Moe Berg

A Spotify Playlist

On the surface, this might seem like an immodest, self-indulgent thing. However, I’m doing this more as a way for me to talk about the music that has inspired me to become a musician, a songwriter, a producer and also describes me as a music fan.

Most of my Spotify playlists are a dog’s breakfast. They don’t have a lot of conceptual integrity. I hear a song and then add it to one of the random playlists I have going and none of it makes a lot of sense. This playlist is my attempt to make something coherent, though it is also eclectic. I’ve also tried to be honest in my selections. There is a lot of old music that I discovered more recently that I won’t include, like Waiting For Someone by The Tokens, which is one of my all time favorite songs. Some of the stuff on the list is a bit corny but no one should be embarrassed by their musical choices and no one should make musical choices based on how cool it makes them look to others. You may be disappointed that there aren’t more deep cuts or obscure tracks. Often, the song that got me interested in a band or caught my ear, was the one I heard on the radio. I’m not trying to be hip with my choices, I’m trying to be honest. A lot of these songs were the big hits for the band and I’m not the kind of person who feels that disqualifies a song.

This playlist is loosely chronological. One thing though is, this list ends at 1985, which is when I moved to Toronto. Even though music continues to inspire me, I look at that date as the end of my musical upbringing.

There are some significant omissions here. Both Neil Young and especially Joni Mitchell were huge influences and major parts of my musical upbringing. I could tell long tales about my experiences buying their records, listening to their records and learning their songs. But since, (at least at the time of this writing) they have pulled their records from Spotify, and the whole idea of this is based on a Spotify playlist, those tracks are, regrettably, not included in this piece.

From a very young age, music was everything. My older brother, John and sister, Ann would occasionally bring home records and I listened to them over and over. Mostly, I was glued to the radio, listening to 630 CHED AM and later, K 97 FM. I listened to music all the time, learned to play songs on the guitar, picked out harmonies with John and dreamed of being a rock star.

I miss my youth. No matter what people say, you can’t relive it. When you do things like listen to an old record or go see a band you loved 20 years ago, you are seeing it through the lens of all that you’ve gone through since you first heard it/them. It reminds you of everything you’ve lost and everything that is gone. Doing things you used to do when you were young can never have the same rush as it did the first time. A song that captures this a little bit is Merle Haggard’s Wishing All Them Old Things Were New. A visual image of how I see my life is the scene in Fargo where the police are dragging William H Macy as he tries to escape through a window, whining like a child. That’s me trying to escape the inevitable end of my time on earth.

This is written sort of stream of consciousness. So don’t expect a literary masterpiece. You may or may not want to follow along with the actual playlist. Also, not to really get into it but I have some misgivings with Spotify and streaming services in general and I’m anticipating some comments about using Spotify. I see Spotify as a good thing for some (fans) and a bad thing for others, (musicians/songwriters). I’ve heard it said that better always means better for some and worse for others.

House Of The Rising Sun was the first record I ever bought by myself, which is the main reason it appears on the list. I bought it at a store called Ollies Pipe Shop, (later named Emery’s Pipe Shop) which was a tobacconist/convenience store about a half hour walk from my childhood home. On the counter was a cardboard box of current and old 45’s, positioned in the same way you might have a display of gum or lighters. I think they did quite well with this as, for a while, it was the only place you could buy records in St Albert, AB. If you wanted an album or a bigger selection of singles, you’d have to take the bus into Edmonton. (Eventually, Safeway, for years the only grocer in St Albert, put up a rack of albums that they sold at a wildly inflated price). Buying a record was a big deal. We were poor, the poorest people I knew in our slightly affluent suburb. It meant I listened to this record over and over again. When I first moved to Toronto, there was a club called the Copa. The place would often have bands play early shows before it converted to a dance club later in the evening. I saw Eric Burdon there and he sang a bunch of Animals songs and his voice still sounded amazing even though he must have been into his 60’s. One of the greatest rock singers of all time.

Roll Over Beethoven. Where I lived, no one had tons of records and most of the records people had were singles. But some people had Beatles and Beach Boys LP’s maybe some Sinatra and easy listening stuff. So that was my starting point. You’d go over to a friend or a relative’s house and you’d almost always find Long Tall Sally, which was a Canadian only release from the Beatles that resembled The Beatles Second Album. I remember listening to the intro to Roll Over Beethoven over and over again, stopping at the vocal and bringing the needle back to start again. There was something magical about George’s intro guitar that I couldn’t get enough of. At the time, I didn’t know this was a Chuck Berry song-I thought the Beatles wrote all of their songs. This is a great track that really has the Beatles sound. Each individual instrument is undoubtably John, Paul, George and Ringo playing it and there is an ensemble sound of the Beatles that is very distinctive.

Don’t Worry Baby. My brother John, was a big Beach Boys fan and that’s where I got my love for vocal harmonies. I Get Around was an early favorite of ours with its complex vocal intro and re intro that I still think is genius. But it was the more melancholy side of Brian Wilson that stuck with me over the years, which is why you see Don’t Worry Baby on the playlist. As a kid, I always imagined the teens of that era around a campfire snuggling with their girlfriends while that song played. My sister used to run with a bunch of guys who rode crappy motorcycles. They’d hang out in our basement and eat Kraft pizzas, (can you still get them?). They came in a kit that had a can of pizza dough, sauce and shredded cheese and you’d assemble and bake the pizza yourself. They must have been awful though I know little about pizza. But Ann would drag the portable record player down there and Don’t Worry Baby would be a song that would leak upstairs to where I was sitting with my mom, distracting me from whatever terrible TV show we were watching. When I was young, I used to think the Beach Boys were a band that people would listen to after a break up. I didn’t know much about romance but their songs had a subversive paradox inside them that could make them as relevant at a funeral as at a wedding.

