Albums On My Office Wall, Part 1: Rubber Soul

I'm now turning to my office walls for inspiration as I sit here and eat my Chuy's takeout for lunch. I have six album covers framed and hanging on the wall to my right, the oldest and best of which is the Beatles' Rubber Soul. I bought the LP used at a Half Price Books in 1996 while I was in college. I already had the official British version on CD, but I wanted the version I grew up with, the version my parents had, the American version that started with "I've Just Seen a Face."

As a little kid, I saw the world through Brothers Grimm-colored glasses. Life seemed weird and dangerous, with wolves in the streets and old German forests around every corner. My dad works in construction, so I thought of him as a carpenter who went to a sawmill in the woods every morning. I dreamed about being one of the three little pigs, and I would lie in bed on my stomach and hear my heartbeats as giants' footsteps in the distance.

So, in this context, the song that really stood out to me on Rubber Soul was "Run For Your Life." John Lennon's exhortation to the "little girl" (I could relate to being little) to run for her life or hide her head in the sand to avoid being killed was an affecting statement. This life-and-death scenario fit in well with my fairy-tale world.

While none of the other songs on the album had similar themes, the feel of some of the other tracks, particularly "Norwegian Wood," "Michelle" and "Girl," seemed to evoke an old European landscape (even with the sitar). I don't see how I could have actually had any idea about this as a kid, but there was just something about the way this album felt that I didn't get from, say, the Doobie Brothers' Minute By Minute, another big one from my early years.

And just look at the cover! I'm sure the boys were photographed in some English garden somewhere, but, for all I know, they could just as easily be getting ready to head into the deep, dark woods of Austria on a rescue mission for Hansel and Gretel.

I'm sure this will all seem like a pretty strange take on one of the greatest albums ever made, especially for those who are used to hearing it kick off with the upbeat R&B of "Drive My Car" (which isn't even on the old American version), but topload it with folkier stuff, focus on "Girl" or "Run For Your Life" and think about life at age 5 and see what happens.

Van Halen vs. Mike + the Mechanics: Is One Really Cooler Than the Other?

In my early record-buying years, there was no cool factor. I bought the records I liked, regardless of what anyone else thought. By the sixth grade, though, it became obvious to me that some record purchases could make me cool, at least in my own head. I asked my friend Corey (who was cool) what the cool records were. He pointed me in the direction of INXS' Kick, George Michael's Faith and Terence Trent D'Arby's Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D'Arby. It was a while before I discovered that INXS was the band I had been referring to all along as "Inks." It was a devastating realization.

In the next year I grew more comfortable with my own sense of what was cool and what wasn't, but I sometimes let my early record-buying self take the reins at the store, with occasionally mortifying results.

For example, one fine, sunny day in 1988, when I was 12, my parents hauled me down to Sound Warehouse and let me pick out an album. I was really into Van Halen's "Finish What Ya Started" at that time, so I selected their album OU812. My parents denied the request due to the sleaze factor (see "The Rolling Stones vs. Aerosmith") and told me to pick something else. There was another song on the radio that I had just heard and really liked; it was "Nobody's Perfect" by Mike + the Mechanics, and it was from the same album that later produced their giant smash "The Living Years," the most sentimental, uncool single of the year.

Predictably, when my friends noticed this cassette in my collection, they wanted to know how the hell it got there. My insides twisted into a tight, little ball and I saw my cool life flash before my eyes. The end was near and desperation was dawning, so I explained:

"I was at Sound Warehouse and was going to buy the Van Halen tape, but I didn't look down when I was grabbing it and I picked up the wrong tape by accident."

"So you accidentally picked up Mike + the Mechanics?"

"Yes."

"Even though the M section is nowhere near the V section?"

"They were displayed on a table next to each other."

"And you never looked at it as you walked to the cash register?"

"Right."

"And you paid for it without looking at it or realizing what you were buying?"

"Yeah."

"And you made it all the way home without looking at it?"

"Yes."

"And you decided to open it and keep it rather than return it?"

"I didn't know you could return it."

"Really?"

"Yes."

They never mentioned it again, maybe out of pity. Or maybe I convinced them after all. Who knows. I kept a pretty straight face, and these are junior high kids we're talking about.

The Greatest Second in (Recorded) Rock and Roll

The Allman Brothers' instrumental "Jessica" starts off chugging along like a little acoustic train leaving the station, and before 15 seconds have passed you're out flying through a beautiful countryside with trees and grass and water and blue sky all around. But just wait until you get around the bend...

