 April
2004 | The tiny dog discography
What follows
is a listing of albums that happened to crop up as soundtracks to
certain moments in the life of tiny dog. I was going to put up all
the album pictures and stuff but it's late, so to hell with it.
Are they great albums? Well, many of them are. You may have to read
awhile before they start getting better. Being that the list starts
with The Gambler, I think it is clear that this isn't intended as
a shopping list.
Note: entire
half decades of the alleged tiny dog lifetime are missing from the
list below, since this was just a random list I thought up in 30
minutes. Stay tuned for possible future amendments.
But enough
about me. What I would really like to know is an album that was
influential during a banner moment in the life of you,
the reader. Write immediately to let us know about it.
Kenny
Rogers: The Gambler
1978
So, this was
my first album. I vaguely recall feeling very musically legit as
I actually enlisted my mom’s help to order this one through
the mail. I wasn’t going to stand there and just keep eating
up the latest early 80’s (yes, I was a little late to the
gambler train) crap they were doling out on “KPOP” FM.
As a notorious
story about my childhood goes, I once collected plastic horses,
and liked to bust out the Mag light during a spotlight dance between
my favorites, Morgan and Lady, to the tune (here it comes) of the
Kenny Rogers hit, “Lady.” A
fact my erstwhile tormentors did not know, however, is
that Lady sometimes did a solo dance to Upside Down by Diana Ross.
Anyway, once
I had this album, Morgan and Lady no longer had to wait around for
K-108, the Easy Listenin’ station, to kick up their hooves.
The
Smiths: Hatful of Hollow
1984
I was introduced
to the Smiths by a force of nature known as Tiffany, a fashion-forward
school-aged hipster who liked to steal her mother’s minivan
for unlicensed drives around the block. We executed a number of
tween-aged capers in the early 80’ including the iconic stealing
of wine coolers for our first episode of public drunkenness, stumbling
furtively through the local park in her neighborhood, wearing our
cable knit sweaters from the mall (or in her case, the Esprit outlet
in San Francisco, the holy Mecca of fruit-colored school girl fashion).
I have to admit
when I met her, my favorite band was Huey Lewis and the News—who
I refuse to put on this list. Kenny Rogers is quite enough.
A-Ha:
Hunting High and Low
1985
Two of my cousins
and I developed a simultaneous and intense obsession with the gel-haired
Norwegian dreamboats during the summer that this album came
out. We spent our vacation together in Little Rock, Arkansas laying
100 A-HA posters ripped from Teen Beat out on their bedroom floor,
end to end, and taking pictures of this shrine with our Disc cameras.
I stand firmly behind the contention that this was a great band,
for reasons extending beyond hair gel and into the soaring drama
that is Scandinavian keyboard pop music.
Prince:
Sign O’ The Times
1987
Keith
Knight recently said it best, Prince
is a God among men. He somehow became a holy figure in my high school
circle, such as it was, in the late 80’s. It was understood
among us that Prince was more than another flash in the pan, and
was in fact the (insert iconic musical act from the 60’s)
of our time. Note that he is currently included in Rolling Stone’s
Fifty
Greatest Artists of All Time (a distinction diluted greatly
by the inclusion of fellow 80's alum Madonna, one of the greatest
shams of 20th century entertainment).
In no small
related matter, Prince was also hero-worshiped by an influential,
brooding 21-year-old aspiring guitar hero I met, and greatly admired,
when I was 17.
—-Note
about late high school—-
This was my
“Beatles phase” and secondarily my “Monkees phase”
(thanks to the MTV “Last Train to Clarksville” marathons)
which is incredibly boring to discuss…. picture a teenaged
girl with a D average GPA…. big hair…. ankh earrings….
thrift store sweaters….. a jean jacked embroidered with squiggly
flowers and peace signs…burning incense in her room and fomenting
hatred toward the Man…. ruing her unjust placement in the
space-pop music continuum at two decades past the summer of love.
No one understands...
Neil
Young: Decade
I forget the year, but many years before the year(s) I was listening
to it, which was about 1990
My Beatles
phase bled out into a lifelong admiration for folkey singery songwritery
types, the best ever example being Neil Young, “grandpappy
of grunge” (a connection I just don’t get; I still think
of grunge as heavy metal without the budget).
A boyfriend
I had at the time was himself deep into the 70’s aesthetic,
complete with black light posters, lava lamps, CSN&Y records,
and books about color auras, and thus I too was down, way down with
the laconic, whole wheat poetics of Neil.
Lois:
Butterfly Kiss
1990? I’m not really sure. These damned Internet discographers
never list the year.
Now, I know
you have never heard of this album. Neither had I, until a floppy
haired rich kid from Michigan who I met in a college creative writing
class gave it to me on tape in 1992. After that he called me a few
times and we had an air relationship for approximately a week and
a half before he dropped me like 4,000 shares of ImClone.
I of course
recovered from this slight immediately, and did not spend the rest
of the school year bitterly appreciating the sage, spurned-girl
lyrics of this record. Because that would have been really embarrassing
to think about later.
Hole:
Live Through This
1994
I’m unemployed.
The economy is in the toilet. I’m living in a scary San Francisco
neighborhood grappling with temp agency interviews and flirting
with random crying jags and other general symptoms of post-collegiate
malaise. Somehow, the unwashed hostility of this record really made
it a pitch-perfect soundtrack for this experience.
I went with
my roommates to see Hole play at the Fillmore that November; this
was Courtney Love in all of her track-marked, widowed glory, evoking
the specter of Kurt Cobain by changing the lyrics of “I Think
That I would Die” to he’s all gone for dramatic
effect. In my state of mind, I was greatly impressed by it.
Elliott
Smith: Either/Or
1997
This was a
record I played nonstop in the second hand Honda Civic I shared
with the Nup for trips
across the obscure Washingtonian burg of Bellingham, in the days
after I dropped out of grad school. It brings back vivid memories
of the drama of being 20-something in a random pulp mill town near
the Canadian border, brooding over one's cloudy future prospects.
Nup and I saw
Elliott play at Western Washington University in 1998; I think he
did a cover of Big Star's "September Girls" but maybe
I am losing it and it was actually "Thirteen". This is
well before he up and died, laying waste to a brilliant career.
I can never seem to find the right words for how much I love his
music, although god knows I have tried.
The
Verve: Urban Hymns
1997
My god am I
still going on about these damned albums? I remember, for reasons
unknown, this album playing on the husband’s stereo (this
is back when he was the boyfriend, I suppose) in his tiny-ass but
immaculate Bellingham apartment on a beautiful spring day which,
if you've never lived in Washington during the winter, is like seeing
the face of god.
It was after
work, and I’d driven the crappy Honda over there to see him.
He was in the kitchen or something, I don’t quite remember,
but I was standing there inside the open doorway, listening to Velvet
Morning and realizing how thoroughly life had redeemed itself for
me, that year.
The
Wrens: The Meadowlands
2003
I’m listening
to this one right now…
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