I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party. This whole list could be Beach Boys and Beatles songs. Their catalogs are my earliest memories of music and their music is almost part of my DNA. This has a very relatable lyric. About a breakup where you might have mutual friends and how do you manage that? And about the singer taking the high road even though he is broken hearted. The last band I had in Edmonton was called facecrime, (I was on a huge 1984 kick at the time but yeah, cringy name). As I’ve noted in previous blogs, Edmonton was a hard place to get a gig if you weren’t a cover band. A lot of gigs would be week long residencies at a hotel bar. One of the more ‘prestigious’ gigs in town was a place called the Sidetrack Cafe that wasn’t attached to a hotel but was able to have live music and a liquor license because they served dinner. I remember seeing BB Gabor there a few times. Anyway, facecrime ended up with a booking as I had been grinding it out in other gigs in the city for years and this was considered, (comically) an “A” room. We had to play three sets and so we needed to pad our set with covers and also, do extended versions of our own songs, which no doubt made them crappy. We were getting some sort of decent fee to play the whole week. We didn’t have a sound man, in the sort of punk/new wave world, we would typically use the house guy, unless we were opening for Teenage Head or the Diodes or some touring act. (Though for a period of time, we had a young kid named Brook Pimm do our sound until he got too good at it and went to work for people who actually paid him). The manager of the club set up our sound-set it and forget it-so for the whole week no one was manning the sound board. Apparently he did an awful job as everyone said we sounded like crap. We played the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday then the manager fired us. I feel like he only hired us because he had a touring band that only wanted to play the Friday and Saturday and he needed someone as a placeholder for the early part of the week. When I went to collect our money, he gave us less than half of what we’d been promised for the week. His rational was that they made most of their money on the weekend and since we didn’t play the weekend we didn’t make half of the money. We had a back up singer named Dianne, a very nice and sensitive woman. She cried and I felt bad for her but I was like, whatever, we shouldn’t have been playing at a club like that in the first place. It was just one more reason I needed to get out of that crap town that was so aggressively horrible to its musicians. I hate bashing Edmonton. It’s much better now and when I am bashing it, I’m bashing what it was when I lived there and feel extremely justified in doing so. Anyway, I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party was one of the covers we did and I believe Dianne sang it. My 14-year old son, who is a Beatles fanatic recently got me to do this Beatles Bracket thing to discover what your favourite Beatles song is. This was mine.

She’s Not There. This was a single. I really didn’t know more of the Zombies stuff until later. I knew this song and Tell Her No and eventually, Time Of The Season. The tiny bass solo that acts as a transition between the first chorus and the second verse floored me. I first heard this on the radio and then I think Ann bought the single. We had a suitcase record player and, like I did with Roll Over Beethoven, I would drag the needle back to play the bass signature over and over again. At this point in my life, I didn’t really pay much attention to lyrics. I was more fascinated by anything unusual about the track, which the bass was in this one. This is still so great, holds up amazingly well after all these years.

Mr Dyingly Sad was a song I would hear on the radio but never owned a copy of and didn’t know anyone who did. This was one of the big issues with retail controlling music. If record stores didn’t think a record was selling, they’d send back their unsold copies and the record company would stop producing the record. They would typically destroy the unsold copies unless they could find a way to sell them at a huge discount. I assume that this song was quickly deleted and was not able to be purchased for decades. Several years ago, my friend, documentary filmmaker Alan Zweig, put it on a cassette for me and that was my only physical copy of the song. This track is all about the hauntingly beautiful vocal arrangement and exquisite chords. People at the time might have called it ‘jazzy’, though I personally wouldn’t. There are certain favorite songs of mine that I have listened to so many times that I never have to hear them again. And there are others that I never seem to get tired of. This is one of those, I could put it on anytime and still love every second.

Sit Down I Think I Love You. Again, it was the chords. Also, the little signature that the accordion plays around the hook made me fall in love with this unpopular instrument. I’ve tried to replicate that accordion style in songs that I have produced over the past decade and I’m thinking I should just send the player this track as a reference. All through the song there are interesting textures, like the sound of the guitar that does a call and answer with the vocal at the end of the B section. And the mandolin. The outro of the song features a great vocal counter melody that I often think of when I am getting lazy with an arrangement. I try to encourage myself to continue producing the song until the final note. I believe the original version of this song was by Buffalo Springfield and this is a Stephen Stills composition.

Tattoo I think my friend Rod bought The Who Sells Out as a ‘twofer’, which was one of the ways record companies repackaged records after their release. You’d stick two records together and sell them at a reduced price. Which meant I first heard this record a fair time after its initial release. The other record it was packaged with was A Quick One. The Who Sells Out forshadowed their later work as, although it wasn’t technically a concept record, it had these interstitical radio bumpers that tied the whole thing together. This song sounded so sad to me and it sounds sad in my head as it is running through it right now. The track is stripped down with it’s melancholy vocal and chords that make the uncharacteristically dopey lyrics sound more meaningful. I remember singing this song and others off of this record randomly when my friends and I were walking to school and it turns out, irritating the shit out of them. My friend Jackson would chastise me and ask me what I thought I was accomplishing by doing this? Was I showing off? I wasn’t showing off, I just couldn’t help myself. I also used to watch TV with a guitar in my hands, often ruining shows for my family members. Music was just inside me, screaming to get out and I didn’t even realize I was being such a frigging nuisance. I played my guitar until all hours of the night, driving my poor mom crazy and hogged the stereo, listening to records. A real pest. I was probably more driven as a kid than I ever was as an adult.

Let’s Spend the Night Together. Honestly, I didn’t know that much about the Stones for a long time. My sister Ann bought Let It Bleed but I’m not sure I liked it back then. Rod, who always had more disposable income than me, bought Through The Glass Darkly, with the original hexagon cover, (I wonder if he still has it). It was a greatest hits collection that we listened to it a lot and it was really loaded with awesome stuff. Let’s Spend The Night Together was my favorite song. I could never figure out the second chord until much later in life. It wasn’t clear to me that you could change the bass note on a chord and turn it into something else. I eventually figured that out and it dominated my philosophy of composition. And the harmonies were amazing. The Stones have been good for that, from Sympathy For The Devil to Love Is Strong, their harmony parts were very specifically them and brought an idea of catchiness that I think elevated a lot of their songs. The Stones were always a bit scary for me. They looked stoned and amoral. For a kid who grew up in the church, they seemed like what the parents in our congregation thought all rock musicians were. Releasing a record called, Their Satanic Majesties Request didn’t help. For me, the most interesting thing about The Stones is how much better a band they became when they stopped trying to be a blues band. When they figured out how to write great rock songs, that’s when they grew a personality. I’m always amazed by that. The moment when somebody finally gets good at something. I watched the Oasis documentary and there’s that great scene when Noel shows the band a song he wrote and the rest of the guys go, “you wrote that? No way, you didn’t write that!” I wonder if that was how the Stones felt when they recorded Aftermath and Between The Buttons?