After the first two "verses" establish the mood and melody, there comes an extended vamp over which pianist Chuck Leavell lays down a solo like he's Schroeder from Peanuts (or, rather, Vince Guaraldi), and, great though it may be, it ends up mostly serving as the ski jump from which guitarist Dickey Betts will take his flying leap. As Leavell's section ends, the band builds up to a heart-bursting key change and, at 3.44, the first note of Betts' guitar solo punches through the fabric of space and time like a needle from another dimension. Just when you thought the train couldn't pick up any more momentum, it does. It's like in Back to the Future when the lightning strikes the clock tower at the exact moment needed to send the DeLorean through time; Betts is standing in the right place at the right time with the right feeling in his heart to receive the signal. And now that he's received it, he couldn't make a mistake if he tried. The whole band plays like a team of superheroes who have just discovered their powers and are gleefully putting them to the test.

Eventually, the guitar solo comes back down into the last verse and the song ends after seven-and-a-half minutes of pure joy. It's a perfect ride: couldn't have been any shorter or longer. It's rock, country, gospel and jazz all in one, and I love it.

Judge That Book By Its Cover!

One fine day in 1990, when I was 14, I was reading Music Express, the music magazine you could pick up for free at Sound Warehouse, when a half-page ad caught my eye. It asked, "Are there little surfer girls in outer space?" Good question. Of course, just the word "girls" at that point in my life was enough to completely command my attention, but add to that "little surfer" and my interest doubled. Girls in bikinis! On surfboards! A nice concept with staying power that was planted in my head (as well as millions of other heads) earlier in life by Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys.

The "outer space" bit wasn't something that I typically cared about, but I liked "outer space" as it was presented in this ad. It was a 1950s kind of space, plastic and red. With weird, flexible tubes. And rings around the Earth. And a name on those rings: Pixies. I knew then that I had to have whatever it was that was being advertised. And whatever it was turned out to be Bossanova by the Pixies.

Later, at the mall with my mom, I made a beeline for Sam Goody or Record Bar or whichever over-priced record store was there, and I headed for the cassette section (this was in my cassette-preference days). I located Bossanova and bought it, sound unheard.

Leaving the mall, I sat in the car with my Walkman on, waiting for the blank seconds at the front end of the tape to pass, marvelling at the beautiful planetary album cover.

I was probably a good minute into the first track before I realized there was not going to be any singing. Oh no, I thought, I've bought an instrumental album. What have I done?!

But then came track two. Now there was singing, if you could call it that. Black Francis screaming his lungs out. I still don't have any idea what the lyrics to that song are after all these years. I bought a death metal album, I thought. What have I done?!

And then track three, "Velouria." Things started to look up, to a degree. I really didn't know what to make of this band. But I sure liked their album art (even more so later, when I discovered Surfer Rosa — a topless woman flamenco dancing on an album cover? I would have bought that even if it had been a Michael Bolton album).

By the time I was a high school senior, the Pixies (broken up by this point) were my favorite band on the planet. It hadn't been easy, immediate love, though. There was an article in Music Express in the intervening years comparing the Pixies to a "stinky" cheese that you knew was supposed to be good but took some getting used to. I thought this sounded about right. They had bite. And, fortunately, the artwork and concepts helped create an opening in my brain just big enough for the music itself to get inside and take root. And, man, it's good, pungent stuff.

Telling Stories to the Sea

I bought Afropea 3: Telling Stories to the Sea in 1995, while I was a student at the University of Texas at Austin. I discovered this CD via a "world music" listening station at the Tower Records on the Drag. (Sadly, that Tower is no longer with us.) I was drawn to this album because of its interesting cover art (there's a hole punched straight through the middle of the book) and because it was on the Luaka Bop label, which I had already learned to love for its Brazil Classics series (more posts to come on this later).

Listening to the first track through the station's falling-to-pieces headphones, I was hypnotized by the completely foreign atmosphere that enveloped me. I'm sure this song, "Mona Ki Ngi Xica" by Bonga, was probably recorded in some bright, clean studio in Portugal, but in my mind it was (and still is) a few guys sitting on an old, ramshackle deck somewhere looking out over the dark, midnight sea seen on the CD cover, lightly slapping hand drums and rocking back and forth to the restless, climbing-but-never-getting-any-higher bassline. The translated title is "The Child I'm Leaving Behind." The atmosphere could not possibly get any thicker.

