenny saw I had bought this album, she played the opening and the kids stopped what they were doing and said "That's scary." It's very unusual for anything to divert their attention from their screens. Trust me, the civil defense sirens have accidentally been sounded here, and they didn't look up, so to get their attention you know something has to be unusual. After that opening the album goes right into the most famous song on the album, and the only true single, "Ride My See Saw." Maybe "Voices In the Sky" was released as a single, not sure, but after "Ride My See Saw" the album goes into the sequence of concept songs about searching for the lost chord. I remember from my reading this is from a poem where a musician strikes the perfect note and angels sing and the heavens open, but he is never able to replicate that note and is driven mad by the experience of trying. 

My mother's musical tastes ran towards British Invasion bands and pop like Abba, and my father listened to country and roots bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival. The Moody Blues is a band that doesn't fit into any of those categories, so when I heard it on a long bus right headed towards a cross country meet in central Illinois, it was my first experience hearing most of these songs. My friend Royal had the cassette tape, and since we were senior members of the team nobody had the juice to complain that this was completely non-motivational running music. Can you imagine a school bus full of athletes in 2014 headed towards a sporting event while listening to Moody Blues "In Search of the Lost Chord." That in itself made my introduction to the album a very unique experience, but it was the music. I just dug it. And I misremembered. This event occurred two years earlier than I thought, and the reason we were allowed to play such an unusual album isn't that we were older, it was that the meet was a fresh-soph meet, and none of the older guys were there to shout it down, which no doubt they would have. Maybe even a few of us were just in the back of the bus listening softly, but no matter, this was something that didn't happen very often, if ever. 

What fifteen year old can't identify with the themes of searching for truth, meaning, and identity? 

I ran badly that day. Again. It was cold and rainy, of course, and I probably didn't even eat anything before I got on the bus. I didn't learn until nearly thirty years later the valves and vessels in my heart resembled the St. Louis cloverleaf, and I wasn't getting enough blood to vital areas to be competitive in an endurance sport. I'd like to run those competitions again with my new heart. That will never happen, but I have the keen memory of that bus trip, and the guys I was friends with then. They'd probably be surprised that moment in time had such a lasting impact on me. Maybe not. 

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My Vinyl Collection: Devo, Freedom of Choice

Well, I've finally taken the plunge and started collecting vinyl records. At least a few vinyl records. Most likely there's less than 100 albums in the world I'm even interested in owning, again. Hell, I don't even have a turntable right now. I think as I acquire albums I'll post a little bit about why I bought that album and maybe what it meant to me when I bought it the first time as a teenager, and now as a middle-aged man. My first acquisition was The Monster Club soundtrack. I've already written rather extensively about that, so here's the first album I decided to buy for the second time...

Devo's Freedom of Choice LP is the first piece in my vinyl album collection.

One of the very first vinyl albums I remember buying with my own money is Devo's Freedom of Choice. As a younger kid I spent most of my birthday money on Kiss albums, so this is probably the first serious album I ever bought, although most people seemed to think of Devo as little more than a novelty band and a one hit wonder. To me that never seemed to be true. I just got it from the beginning. Even at 12 I knew this was some serious shit to be dealt with. I probably got almost none of the lasting significance of what this band was about back then, I just dug it more than I had previously dug anything else. I couldn't have told you what albums they had done before this one, but I was hooked. Oh No, It's Devo only solidified my affection for the band. 

We rarely watched Saturday Night Live in our house because my father was off work and if he wasn't dragging us off somewhere to drink beer and work on cars, he just didn't like the show very much, but on Friday night there was a comedy show called Fridays, and that one we did watch. I remember seeing Devo perform "Gates Of Steel" and "Girl U Want" before the album ever came out, so "Whip It" wasn't even the first song I heard from this album. Fridays developed a reputation for showcasing a lot of the alternative and new wave music of that era, bands that weren't established enough for SNL. It was just the more cutting edge show, and skits like "Diner Of the Living Dead" were proof of that. 

Where did I buy Freedom of Choice? At the Ben Franklin store in Byron, Illinois. Same place I bought most of my albums. I believe albums generally cost $8.99 then, so I don't feel too badly about paying roughly twice that much for the album 25 years later. The owner and his family lived across the street from us, and for 25 years I've wanted to unburden the guilt and confess we nicked AC/DC's Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap album from his store the night of my 12th birthday party. Sorry.  We played it 27 times  that night, and that's not even possible. We always had a pretty high end setup in our house, with expensive Kenwood and Pioneer products, so it's likely unless I invest in some expensive gear that I'll never hear this album the same way I did when I first heard it. 

I'm hoping to save enough money this month to buy an original energy dome, but that seems a little extravagant. I'll probably pass this year and wait until they come around again next Halloween. It makes me happy to have this album again facing outward from the shelf into the room like a monument to the enduring power of geekdom. 