I’m Goin’ Home. Alvin Lee was my first guitar hero. One of my older siblings either bought or borrowed the Woodstock soundtrack record. For me, the best track on it was Ten Years After’s I’m Goin’ Home. Alvin Lee was the first fast guitar player I’d ever heard and it blew my mind and that lick that’s in the solo of this song, the one that I’d hear on Montrose’s Good Rockin’ Tonight years later, still slays me. These days, fast guitar playing holds no interest for me other than respect for the gymnastic ability someone might have. Though sometimes I’ll hear someone play something fast but it will be a really interesting scale that I’ve never heard before and isn’t being played so fast or with so much distortion that you really can’t make out the notes. A good example of this would be the solo in Hip Today by Extreme or the outro solo in You Went Away by Earth Wind and Fire. My first rock concert was an all day festival at Clark Stadium in Edmonton, which may not even be there anymore. I was really young. There was a huge lineup of bands, some of which, like the Flying Burrito Brothers, never showed up. Growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household, this was my first experience with seeing people openly drinking, smoking pot and making out. John, my cousin Rob and I got a hot dog at the Bay, (a Canadian department store) bought 10 cans of pop and headed to the park. That was all the sustenance I had for the day. I only remember a few of the bands’ names, The Wackers, Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids, who were like a B version of Sha Na Na, and Country Joe MacDonald doing a solo set, capped off with the obligatory Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag. When Ten Years After finally hit the stage after nine or so hours, everyone stood up, blocking me, the tiny child, from seeing them. So I basically heard their set. For the last song, they punched into I’m Goin’ Home and John put me on his shoulders to be able to see them play. By then, I was so tired and worn out from the day, I’m not sure how much I appreciated the song but, thinking back, it was a cool first concert.

Suite Judy Blue Eyes. This is a title that I thought was clever as a kid but now find painfully corny as an adult. As band’s became heavier and vocals became less important, Crosby Stills and Nash were a breath of fresh air for me. They were one of a growing number of supergroups that would be a thing during the ’70’s. This track was on their eponymous debut and was in heavy rotation on my suburban crescent. I’d be in one of the neighborhood girls’ basement and everyone there would sing along to Marrakesh Express and this song and, because I was good at singing harmonies, it made me look awesome to the girls. Picking a harmony part in a song and singing along was pretty much my favorite thing to do at the time and this record was like a buffet of that. I spent a lot of time hanging out with girls when I was a kid and had a few girlfriends though I never really did anything with them. A bit of hand holding and an even smaller amount of kissing. I was pretty naive and, even though I was very girl crazy, I was unschooled in carnal matters. A lot of that was on account of my fundamentalist Christian upbringing where sex wasn’t really a subject or even a word. But I learned early on the power women had and how men’s desire for them made guys act and feel stupid. And also the rush you get when a girl likes you back.

Heaven On Their Minds. Jesus Christ Superstar was a gigantic deal when I heard it. My life up to that point had been singles and collections of singles. The idea that a story could run through an entire record seemed pretty cool to me at the time but in hindsight, the idea of a rock opera is really dopey. When I used to listen to albums before this, I would typically skip the songs I didn’t like or couldn’t understand. But I listened to JCS from beginning to end, with my headphones on, over and over again. My brother John brought this home but I don’t think anyone in my family listened to it more than I did. I can still remember almost every word, every riff clearly and I may have listened to it more than any other record I can name. The singing on the original cast recording is absolutely stunning. In my opinion, it was Deep Purple’s, Ian Gillan’s finest hour. All the vocal performances by the cast were flashy and passionate, which, I discovered later, is the nature of the theatre. Heaven’s On Their Mind has a guitar hook that foreshadowed the drama and impending doom of the story that was about to unfold. What always struck me about JCS was how dark it was and when I listen to it now, it feels sinister, full of foreboding. We are leading up to the tortuous death of Christ and there is an ugliness to the plot of this opera. The death of Jesus may have been preordained but it doesn’t make the events leading up to it any less creepy and I feel that Rice and Lloyd Webber expertly captured that.

Pearl. I remember hearing this on a bus trip home from my Grandma’s in Camrose, Alberta. I don’t know if the bus had a radio of if someone was playing it on their transister. My cousin Dan and I used to go to Camrose every summer for a week to visit Grandma and mainly, just hang out with each other. One of our main activities during these visits was to come up with song titles based on descriptions of farts noises and poo. It was about a one and a half hour bus ride home but to a kid, it felt like it took the entire day. On one trip home, Grandma had sent us off with a couple of root beers to drink on the ride. For some reason, we were having trouble opening them. A man stepped up and helped us and then scooped a middle finger full of Copenhagen into his cheek proclaiming, “This is my root beer.” Weird thing to say. We were probably 11 or 12 years old, maybe a bit young to be on a Greyhound alone but those were the times. Pearl was clearly a love song but something about the way it was portrayed, maybe it was the organ tone, gave it a sad feeling. As I write this blog, I can’t help noticing how often melancholy and sadness comes up when I describe songs I like. I think of my youth being carefree especially compared to the lives of today’s youth, but in reality I think it was pretty sad. I think there was a perpetual feeling of longing that dragged me down and prevented me from really enjoying things, something that remains part of me to this day. My father abandoning our family when I was seven years old obviously had a profound effect on me and I, perhaps foolishly, blame everything that’s wrong with me on that. It was clearly a constant source of sadness and shame and was only perpetuated by a myth that he would someday return. The old man would come around from time to time, often to beg my mother for a divorce. He’d occasionally bring birthday gifts though that dried up after a couple of years. One day, I made a bet with a guy at school named Dave, (not Dave Gilby). He said, if I could refrain from speaking for a whole day, that he’d buy me any album of my choice. As someone who didn’t have a lot of money for albums, this was a bet I had every intention of winning. I was out with him and my other friends for most of this ‘day’. However, at one point I was home and my dad was there, again, trying to get something out of my mom. He asked me something and I wrote down on a sheet of paper that I held up, saying that I couldn’t talk to him. I didn’t explain why. I didn’t see him again for ten years, and that night tortured me every day of those ten years. I managed to win the bet and got Dave to buy me Journey Through The Past by Neil Young, an odd record but I was at the height of my Neil Young phase. I don’t know what happened to it, I can’t find it in any of my stuff and considering how monumental that weekend was for me, a bit curious that I would lose track of it. My cousin Dan has had a troubled life. I had lost track of him for decades and recently was able to connect with him via Facebook. Talk about a guy who was dealt a shit hand. There’s more to say about this but I think discretion prohibits me going any further.

