If you have this dog-like sniffing ritual of checking out the record collection of anyone the first time you’re in their home you might find yourself reading this even though you don’t give a shit about my tastes in music. It’s something you can’t stop yourself from doing. It’s how you try to understand other people and seek out friends. Even if you think I’m an idiot and you hate my taste in music, you’re going to want to know exactly what kind of idiot I am. It’s a way of gauging enemies as well as friends. It’s how you guard your gate. It tells you how far to let someone in.
Record collectors who are in it for the money might go through a similar ritual but their motives are different and the end results are different. People like you and I know that a large percentage of our psyche is on the shelf. Our thoughts and feelings and beliefs have been expressed in music and we can remember who we are just by strolling through the collection.
I have approximately 2000 LPs (I stopped buying vinyl in 1990 when I got my first CD player—I hate vinyl) and maybe 1500 CDs that are not duplicates of the vinyl collection. It’s only in the past year that I’ve been downloading music (I’m still not sure if I like that but I’ve run out of space). One of the peculiarities of this list and discussion is that it is limited to rock. For the past 35 years I’ve been losing interest in rock and pop, heading toward classical, jazz, ambient, both pop and folk world music, (I hate to say this) new age or ambient, electronic, experimental. Another peculiarity is that bands or musicians who are favorites might not have produced favorite albums. They might always be interesting and often good, or consistently good, but never quite there (that’s how I feel about David Cronenberg’s films, which are spotty, often outright failures, but almost always interesting, or Ridley Scott’s, which are pretty consistently good but seldom outstanding).
I’m working off a list I compiled through the process of elimination sometime in 2010. It does not reflect my current idea of my top ten but it probably didn’t the day after putting the list together either, since this is a very fluid and subjective process. By 2010 I had almost stopped buying new music and would rarely listen to the records I already had. Then in the summer of 2014 I decided, first, to get a bunch of Beatles’ albums, making my partner wonder if someone else had taken my place or if I was demon possessed or had an alien in my brain—I have often claimed to hate them. Not true: I just think they’re ridiculously overrated. For the hell of it I put these albums on my computer. Except for my own recordings I’ve never had music on my computer unless it was a temporary thing, for instance as I’d digitize vinyl. Then I obsessively uploaded about 2000 CDs onto my computer. And since then I’ve probably downloaded at least 75 more. Now I am again listening to music. Compared to what I did when I was young I still hardly ever listen to music. But compared to what I’ve done since getting into a relationship 30 years and ago and then becoming a parent (1991) (and working a fulltime day job, et cetera) I am again listening to a lot of music. It’s the first time since the turn of the century that I’ve been exploring new music.
There are only two albums that have been consistently and indisputably on my top ten records list, which vacillates between five and twenty-five, for the past 35 years or more: Funhouse by The Stooges and Caravanserai by Santana. So let’s just consider them my top two.
I first heard Funhouse when my cousin bought it, sometime after the release of Raw Power, maybe in 1973 or early 1974. When he started college in the fall of 1973 my cousin for the first time in his life had money to buy new music. And a place to find it, on campus. At that time we were both into all hard rock and the beginnings of heavy metal. The Stooges were something else. Nothing, absolutely nothing, had that intensity. Nothing else felt that real or serious or had that sense of commitment. At the time I only liked the first side of the album. Now I almost prefer side 2. “Dirt” is one of my life’s theme songs and probably needs to be played at my funeral.…Iggy’s The Idiot has hovered near my top ten over the decades. Raw Power and Lust for Life are great but I’ve never liked them quite as much. Too many of his records just sound like imitations of The Rolling Stones, such as The Stooges’ first album or his collaboration with James Williamson, Kill City. On the whole I don’t find him all that interesting.