August 10, 2026 update:

In our family we had a communal record collection that seemed to begin when the family did. My parents bought records, my brothers and I added our own as we got older, but nobody thought much about whose album was whose. They all went into the same collection. Those records were simply part of the household, and consequently part of my childhood.

When my mother died, we lost access to that record collection. Strangely, I didn't think very much about the records themselves at the time. Records disappear pretty easily when a household disappears. Years later, though, vinyl came back, and I started thinking about those albums again. Not just the music, but the objects themselves—the covers I had stared at, the labels I recognized instantly, the records somebody brought home and put into the family collection forty or fifty years ago.

I had said I would never buy vinyl records again. Eventually I started buying back some of the albums that had meant the most to me. That's really what these posts were about. I wasn't trying to assemble the world's greatest record collection. In some way I was trying to reconstruct ours.

Of course, I eventually realized that's impossible. I can buy another copy of Freedom of Choice, Jailbreak, Abraxas or In Search of the Lost Chord. It can be the same pressing, have the same cover and make exactly the same sounds. But it can never be that copy. It isn't the record my uncle brought over on the weekend or the one my brothers and I put back on the shelf. It wasn't sitting in our house when I was seven or twelve or fifteen years old.

Those records are gone. These are replacements. I suppose collecting them again was my way of discovering that there's a difference.

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Thin Lizzy Jailbreak Album Forty Years Later

One of my favorite things in life is when content lives up to design. Thin Lizzy's sixth album, Jailbreak, released in 1976, more than kicks the tail promised by this spectacular album cover. If you were a seven year old and your uncle laid down the needle for the first time on this LP and you heard the opening jabs of guitar and bass on "Jailbreak," that was your ass. Almost forty years later this is one of the albums from my childhood that holds up the best. The two classics that anchor side one and side two are just the beginning. Song three on side one and two are classics, and I mean the kind of classics that transform a good, even great album, into a legendary album. It still sounds modern. As if this style of music will come around again and there will be Phil Lynott leading the way one more time. 

Thin Lizzy Jailbreak

Side one

"Jailbreak" – 4:01

"Angel from the Coast" (Lynott, Brian Robertson) – 3:03

"Running Back" – 3:13

"Romeo and the Lonely Girl" – 3:55

"Warriors" (Lynott, Scott Gorham) – 4:09

Side two

"The Boys Are Back in Town" – 4:27

"Fight or Fall" – 3:45

"Cowboy Song" (Lynott, Brian Downey) – 5:16

"Emerald" (Gorham, Downey, Robertson, Lynott) – 4:03

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The Monster Club Is The Best Movie Soundtrack of the 1980's

The 1980's were the golden era of movie soundtracks. So many classic soundtracks. Footloose, Top Gun, The Lost Boys, Ghostbusters, Purple Rain. All in all the 1980's were about 674% more Kenny Logginsey than most Americans would have preferred, at least in retrospect. But none of these are even close to being my favorite soundtrack of the Reaganomics decade. My favorite soundtrack of the 1980's comes from a little known horror movie most people have never seen. 

Take equal parts reggae, punk, ska, new wave, rock, and a killer side two composed by John Williams (yes, THAT John Williams), Strauss, Stravinski, and my favorite electronica track by Alan Hawkshaw, "Ghouls Galore," which accompanies the final and spookiest ghouls story, and you have the recipe for the best movie soundtrack of the 80's.

The songs one side one are varied and all guaranteed to stick in your head. My favorite is the tongue in cheek "Sucker For Your Love" performed by B.A. Robertson, who later composed songs with Mike Rutherford of Genesis, including the song "Silent Running." I once read an article where Donnie Iris and his songwriting partner had accused B.A. Roberston of lifting one of their songs, but since it wasn't "Sucker For Your Love" I didn't care.

The Pretty Things are a rather legendary British band whose career arc somewhat resembles Spinal Tap in that they moved equally successfully in pop, blues, and rock circles. Although they never achieved great success at any one time, their longevity has made them a favorite of many music aficionados. They still perform to this day and their titular performance here is magnificent.

During the stripper sequence you see here, singer Sevie Vann of the band Night peels the paint from the walls with her knockout voice. She was born in Rhodesia and sand backup for many groups and performers, including Def leppard, UFO, Manfred Mann, Wham, Tears For Fears, and Ray Charles. A varied list to be sure, but with pipes like that who's going to question why?

The band The Viewers belts out "Monsters Rule O.K.," a straight forward and satisfying rock song. I don't know much about this band, but like the other bands included in this soundtrack they were no fly-by-night operation either. There are no clunkers on this album. throw in a reggae performance by U.B. and you have a compilation too diverse and interesting to not at least give a listen to. But beware, The Monster Club is one of the rarest and most valuable soundtracks of all time, so you'll probably just have to watch the movie or listen to the songs on You Tube. But you should.

"Sucker For Your Love"

I love this review of The Monster Club soundtrack

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