Every Night. Paul’s debut solo album was something of a curiosity to me. I don’t think I was musically sophisticated enough to understand it until much later. But there were some Paulish songs on it that I loved. Maybe I’m Amazed, obviously. Junk as well. In high school, my friends and I did a pantomime in Drama class with Singalong Junk as the soundtrack. Every Night had the Cole Porter major to minor or in this case, minor to major in it. It’s such a great trick that I’ve, oddly, hardly ever used myself. I’m constantly amazed at the brilliance of this song. Knowing how sappy Paul can get, this is decidedly not that. It’s a very interestingly crafted lyric. It really only gets to the mushy stuff on the hook. I had an opportunity to talk about this album on a podcast called The Walrus Was Paul, by Paul Romanuk which offered me the chance to really examine it in detail. This record becomes more impressive to me as the years go by and I’ve probably never loved it as much as I do now.

Make Me Smile. Sometime in the late ’60’s into the ’70’s, jazz rock became a big thing. Someone told me that Bitches Brew by Miles Davis was sort of the unofficial start of that. However, both Blood, Sweat and Tears and Chicago, the two biggest bands of the genre had formed before Bitches Brew’s release. So I don’t know. (Maybe they meant that Bitches Brew was the start of jazz rock fusion?) There were other bands that cashed in on the trend, Ides of March had a killer track called Vehicle and I also had a single by a band called Spiral Staircase, called More Today Than Yesterday that featured an incredible tenor vocal. Then there was the Canadian band, Lighthouse who had a decent run in this style and, more on them in a bit. Again, it was John who brought home the Chicago and BS&T records. Make Me Smile was my favorite Chicago track, it was part of a long piece on Chicago III called Ballet For A Girl From Buchanan. It had a drum solo and cool harmonies and great chord changes. It was a Terry Kath song, Terry being the band’s guitarist. He accidentally shot himself to death cleaning his gun, a uniquely American death. The band also died with him. They would go on to greater commercial success later on but musically, they never achieved the artistic heights they did while he was with them. Sometimes a band has someone who is like their creative conscience. Someone who gets what’s good about the band and is able to deflect the more puerile tendencies of the other members. The sort of twee Peter Cetera ballads that were the focus of their sound on their later records created a bit of a sad legacy for a band that was pretty radical in its early days, very political and musically adventurous.

No Matter What. This feels like a song that everybody likes, like Blister In The Sun by the Violent Femmes. It’s pretty much the definition of power pop and I believe it has influenced thousands of songs. I often cite Badfinger as an influence but I had little interest in any of their songs that weren’t written by Pete Ham, (or Paul McCartney). The Beatles introduced an idea that everyone in a band can and should write songs. I haven’t really examined how common this idea was in general but it seemed to be a big thing in the power pop world, I guess since power pop bands were so influenced by the Beatles. Arguably the two biggest power pop bands of the original wave, The Raspberries and Badfinger, had this egalitarian approach. It meant that every record had a few amazing Pete Ham/Eric Carmen songs, then a few by the second best writer and then a bunch of barely listenable songs by the other guys in the band. This sounds uncharitable and many would disagree. I guess I don’t believe that, just because you can play an instrument, you are a world class songwriter. The story of Badfinger is one of the most depressing in the history of rock. If you are interested in a tale of the music business screwing over a band so badly that two of the members commit suicide, then dig into Badfinger’s story

Surf’s Up. I have never seen a record jacket that so accurately described the music that was inside it. The photo of the lonely horse rider, his head down and the dull green hue to the painting really illuminated the essential contradiction in The Beach Boys music, the idea of melancholy presented in a beautiful and upbeat way. The final act of the song Surf’s Up, as I stated in a previous blog entry, is the single most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. I remember listening to this at my grandma’s house, in a sitting room with my cousins Jackie and Greg. I’m not sure who actually owned the record, probably one of their brothers, and being devastated by Feel Flows, ‘Til I Die and especially Surf’s Up. They kept playing Student Demonstration Time and Take A Load Off Your Feet, both of which are kind of gross, but that’s not a knock on my cousins. We were kids and those songs had a catchy simplicity to them. It never clicked with me as a youngster what an absolute genius Brian Wilson was. Even back then and even after hearing this record, I still associated the Beach Boys with surfer and car music, summer and good times. As cool as I thought it was at the time, I was still too young to really grasp how musically sophisticated it was. As I got older, I began to appreciate Wilson and the Beach Boys in a new way. This song reveals a genius in full bloom. I feel like it took a long time but the world has caught up to Brian Wilson and more and more people are seeing him for the brilliant producer and artist he was.

Lord Of This World. John brought home Masters Of Reality by Black Sabbath one day. I (and really, no one else on earth) had ever heard music this heavy. We put it on and the coughing with the delay into the opening riff of Sweet Leaf was like a completely new experience of music. The distortion and low end were other worldly. There was an evil vibe to this, which was a bit weird as my brother was embracing Evangelical Christianity right about then. Another song on the album, After Forever, seemed to be a pro-Christian tune but there was enough of the Diabolus in Musica to make it clear that this was from the dark side. I absolutely loved this record and played the crap out of it. I found out that they had earlier records and it was on my record buying radar to get Paranoid, their second album. I took the bus into Edmonton to a store called Kelly’s with enough dough to buy a new record one weekend as I must have come into some birthday money or something. I narrowed it down to a choice between two that were on sale. One was the original cast recording of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I was high off of my adoration of Jesus Christ Superstar and thought this might be similar in its greatness. My other option was Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. I did a mental coin flip and chose Joseph. (This was years before Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat became a Broadway sensation). As anyone knows, it kind of blows. I tried playing it a bunch of times but never really got it. I thought, I’ll go back downtown and ask if I can switch it for Paranoid. Both records had been in some kind of budget bin. I sheepishly went up to the cashier and asked, “Are there refunds for these records?” to which he replied, “nope”. What I meant to ask was, could I exchange Joseph for Paranoid but I was too nervous. It was the only time in my life that I contemplated stealing something. I never ended up buying Paranoid until I got the CD on sale at Walmart in about 2001. But Lord Of This World has remained my favorite Sabbath song.