When I was in high school, in the early 1970s, Santana were very big, especially with the stoners. I think it was as close to a spiritual moment as many of us would have. Anybody with any kind of hipster musical credibility, though, probably stopped listening to them after their third album. There were already signs that they were straying from their Caribbean roots and the rock and soul of the first couple of records. Caravanserai took us to Brazil, into jazz, and was probably not that popular. I don’t know, I never hung out with music freaks, except for my cousin. And he never hung out with any music freaks except for me.…I am still very fond of Abraxas and the third album, feel some nostalgia for the first, but can hardly listen to anything after Caravanserai. When I first heard it, after stealing it (when I was 15 I stole about 85 LPs then quit before I got busted), my response was luke warm. It was certainly too mature for me (this was the height of Alice Cooper, T. Rex, Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep). By the end of the decade it was my favorite Santana album and one of my favorites by just about anyone. Carlos’ solo and collaborative albums never made much of an impression and the earlier albums have been drifting from consciousness but Caravanserai remains, beautiful and dreamy and always finding a way into my blood.
For Christmas in 1967 (I was 10) my cousin and I were asked what record we’d like for a present. I chose Look Around by Sergio Mendes and Brazil 66. He chose The Doors’ first album. I was oblivious and The Doors meant nothing to me. Maybe in 1968 I saw The Doors on American Bandstand, or some such show, and I hated them. I thought Morrison looked like he was praying as he clung to the mic. Yet in 1969, after my parents’ divorce, my father gave me The Soft Parade for my twelfth birthday. And with birthday money I went out and bought Waiting for the Sun (the first record I’d gotten with my own money). Since then I’ve been a Doors fan. Some years or decades an ardent one. Some years, as I’ve been for the past decade, rather fair weather. Yet most of the past 35 years that first album has been hovering in or close to my top ten. The posthumous release An American Prayer has been the single most influential album I’ve ever owned, one that eventually propelled me to recording my own poetry and audio compositions, even though it’s a rather cheesy affair by a not-so-great band both honoring and seemingly cashing in on the words of their dead singer. Over time I’ve come to see Morrison as a mediocre poet, at best, but for years he was the only person I could attach the word poet to. He’s the one who inspired me to write my own poetry. For that, I give thanks.
I first heard Hawkwind when I found Hall of the Mountain Grill in the post holiday cutout bin, January 1976. They were an immediate favorite. The hint of metal with a residue of psychedelia combined with the sci-fi lyrics (it’s possible I’d already discovered Michael Moorcock’s novels), the relentless rhythm and whooshing synthesizers—really, an immediate favorite. It took me at least till the end of the decade to round up all their earlier releases plus what was current (finding several as imports in San Diego, spring of 1980). I remember loaning Space Ritual to a coworker in 1979. He was a Jehovah’s Witness and though he liked metal he had to take this off his turntable because of the paganism. At that time it wasn’t yet my preferred Hawkwind album but it seemed to define them better than the others, which is why I’d chosen to lend it. Almost all that they did between Lost in Space and Hawklords’ 25 Years On is magnificent, in a lowbrow way. They are wonderfully, sincerely idiotic (I doubt they consider themselves idiots but they are). Space Ritual has usually been my favorite and hovering in or near my top ten for the past 30 years or more. Hall of the Mountain Grill, Quark, Strangeness and Charm, and 25 Years On also hover close to that top ten. You will probably notice a paucity of fun in my selection but Hawkwind qualify as fun, I think (since fun is something I’ve never understood—at least by anyone else’s definition of it—I could be wrong). The Doors turned me onto a dark and serious path at a young age. Hawkwind are something of an antidote.
Christmas 1969 was the jackpot for my record collection, as small as it was. It was a long time ago and my memory is vague, so I might have gotten something the preceding year. Whatever. Let’s pretend I know what I’m talking about. The story I’d heard from my mother (in rather catty tones) was that my aunt had married such an old-fashioned Catholic that he wouldn’t allow rock music in the house. She had to part with some records and I received ABC/Dunhill’s A Treasury of Contemporary Hits (Steppenwolf, The Mamas and the Papas, The Grass Roots, and others), The Mamas and the Papas’ Deliver, and Three Dog Night’s Suitable for Framing. The real winner, a used copy given to me by a younger aunt, was Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Bayou Country. That record got a lot of play then and has remained on my turntable, in my CD player, and on my computer ever since. At times I’ve preferred Cosmo’s Factory and gave Pendulum quite a go but Bayou Country is the one I’ve always come back to. Until I crossed paths with Black Sabbath in early 1972 (Paranoid) CCR had been my top band. (I saw them that spring on their last American tour, after Tom Fogerty had left the band. It was so disappointing. Not that they didn’t try. They did everything they could to put on a good show. But they were touring Mardi Gras, the one album of theirs I’ve never liked. Doug and Stu were doing some of the vocals. John Fogerty, at least, had moved on from the ripped jeans and flannel shirts of 1968 and was dressing like a polyester cowboy. I had already begun to move on musically but that concert was a blow from which I’ve never fully recovered.)
Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Yes, bloated prog rock. While I was in high school I was probably like everyone else in preferring the heavier Tarkus and Brain Salad Surgery to the milder Trilogy. The first album had some sort of honor of precedence but was too classical for teens. Over the years Emerson, Lake, and Palmer has been my favorite though I’m sure I wouldn’t have said much of anything about liking them in the ’80s. Prog was pukingly passé. Actually, even then I liked the first album.…I saw them perform sometime toward the implosion, either touring the second Works album or Love Beach. They were very disappointing. Not that they played badly or put on a bad show but you could tell they were not happy playing together. The new music didn’t resonate with the audience and they were just going through the motions.…Since compiling this list it’s possible I’ve come to prefer Trilogy to all their other albums. I listen to it fairly often. I’ll stand by the first one and Trilogy no matter what any of us think of prog.
When did Jethro Tull’s Stand Up become a favorite? I remember bringing it to my cousin’s house circa 1978 and making an ass of myself. I thought the song “Fat Man” was in praise of girth—my cousin’s always been a pretty stocky guy, like Gary Farmer in Powwow Highway—while playing it for him I realized it was just the opposite. When I crawled under a rock I took the record with me and kept listening to it.…I was introduced to them by the same kid, a family friend at the time, who had introduced me to Black Sabbath, spring of 1972. He loved Benefit, which I heard several years later and never quite liked. The first Tull album I heard was Aqualung and for many, many years it was my favorite by them. It was the album I always pulled out when we’d have our first snowfall (my partner still throws out that opening riff on this occasion and, oddly, now likes the record more than I do) so it’s sort of an October album. Or, rather than Christmas records, I’d listen to Aqualung all December. Shortly after being introduced to the band I got a copy of Thick as a Brick, which my schoolmate hated. It remains a favorite with me. But over the years Stand Up has been the Tull album that I need to hear with some regularity. Aqualung, Living in the Past, Thick as a Brick and, most of all, Stand Up are my Tull albums. I’ve found many of their other albums repellent, and not just in retrospect.
Talking Heads’ Remain in Light has been in my top ten about as long as anything. I couldn’t tell you which of their albums I heard first. Maybe Fear of Music. It probably wasn’t until 1980 that I really started to listen to them. If I’d heard either of the first two albums I hadn’t liked them; I acquired a taste for them after going crazy for the third and fourth. Speaking in Tongues is the Heads’ album that I listened to the most, when it was current, because it was good to dance to though I didn’t like it as much as Remain in Light. Now I can’t stand it. Even when I’m having one of those years where I have no patience for David Byrne’s voice (or his personality) I know that I still love Remain in Light and want to have it near me the way I have monster models and books of poetry. I am comforted knowing the record exists.