I would lie in bed listening to this album, reading the liner notes and staring at the pictures of earlobes, frying pans and bathroom sinks. One picture, that accompanied the lyrics to a song called "Mama Africa" by Dany Silva, affected me more than the others. As far as I can tell, or imagine, what I'm seeing in this image is fishing boats off a distant African coast. Now, I may feel a dryness in my throat and a lightness in my stomach when I listen to "Mama Africa" while looking at that picture, but I know very well that I'm a spoiled white kid from Dallas, Texas, and the romantic feeling would disappear like smoke the second I set foot on one of those African fishing boats. But the feeling is inescapable anyway.

Tolkien (yes, I know I'm a dork) said, "The dweller in the quiet and fertile plains may hear of the tormented hills and the unharvested sea and long for them in his heart. For the heart is hard though the body be soft."

I wrote a song a while back about the Dallas neighborhood I grew up in (as far away from the sea as you can get), and the last verse goes:

The sun sets over West Commerce Street
And old Oak Cliff bakes in the heat
And all you hear’s the chickens and the goats
But the ocean lies around the bend
And in my bed at the long day’s end
I can hear the bells ring on the boats

The Rolling Stones vs. Aerosmith: Degrees of Sleaze

One day, back before I was old enough to drive myself to the store, I was at Sound Warehouse with my mom, and, after browsing around and deliberating for a good long while, I had settled on Aerosmith's "What It Takes" 45 as my purchase for the day. I knew my parents weren't Aerosmith fans, but I also assumed they didn't really have an opinion on them either way and figured I was flying under the radar. Besides, the song was a ballad; should have been no problem. Mom asked what I had come up with, I showed her the single and to my shock and dismay was rebuffed.

She said, "No, I don't want to buy that for you."

All I could get out was, "But why?!"

"Because they're sleazy."

"But the Rolling Stones are sleazy! You like them!"

The stunning reply: "They're a different kind of sleazy."

I didn't know how to answer that. But over the years I heard stories and began to realize that, yes, the Stones were a different kind of sleazy. They were very likely much sleazier than Aerosmith could ever aspire to be, a point that my mom now admits.

My parents were just old enough to not have any respect for a group like Aerosmith in the 70s; after all, they graduated from high school in the year of the Stones' Aftermath and the Beatles' Revolver, so who could blame them?

A few years ago, I came across that 45 at a Half Price Books and I bought it. It now sits unplayed in a big box of 45s, but it sits there in my possession nonetheless.

Sleaze be damned!

The first one: Billy Joel's Greatest Hits, Volumes 1 and 2

Kids love TV theme songs. My friend's 4-year-old loves the theme song from The Office; it's been moving him to do the Running Man since he was 3. My childhood friend Jeremy was into The Greatest American Hero; he wanted to be the GAH, and being able to bellow the theme song by heart seemed like a good first step towards that goal. The first pop song I ever really loved was also from TV; I used to hold my Fisher Price tape recorder up to those little TV speaker holes every night (the show was in reruns) in an attempt to better catch the magic.

Most little kids, I assume, don't pay too much attention to top 40 radio or the best sellers list at iTunes, but they do pay attention to their favorite TV show. The show's theme song then gets inextricably intertwined in their minds with something they fiercely love, and just hearing that first note can be enough to send them off into fits of ecstasy. It also helps that theme songs by their nature are (or should be) the epitome of short, to-the-point, hook-laden pop.

The song that bowled me over was a top 40 hit that had been rerecorded and squeezed and molded into the tight theme song format for the sitcom Bosom Buddies. My dad informed me that the song was originally by a guy named Billy Joel, and that I could have it on a record that I could own and play anytime! Next thing I knew, we were at Sound Warehouse, and my dad was buying me Billy Joel's Greatest Hits, a double LP!

I spent that evening sitting in front of my dad's stereo system repeatedly listening to "My Life" through massive headphones, completely ignoring every other song on the album. I would eventually learn to love pretty much anything Joel did, but not that night.

Or the next day, when my mom announced that my little sister and I were going to our grandparents' house for the afternoon. I went into panic mode, since all I had been doing and all I wanted to do was listen to "My Life." I started the turntable again, hit Record on my Fisher Price, held the recorder up to the speakers, and got the opening 20 seconds on tape before Mom said it was time to go.

I spent the afternoon at my grandparents' listening to that 20 seconds of opening piano rumble over and over. It was indefatigable love.

Side note: I would set the album cover on a music stand while listening to the record, and I noticed that Billy's eyes would follow you no matter where you went in the room. Kind of scary and still true.