I’ve Got Confidence I would be remiss if I didn’t include at least one Gospel song. I grew up in the Pentecostal church. My Dad’s family were a part of it and my mom converted after the old man bolted from the family. I guess it was a way of coping with her crap circumstances, 5 kids and no job, fucking hell. John was the only one of us kids who bought into the church and he did so in a big way. He started bringing home Christian records, lots of quartets like the Blackwood Brothers and the Imperials, who were a bit “hipper” what with their guitar solos and sideburns, and seemed to be pandering to a younger audience. They had one killer track called Jesus Made Me Higher (see?) from a live record they released, that had some insane harmonies. There was also a sort of hippy group called Love Song that had some stuff with really nice tight harmonies, They probably would have been a relatively successful secular group along the lines of America or Crosby Stills and Nash. They had one track called, Feel The Love that had a really beautiful chorus and another song called And The Wind Was Low that was/is painfully lovely. The best record John brought home was called Keep On Singin’ by Andre Crouch and the Disciples. The song I have chosen to showcase here is I’ve Got Confidence, though it isn’t the version from that record as that version is not available on Spotify. This version seems to be the same backing track but with a different, not as good, vocal on it. The bass playing on this is amazing-his band was hot. Many of the songs I listened to growing up, including the aforementioned Jesus Made Me Higher aren’t available on Spotify. Maybe there is some kind of Christian streaming service that I am unaware of? Later on, after the time period of this list, I started listening to a lot of traditional Gospel music like the Staple Singers, Five Blind Boys of Alabama and a lot of mass choirs. We used a snippet of The Downward Road by the Staple Singers to lead off our record of the same name.

Stop. Several years ago, I recall seeing a band of really young kids who were doing sort of a classic rock thing, a before its time Greta Van Fleet. They were pretty good except for the bass player. The band would kick into a song and he would just solo over it. The groove would never be established because he would rarely hit the root note and never played with the drummer, ever. They were managed by a guy I knew and this was at a time when I was really aggressively looking for production gigs. I remember telling him how much I would like the band if they had a different bass player. I feel like he agreed with me and also, that the rest of the band would agree with me but the bass player was a very strong willed person and they all went along with him wanting it to all be about him. I imagine they had grown up together. He was probably influenced by flashy players like John Entwistle. But John, and other bassists like him, still managed to play the root notes to the chords of the song. James Gang had a record called James Gang Live In Concert. Still my favorite live album. On one of their early records, they had a long song called Stop, which was a pretty white sounding jam track with about 6 minutes of Joe Walsh guitar soloing. However, the version on Live In Concert was shorter and tighter and had all three members playing virtuoso parts. The drums and the bass are all over the place. But Dale Peters always hit the root note before doing some kind of super fancy lick. It’s one of my favorite bass parts and this is coming from a guy who thinks punk rock bass is the best bass. Just play eighth note roots and you’re good in my book. But the bass playing in Stop really highlights what was wrong with the arrogant young bassist at the start of this story. No matter what you use to embellish the part, you always need to play the chords of the song. Joe Walsh’s guitar playing on this record is his high note. I never heard him play better than he did on this album and this is the best power trio recording I’ve ever heard.

Country Road. Speaking of power trios, I grew up thinking Grand Funk was a cool band. Cool people in my high school listened to them and girls used to spin Footstompin’ Music at parties. It wasn’t until I got older that I found out they were regarded by the gate keepers of the time as trash. My first band was with a bunch of older kids and we were called 556, the meaning of which remains unknown to me. We used to get together to ‘practice’ and barely ever played a song from beginning to end. We’d jam to Aimless Lady by Grand Funk because our bass player loved the bass part. One weekend, the bass player’s parents went away and he invited the band to come over and have it be more like a party where we played. He told me to bring something to eat for dinner. I brought a can of Mini Ravioli, which was like a bar of gold in our family. We jammed for a while until the other guitar player started to make out with his girlfriend. Even though the guys were only a year or two older than me, I must have seemed like a little kid to them. The bass player suggested he drive me home before they all got drunk and disorderly. The guitar player ended up knocking up that girl, (maybe it happened that night?), which probably turned their life to crap. We performed one gig, which was my school’s variety night, where we played Neil Young’s Cowgirl In The Sand. Speaking of bass, the bass is so frigging loud on this track and pretty much every song Grand Funk recorded up to the Todd Rundgren produced albums. It’s the loudest thing in the mix other than the vocal. I loved it and any listen to a TPOH record reveals that any mix note I ever gave to an engineer included, ‘turn up the bass’. I still don’t get why people thought Grand Funk were like a boy band. Their lyrics were very political, which was the style at the time and they played long, jammy songs which was also the style at the time. Maybe it was because they were always shirtless? I don’t think they were the only band who did that though, what a weird thing to do. Could you imagine a shirtless band now? (hint: their initials are RHCP)

Baba O’Riley. There was a girl who lived down the street from me, we’ll call her, Susie. We’d known each other since we were young and had gone to all the same schools as kids. At puberty, she developed some very womanly features. She had met some older guys and she would routinely steal money from her parents to buy beer to meet up with them. Stealing money from one’s parents was a thing that a few people in my grade did. Maybe it’s a common thing even now? One day she asked me over and bought me some food from the only fast food place in St. Albert, a place called the Klondike Inn, with some of her stolen money. The Klondike Inn had a burger called the Mushroom Burger that was soaking in something like Cream Of Mushroom soup. Susie had just bought a Who record called Who’s Next with some of her parents cash. I had been a Who fan for a long time and especially liked Tommy. I remember sleeping in my friend Jackson’s backyard and he sang Christmas from that record. I thought it sounded great and later he played me the album and I thought it was magical. Tommy was another rock opera, like Jesus Christ Superstar. When Susie put on Who’s Next, the first song was Baba O’Riley and I was struck by how great it sounded. Like the fidelity of it. There is talk that it was one of the first records where a lot of energy was put into making it sound better than rock records typically sounded. We listened to the whole album while we ate our mushroom burgers and drank orange soda and then she went out to meet the older guys. It was a hard rock masterpiece that seemed to be written by a genius. The songs had enough of the meat and potatoes rock that would make it accessible to a North American audience but still had a sophistication that made it better than any American hard rock album to that point. Hard Rock was still a British thing until Montrose came along. Who’s Next was produced by Glyn Johns, who had engineered the Let It Be album by The Beatles and the Beatles were the only band other than the Beach Boys whose records had any meaningful fidelity to them. One of the most influential parts of Baba O’Riley was the Lowery organ that ran through the entire piece. What struck me most was how different the organ sounded depending on what bass note was being played. I started playing chords but changing the bass notes to see how the chords reacted to them. As I mentioned earlier, this defined my personal sense of harmony.