In the 1970s I was not a fan of David Bowie. Back in high school I’d acquired a used copy of The Man Who Sold the World and was genuinely fond of it but could not stand anything else I’d heard. There’s something about his presence, what seems a mixture of self-consciousness and vanity, that I find repulsive. But it was his music I didn’t like. None of the Ziggy period. Diamond Dogs seemed awful at the time. Young Americans and Station to Station did not appeal to the lingering metalhead I was. I’m not really sure why my cousin and I were listening to Low not long after he’d first gotten it, whether I’d asked to hear it or if he thought I might be interested. I did not like Low, at all. Ten years later I finally got my own copy with the expectation that I would finally like it, which another ten years later I did. Very slowly my opinion of Bowie began to change. It wasn’t until Scary Monsters that I came to appreciate a Bowie album while it was current. And I soon came to enjoy Lodger in part because of Adrian Belew. Since then I’ve really come to admire the Berlin trilogy with Low being my favorite. The Man Who Sold the World has also hovered around my top ten in recent decades. Aladin Sane has become a regular on my playlist, especially the title song (which seems a definitive Bowie moment). I’ve generally come to like all the old records. His work from the 1980s, whether it’s his solo stuff or Tin Machine, has generally left me cold, except for an occasional song. Starting with The Buddha of Suburbia I’ve liked pretty much everything he’s done. Of those albums Outside has hovered around my top ten. There are very few artists I admire and respect as much as David Bowie though I still go through long spells where I can’t stand to listen to him. There is still something about him I find disconcerting and chilling.
I don’t remember when I first heard Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygene. I do believe in love at first listen. Usually it wears off fast: an album or song will be played many times a day, dozens of times a week, hundreds of times in that first six months or year or whatever. Then you can no longer stand to listen to it. I’ve had many of those obsessive musical flings since the late 1960s. I think part of what made the affair with Jarre last the rest of my life (at least, I don’t think I’ll dump him) is that at first Oxygene was unobtainable. I could not afford a new copy and no one was parting with theirs (or the used copy was snapped up before I could find it). I think many of his early fans wanted a monogamous relationship and they meant it to last forever and clung to him. I don’t know when I finally got my own copy. It’s never been quite the heady affair of a genuine fling. The album isn’t like the princess in a fairy tale or that woman you met while on vacation. This is something you can live with. Like my copy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, I can feel peace just knowing it’s there on my shelf. It’s only in the past decade or so that I’ve taken to exploring the rest of his music. Most of it is good, though a little schlocky, but none of it has won me over the way the Oxygene has (I tend to think of the sequel as the same record—Jarre has an odd way of coming back to things decades later as though he still thinks and feels as he did, able to make an extension/sequel to the original, able to re-perform and rerecord the original).
When I lived in Duluth, until 1984, our little slice of counter culture (often of the seedier parts) was Downtown Book where they sold records and books, new and used, and posters, pot pipes, incense, and I forget what else. For about a year it seemed like every time I came into the store someone was playing this really odd and somewhat obnoxious record: Dub Housing by Pere Ubu. Eventually I came to like it enough to buy a copy. It was over ten years before I met anyone else who liked them. Their other albums were good (I really like New Picnic Time, too, which I didn’t get until about ten years after release). When they reformed in the late ’80s I was disappointed. The new Ubu was dull, rather conventional sounding except for David Thomas’ voice. (It was at that time that I saw them at First Avenue, with Peter Blegvad opening. Cloudland was their new album. Very disappointing. What I got out of that evening was Blegvad. The Naked Shakespeare is pretty good.)
Another album that almost immediately won me over and has, usually, continued to lay claim to my…I’m not really sure what it claims of me. My belief in it? Echo and the Bunnymen’s Heaven Up Here. In the spring of 1980, a few months before my 23rd birthday, I moved back into my mother’s house (stayed until October, 1984). At the time I viewed it as something of a curse but in retrospect I remember the luxury of having time to explore so many fields of thought and to develop my art. I also occasionally had an opportunity to earn money (usually working for my neighbor, hauling concrete blocks and mixing mortar when he needed an extra grunt), which meant that for the first time in my life I could sometimes afford a new release instead of always having to wait for a second hand copy.…I think Heaven Up Here was the first thing I heard by the Bunnymen. Crocodiles never quite did it for me. It always seemed too stiff, like they couldn’t be themselves in the studio on that record. I wanted to like Porcupine but it seemed bogus (and to my ears, now, the mix is awful). Ocean Rain seemed like pretentious shit and I simply gave up on them. So many bands of that era had charm when they were bad, maybe because they seemed earnest like good little amateurs. It seemed like something anyone could do (that whole punk and post-punk DIY credo, though it antedates punk). When they went in for cleaner production and a slicker sound they rarely fared well. Most of them lacked the talent to write good songs or to play them well enough to make me come back for more (Psychedelic Furs were possibly the most embarrassing example of this…and you’re wondering why I would have bothered with any of them, as though I should have known better).
A drawing three times life size on Rieves BFK, graphite with touches of India ink, chalk, and white acrylic paint. The article is from Rolling Stone. This drawing is one of the few of my works to be seen in a public exhibition, spring of 1985, at the Duluth Art Institute. I can’t recall for certain but it might have been featured in the local newspaper. Gendron Jensen was the star of the show, though not an active participant, but this drawing made a small stir because of the craftsmanship.
Magazine were close to the end when I finally stumbled upon them (after the first half of the 1970s, when my cousin was often leading my musical taste with his new discoveries, I was usually on my own…I came to love the adventure of exploring the record stores, seeking out new and interesting things…either way, it was rare I’d find or could afford a record when it was current). The Correct Use of Soap was not as cool and exciting as any of the other bands I was finding at the time but the music was so solid and the lyrics clever and humorous enough to keep pulling me back (now that I’m becoming an old man the wit seems lacking). Twenty years later Magic, Murder and the Weather had also won me over, sometimes becoming my preference over The Correct Use of Soap. “Song from Under the Floorboards” needs to be played at my funeral. It seems like a condensation of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, the only one of his works that has meant anything to me.
With her annual bonus, near the close of winter 1994, a few months after we’d purchased a duplex with a friend, my partner bought us plane tickets and a room on the beach of Playa del Carmen, Mexico. It has been my only vacation out of the country and certainly my only vacation as a rich American (I was shit broke but compared to the poverty I saw down there I was disgustingly well off). We were browsing in this very upscale gift shop, all local artisans, run by a German (handmade papers and books as art objects, ceramics and sculpture, et cetera). On the stereo was this music like I’d never heard before. We split the cost of the CD, since neither of us, by then, had much money left (well, I was nearly out of credit): Jorge Reyes, Bajo el Sol Jaguar. After tracking down more of his music (still not easy to come by) I found that the album was more like his collaborations with Steve Roach and Suso Sáiz (as Suspended Memories), who both feature on Bajo el Sol Jaguar, than it does any of his other works. Usually his work is less New Age and more quasi-anthropologically pre-Columbian.
Mike Oldfield has been one of my favorite artists since I first heard Tubular Bells. I was aware of it being used in The Exorcist but I’m almost certain that I didn’t see the film until several years after its release. Are you sick of Tubular Bells? It seems Oldfield’s fans can’t let go of it. Nor can Oldfield, he’s reworked it so many times. Back in the 1970s the album I liked was Ommadawn, which I did not own until I bought the very expensive import Boxed, maybe in 1980 or 1981, and that album has hovered near my top 10 ever since (some of the recordings on the fourth LP, stuff he did with David Bedford, are what I really got out of that collection). Most of his albums were pretty good though becoming progressively cheesier until he started doing pop songs (as on Five Miles Out and Crises) and more or less gave up on instrumental music for awhile. That was as far as I could go with him until the mid-1990s, after getting the Elements box set. I gave Songs from Distant Earth a try. I think he has always had an attraction to schlock and that album characteristically has some pretty nauseating moments. But it’s freakishly beautiful as well. Nothing he has done since compares and, really, none of his earliest recordings do either. It is the one Oldfield album that I unequivocally like. Otherwise, I often find listening to him to be a guilty pleasure, as though I had on Enya or Enigma.
Back in the 1990s I was excited by the apparent freshness of electronic dance music: Future Sound of London, Orbital, Underworld, and The Orb to name some of them who didn’t very quickly get bogged down in a stylistic rut and among the few I still listen to from time to time. Underworld’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman has remained something of a magical release—that is, I still hear it as such. In the past twenty years it has become one of my most played records, at a time when I’ve come to listen to less and less music.