Go All The Way. I saw the Raspberries on Don Kircheners Rock Concert. It was pretty much power pop heaven. Great harmonies and Left Banke chord changes. I loved Go All The Way. Along with No Matter What, it may be the most pure example of power pop ever recorded. A while later, I was in a record store, probably Kelly’s, with Rod. They were playing Raspberries Best in the store and I basically stood around and listened to every magical track. I didn’t have any money but vowed not to leave the store without this record. If I had asked my mom for the money, she might not have given it to me but I asked Rod to loan me the cash for it. That way, I could tell Mom that I had to pay him back. Pretty crappy trick to play on my mother but it worked. It was a great collection that had pretty much every really good Raspberries track on it. Later, I bought all the four original albums but you could easily get by with the anthology I bought that day. Eric Carmen, the main singer and songwriter, eventually went solo and while his first album had a couple of nice moments on it, he sort of descended into a schlocky crooner. On his third album, he unexpectedly released a song called Hey Deanie that Shawn Cassidy covered and it was the best piece of power pop he’d written since he left the band. The band that was to become The Modern Minds learned it and played it at our first gig, an outdoor event that showcased the original Edmonton punk bands. Weird song for us to play at an event like that but our concept was still forming in our heads. Last I heard, Carmen was devoting his life to being in a cult. But the Raspberries have to be one of the most influential bands ever. One of the coolest moments of my life was getting cold-called by Wally Bryson, the lead guitarist in the band. I had made no bones about how much I loved the Raspberries and had probably said as much in Rolling Stone. He found out about it and managed to contact someone who gave him my phone number. They hadn’t done anything in a long while so I imagine he felt it was nice that someone was out championing them. Wally ended up in a band called Fotomaker whose debut was a pretty good album. In a world of WAP, the lyrics to Go All The Way are sort of charming. A guy begging a girl to have sex with him without using any explicit language. The expression, Go All The Way feels innocent though of course it isn’t.

Lady Day St Albert, the town I grew up in, had two middle schools. but those schools merged into one High School, Paul Kane. So when when my friends and I got there, we ended up meeting a whole new group of people. The girls from the other middle school seemed more exotic than the one’s we had gone through our previous school career with. My friends and I started hanging out with some of them. They had different records, like Traffic and Slade and Lou Reed. Hanging out with these girls and listening to Transformer and Berlin felt sophisticated, like life was more than baloney sandwiches on white bread. I really loved Transformer but there was something about Berlin that spoke to me in the way that a bunch of records of the time were speaking to me. It let me know that there was a dark and decadent world outside of St Albert. Berlin painted a bleak picture of life in a big city-of people who had lost their way. Lady Day was such a beautiful song, produced by Bob Ezrin who had produced all of my favorite Alice Cooper records. Lou Reed became one of my favorite artists and a big influence on me as a lyricist and also as a performer. His record, Take No Prisoners had some of the funniest stage patter I’d ever heard though much of it would probably be considered very offensive now. That record and Metallic KO by Iggy and the Stooges, (which also contained some very politically incorrect stage patter), introduced me to an onstage swagger that was not part of my personality but I adopted and probably, for better or worse, was part of what got TPOH noticed. Sometimes it would backfire. I remember playing a charity gig at the Rivoli in Toronto. We had really broken big by then and the Rivoli was a far too small venue for us. I forget what the charity was but I remember that National Velvet was also on the gig. That day there was a catastrophic snow storm and the show didn’t sell out. I felt hurt by that, my ego fucking up on me, and it put me in a terrible mood. I went off on some rant about Barry White for some reason, I have nothing against him, I may have read that he said some benign sexist thing. Anyway, a woman in the audience heckled me about it and I called her a bitch. It was one of those times when, as the words are leaving your mouth, you are already regretting it. It wasn’t a thing I think I’ve ever said to anyone before or since. She wrote a letter to NOW Magazine, basically calling me out as a dick. And, yeah, I was and I deserved that public shaming.

Gudbye To Jane. Slade was another band the new girls turned me on to. Sladest was the soundtrack to most of the makeout parties I attended. Because it’s like a singles collection, there wasn’t really a bad track on it. Noddy Holder is one of the greatest singers in rock history, what a voice! It’s weird that they weren’t really a thing over here as they had all of the standard rock elements that most American and Canadian bands had. Maybe it was exposure. If you hear something enough times, you’ll start liking it. I feel cheated that I didn’t get enough exposure to British glam in St Albert. I came to love Mott the Hoople, early period David Bowie and T Rex more after the fact then when they were current. But I did get lots of exposure to Slade. Later in life, when I started DJing, I would play Gudbye To Jane pretty much every set. Slade were the masters of the singalong chorus and I have adopted their gang vocals as one of my most used production tricks.