Also from that era, though something I didn’t track down until a couple years ago, is Node. I first heard them on a sampler of some sort, probably from a record label or magazine. Their eponymous album (1995?) was an analog synth throwback, totally fetishistic, and totally magnificent. It came across as the one great Tangerine Dream album that we all knew they could do but was never released (Tangerine Dream circa 1975, maybe). (If you listen to Node’s second album, 2014, you’ll hear parts reminiscent of many ’70s synth pioneers such as Jarre, Kraftwerk, and Synergy. An excellent album but not quite like the first.) Node seems totally derivative yet somehow original. I can live with that, especially since it’s better than what it was aping.
It was probably in 2004 that a coworker gave me a couple CD samplers of various metal bands, most of them death metal since that was his thing. I can’t say I disliked much of it but neither did any of it excite me, except for Opeth. The material from Blackwater Park, Deliverance, and Damnation is incredible—all of it produced by Steve Wilson of Porcupine Tree. As metal became formulaic toward the end of the ’70s (think of Judas Priest) I began to lose interest and hadn’t really listened to much since then (though a different coworker tried to reignite my interest 1989-1990…he did get me to reevaluate King Crimson and to pay attention to David Torn). Damnation is such a beautiful album, embodying much of what I like about progressive rock without taking on the mannerisms (unlike Opeth’s last album, Pale Communion, which I can’t listen to, sounding like someone who doesn’t understand the exploratory spirit of prog but merely imitates the mannerisms). I can put Damnation on and listen to it over and over the way I did, say, Dark Side of the Moon or Led Zeppelin’s fourth when I was a kid. That has rarely happened in recent decades.
Something missing from this list are non-rock albums such as Perotin by The Hilliard Ensemble, Current Circulation by David Hykes and the Harmonic Choir, Fauré’s Requiem conducted by Michel Corboz (I prefer it with a boy soprano, though Fauré probably meant it to have an adult female), or Bach’s cello suites performed by Yo Yo Ma. In part this is because my record database was not very accommodating to classical records. Also this represents a mind rut that often precludes me from looking beyond certain parameters. I would probably add all four recordings to my top ten (bringing it to twenty-two, I think).
Also missing are some recent additions. I’m not sure they entirely belong here. I haven’t had enough time to live with them and they could soon overstay their welcome. Two records that immediately come to mind are Farewell Poetry’s Hoping for the Invisible to Ignite and Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock (which is only slightly better than Spirit of Eden and Hollis’ solo, all three of which are superb).
I’m not really sure how I came across Farewell Poetry, if it was serendipity or if someone suggested I give them a try. The general reaction when I’ve tried to pass them on to others has been ambivalent. It is only in the past few months that I’ve come to realize that Farewell Poetry’s music could be described as stylistically banal: they play a very familiar style of post-rock reminiscent of MONO. With an overlay of poetry (and maybe no one liked the poetry). The general business of mixing music and poetry has been my passion for decades so just about any attempt at expanding the field is something I welcome. Also, I like the record. A lot. I generally like post-rock (though it quickly becomes tedious), especially liking the cloying beauty of their sound (as I like MONO’s records), and I am enamored with Jayne Amara Ross’ words and voice. The album brings to mind what I wish I could have heard forty-five years ago, what The Doors and Velvet Underground offered but couldn’t deliver.
Australian poet David McCooey (who, by the way, has an excellent album of poetry and music on iTunes called Outside Broadcast) introduced me to Mark Hollis and Talk Talk. Over the past decades I’ve been pulling away from the song as an interesting structure. I still like songs but I don’t find them all that exciting or inspiring. So, to hear Mark Hollis doing songs that are not in that structural pop rut, are only very loosely related to pop music as we usually hear it, made me an instant fan. Farewell Poetry might not last among my top ten, or even among my top fifty albums but I’m almost certain these three Talk Talk/Hollis albums, especially Laughing Stock, will remain. Like Opeth’s Damnation, these albums reference so much that I was at home with from the 1970s without really copying it—and Hollis extends those ideas without resorting to convention the way Mikael Åkerfeldt invariably does. When it was released, like David Bowie’s Low, I probably wasn’t ready. I think these albums would have seemed to drag. Hearing Laughing Stock now is like instant heaven. I’m at home with how quiet they are. I appreciate the deviance of them. I’m thrilled by the subtlety of the arrangements. I’ve read that the songs couldn’t be performed on stage yet though they’re patched together from hundreds of takes they have an ethereal flow and completeness that seems rare in anyone’s music these days.
Missing from the list and probably my favorite band in the past few years (first heard them in the mid-1990s but didn’t pay much attention until about five years ago) is Einstürzende Neubauten. Many of my recordings resemble their style of industrial music, but with spoken poetry rather than singing, though I have not been directly influenced. Do I have a favorite album by them, something that could be added to my top ten? As a band or artist they might be one of my top five but I can’t think of a specific album that stands out. This is true of many of my favorite artists. They might be consistently good or interesting but maybe never quite great, never pulling together an outstanding album, which has always been a special skill and now a seemingly dying one. I think I mention them just to put the following list and this whole essay into perspective: music I enjoy and admire that never quite reaches the pinnacle of these few others. A continuation of my top ten into a top 50 or 100 or 500 would include albums that have much good material but never quite jell into a wholeness. Well, maybe with this in mind I could probably come up with that top 50 (which would include a few recognized classics, Dark Side of the Moon and Abbey Road and maybe a Kate Bush or two but still primarily albums snubbed by the professional critics and connoisseurs…Argent, Nektar, Pavlov’s Dog, even a Lucifer’s Friend).
- David Bowie Low
- Creedence Clearwater Revival Bayou Country
- The Doors The Doors
- Echo and the Bunnymen Heaven Up Here
- Emerson, Lake, and Palmer Emerson, Lake, and Palmer
- Hawkwind Space Ritual
- Jean Michel Jarre Oxygene
- Jethro Tull Stand Up
- Magazine The Correct Use of Soap
- Node Node
- Mike Oldfield Songs of Distant Earth
- Opeth Damnation
- Pere Ubu Dub Housing
- Jorge Reyes Bajo el Sol Jaguar
- Santana Caravanserai
- The Stooges Fun House
- Talking Heads Remain in Light
- Underworld Dubnobasswithmyheadman
Now, are you ready to argue? That’s what fans do best, I’ve heard.
The Naked Old Man 
The Greatest Sin
Posted in A Day in the Life, Book commentary, Memoire, Morality, Perception, Social responsibility, Time with tags art, book commentary, creativity, despair, good and evil, human nature, ignorance, imagination, internet etiquette, memoire, ordinary life, petty grievances, philosophy, pigeonholing, reality, time on September 22, 2013 by swampmessiahMy concept of sin is very egocentric: it’s something that is done to me. I suppose that makes me a Libertarian? (Pardon, that was a random association but it rings true. It’s all about the world doing unto them as they go blustering about with their irresponsible sense of self-importance.)
I wasn’t raised in a religious household. In fact, I don’t think the word “sin” was ever used within my hearing, except for the rare occasions when I was brought to a Lutheran church (usually just dumped at the door by my stepfather) until I was confirmed and had my first communion, after that no one cared if I went or not.
So, really, sin is not a part of my consciousness and never has been.
Until recently.
The awareness of being sinned against began to grow while reading a book that had nothing to say, or the author had nothing to say but went on and on trying to impress us otherwise. It was probably nonfiction and probably written by a journalist who read and interviewed but did not investigate firsthand (Diane Ackerman’s Natural History of the Senses versus anything by Mary Roach). Or it might have been something by Sarah Vowell, who seems to know everything but says next to nothing when she writes.
Or it might have been my observations of my children’s educations (which, by the way, have been significantly richer than mine was, at least until they got beyond high school—college seems as pointless as it ever was, but more necessary for getting a job)…the memories of hours, weeks, and years drifting away in a dull haze of boredom and meaningless information.
Or it might have been the very existence of my day job, installing and warehousing office furniture. Or the existence of my clients confined to their cubicles for decades—doing what? Or any of the jobs I’ve had before this one. If one of my goals is to be conscious and aware of my life passing but what I do most of the day barely engages my mind…
To me, the greatest sin is to waste my time.
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