Messing With The Kid. Living in Edmonton meant that you weren’t on the usual route for bands touring North America. Bands would usually play Toronto and Vancouver and sometimes Montreal but a band would want to be making a detailed tour before they would come to our town. There were certain bands, though, that seemed to be road monsters, playing anywhere they could. Supertramp used to come to town all the time though I heard it was because they were oddly more popular in Edmonton that they were in any other North American market. Another artist who made yearly visits was Rory Gallagher. Rory was an Irish guitarist who could make his guitar sing. People say this about guitarists all the time, but Rory was the only guy who I actually heard do it. He had a way of bending notes that I haven’t really heard other guitarists do. That combined with the sound he got out of his Strat created a wail that was the signature of his style. There is something about being on the road that affects a band’s sound. I’m not talking about the big tours we see now where everything is choreographed and there is little deviation from show to show. I mean, when bands’ used to tour and play songs and improvise and those improvisations turned into recurring themes that the band would build on. Surely playing every town in North America year after year was what made Rory such an awesome guitarist. That, and the ability to improvise and push himself without worrying that he wasn’t conforming to some pre staged idea of what his set was supposed to be. I have a fantasy of Taylor Swift going on tour with a four piece band with no staging and just playing whatever songs she felt like on a nightly basis and maybe even taking a few requests. I feel like this would be the ultimate Taylor Swift rebellion against those who don’t see her as a legit artist. (I know this can’t happen).

Superwoman. I remember getting really sick with a flu or something. At the time, I shared a bedroom with John. He let me keep the radio on all night because I couldn’t sleep with my fever. It was probably the middle of the night and this song came on. In my delirium, I was transfixed by the beauty of this track. I believe that Stevie Wonder is the most talented person of the recording age. When you look at songwriting, singing, musicianship, production and arranging, I think he’s the greatest of all time. There are people who may be better at one of those individual things but no one is as good at all of them. From Music Of My Mind to Hotter Than July, who was better? The Edmonton Public Library downtown had an enormous collection of vinyl. I used to take out records and tape them onto cassettes and that’s how I listened to all the early Stevie Wonder records. Stevie wasn’t just funky. His songwriting was deep in the traditions of song craft, great melodies and choruses and thoughtful lyrics. And incredible sounds. He was like a more progressive version of Holland Dozier Holland.

School’s Out. The relationship between an artist and a fan is one-sided but still beautiful. I was in love with Alice Cooper, not in any sexual way, but there are parallels to a romantic relationship. I loved seeing pictures of them, I’d even like seeing their name in print. I wrote their name on my school binder. I bought any magazine that had an article about them. They were real rock stars and Alice Cooper, the singer, was almost like a superhero with an alterego. I heard School’s Out on the radio and it instantly became my favorite song. I really wanted the album and I had saved up enough money to buy it. My brother, who was driving by this point, drove me to Edmonton in one of the rotating Volkswagen Bugs that he and Ann’s boyfriend, Derek had parked in our driveway, so I could buy it. The album jacket opened like a school desk and the vinyl inside was wrapped in a pair of paper underwear. The photo inside showed the band around a bunch of garbage cans guzzling beer. These guys were definitely not like me and that was part of what was so great about them. I’ve written in this space about rock stars and how important they are to kids. School’s Out came out during the time that I was becoming aware of production on a record and Bob Ezrin was my first favorite producer. As I went backwards and heard Killer and Love It To Death and then forward to Billion Dollar Babies, I was struck by the sound of the records but also, by the production devices that helped tell the story of the song or the use of strings and choirs in a hard rock setting. I met Alice briefly at a radio conference in San Francisco and had my picture taken with him and he called me by name. Earlier in the day, he had recognized the other guys in the band. Thinking that he knew who I was or had heard our music made my 13-year old heart burst. I never got a copy of that photo, would love to have it.

Rock Me Baby. My introduction to Johnny Winter was his self titled record, the black one with just his face. I’m not exactly sure how it came into our house but I heard the intro to Be Careful With A Fool and it had this incredible energy. His guitar playing was the best blues guitar I’d heard up to that point. Later, I heard Johnny Winter and Live but didn’t really care for it, mostly because of the terrible mix that has no bass. But I bought Still Alive And Well and it was just as good as the eponymous record. It was definitely more of a rock album. Whenever I listen to this song, I am ashamed of how many of his licks I copped. Johnny Winter was another artist I saw at the Copa in my early Toronto days. It was me, one woman and about 700 bikers. I was wearing a suit coat and a black fedora and couldn’t have looked more like someone to beat up. Everyone was cool though, and I’m glad I got a chance to see him. He finished his last song and a girl came out, he put his arm around her and they walked straight to his bus. No encore. My understanding of the Johnny Winter story is that he had been ripped off constantly and taken advantage of by a manager. Apparently, he finally freed himself from that guy but, even though he was ill in the last days of his life, he still had to play. Kind of sad for someone so innovative and influential. He should have been able to retire with a big sack of money.

Glamour Boy Growing up in Canada, The Guess Who were sort of ubiquitous. Always on the radio and in the media. I would hear their stuff on CHED AM and loved No Sugar Tonight especially. But Guess Who 10 was the first album of theirs that I bought. I was on some sort of trip with a friend of mine, Doug, and his dad had the radio on, which is when I first heard Glamour Boy. What a beautiful melody and what beautiful chords. I started buying all the old Guess Who records with the money I made working at Safeway. Safeway was the only grocery store in St Albert and was the best job for a high school kid. It was the first time in my life when I could buy records without saving for a long time. I bought everything from Share The Land to Flavours and loved every one of them. Obviously, Burton has a one in a million voice and his voice often saved songs that weren’t great. I got a chance to meet him at an industry function and although our interaction was brief, he was very nice and complimentary. Someone snapped a photo and it is one of the two photos that I covet the most, (the other being that shot with Alice Cooper). Not too long ago, I got a message from him via facebook about how much he liked our Where’s The Bone record. Struck me as odd as it’s not exactly one of our most famous recordings. But I suppose that makes it even more special that Burton liked it.

Good Rockin’ Tonight. When I was a kid, Creem Magazine was my bible. I read it cover to cover every month. During a press junket in Los Angeles, I got to meet one of the writers, Dave DiMartino and I have never been more star struck. I hope I have this right. There was a Warner Brothers Records ad for a compilation of their artists’ most recent releases. It ended up being part of a series called Loss Leaders. You had to send something ridiculous like $2 to get it. I sent my two bucks and, a few weeks later, a double album called Hard Goods arrived in the mail. It was amazing, filled with killer tracks. Vegetables by The Beach Boys, Strutter by Kiss, songs by Neil Young, Todd Rundgren, Frank Zappa, almost 30 songs in total. It also had a song by Montrose called Good Rockin’ Tonight. Montrose was a band I had vaguely heard about from someone in high school. I can’t remember the kid’s name but I remember an incident. It was during a track meet and someone had given me a stop watch. I went up to him and said, okay let’s time how long it takes you to have an orgasm, thinking it was the funniest thing ever. Unfortunately people had been taking about this kid being gay, which I was completely unaware of. He, and the dudes he was with, took great offense to my joke. I still think about this often. I abruptly left when they got mad at me, thinking I was probably in for a beating. My joke had absolutely nothing to do with any perception people had of him being gay, which I certainly wasn’t aware of. I wish I had spoken up as he probably despises me to this day. Good Rockin’ Tonight-wow, what a track. The guitar sounds were so meaty and the track was supercharged with energy. There was a lick in the solo that was an Alvin Lee lick that I’ve never been able to play. A few years back, I was producing a band called National Anthem and they had a really good guitar player named Bernard. One day I heard him playing the lick and I felt like punching him in the face. Something that had eluded me my whole life and he was just playing it like it was no big deal. What’s also so great about this arrangement is that it’s a 12 bar but it sounds like it has a verse and a chorus. After hearing the sampler, I bought the first Montrose record and it remains in my top ten of all time to this day. In my view, it is the greatest American hard rock record and Sammy Hagar’s finest moment. It was produced by Ted Templeman, who produced basically the same record for Van Halen a few years later, and there isn’t a bad track on it. The whole thing sounds like it was recorded live off the floor in one take and the stories I’ve heard about Templeman’s production style lead me to believe that it might have been. Ronnie never recorded anything as powerful again. There was a second Montrose record with the same lineup called Paper Money. But it was like Ronnie already felt like he had to move in another direction. The only song on it that had the same punch as the stuff on the first record is a track called I Got The Fire. He drifted around with different line ups, each one a bit less successful than the previous, until he died. I should say that him following his arrow isn’t a bad thing. It’s more that, I feel like he had found something unique and uniquely his and also, incredible and I would have liked to see him milk it and also, expand on it for a few years before he went into his Jazz Odyssey period. I’ve heard countless bands and guitarists cite this record as an influence. I even wonder if Van Halen would have existed in the way they did without it?

Dancing Days I remember the autumn that I first heard the Houses Of The Holy record by Led Zeppelin. My buddy Kevin had the best stereo and record collection and also, the most hospitable basement of my high school friend group. He bought the album and, even though I had liked the previous LZ offerings and owned the fourth album, there seemed to be something different about this record. It was the least ‘traditional music’ record they had made and it seemed like they had found their own unique sound that wasn’t largely based on plundering (or outright stealing) music from the past. We’d listen to records for a while and then we’d walk to Lion’s Park and hang out on the swings in the chilly fall air and talk about girls or music. As I was talking, there was always a song was playing in my head. We sat on the swings and shot the crap with Dancing Days as my own internal soundtrack. I love that about music. You hear a song and then you keep hearing it hours later as it swirls around in your auditory cortex. This song still touches something inside me that fills me with dread and loneliness. What happened to me? How did I go from listening to this song at Kevin’s to years of searching for meaning in my life. Everything was in front of me then, and I knew it. I was planning my escape from St Albert, even if I thought my chances of making in the music business were slim. I wish I still had that kind of nerve. This remains my all time favorite Zeppelin track with its angular chords and subdued vocal from Robert Plant.

Livin’ Alone In high school, I started my first band. It was called Hot Toddy, (terrible name) and it featured me on guitar and vocals, Kim Upright on drums and vocals and Bob Drysdale on bass. Years later, we would reunite to become The Modern Minds, my first ‘real’ band. More on that later. Our high school had a yearly Variety Night where kids would perform dances or songs or whatever. That year, we played Livin’ Alone, by Beck, Bogart and Appice and Thunderbird by ZZ Top. Both songs had dual vocals, which was perfect for Kim and I. Our drama teacher, Ms Laurence introduced me to the idea of performance, that you didn’t just stand on stage and play your guitar, you had to try and engage the audience. it was probably the most important thing I learned in school and I owe her a debt of gratitude. I include Living’ Alone for this reason. Hot Toddy split up and I joined a band with some older guys. That band was called Lover, which was a cover band that mainly played high schools. Not sure why anyone booked the band because we played almost no top 40 material. The leader of the band, Walt, figured that the greatest achievement by a band would be to have your single in jukeboxes in small town Alberta. He used to manage a band called Money, (great name) who released an indie single called Whirlpool Woman, which I can, to this day, remember by heart. I spent a season or two in Lover until I realized I had higher aspirations and during Christmas vacation, teamed back up with Bob and Kim.

Cut My Hair. I saw the Who recently as my friend Steven Page was opening the show and graciously invited me. As I watched the Who perform, even though it was clear their best days were behind them, I was struck by Pete Townsend’s genius. The body of work he ran through that night really made me understand that I am not him. There is a level that almost no one in music has ever reached but he has. I’ve always thought that there were people who were good and people who were great but I realized that there was a small group of people who were had achieved something that can’t really be quantified. All of the Who’s records, from The Who Sings My Generation up to The Who By Numbers are stunning. But to me, Quadraphenia, is Pete Townsend’s high water mark. It landed in my life when I needed it most. I was just entering my disaffected youth period and when he sang, why do I have to move with a crowd/ of kids who hardly notice I’m around, I melted. It was amazing how well Pete, at whatever adult age he was at, was able to plug in to the neurosis of youth. Even though I didn’t relate to the character in Quadraphenia, I certainly related to the painful chrysalis of becoming an adult.

Personality Crisis. The New York Dolls were another band I came to via Creem Magazine. Creem loved them and since I trusted every thing they said, I quickly came on board. The opening song on their debut, produced by Todd Rundgren, seem to leap out of the speakers. You just know that piano off the top was Todd’s idea. It was punk rock Chuck Berry before there was punk rock. It had that wild abandon that would be very important to me over the next ten or so years. Listening to that record felt like things were going to go off the rails at any moment, the way you feel when you’re too drunk. The entire record is so blisteringly savage that it may have no equal. The only records of its approximate genre that compare are Never Mind The Bollocks by the Sex Pistols, Raw Power by Iggy and The Stooges and And No One Else Wanted To Play by SNFU. It had things that you would hear in a Stones record and later in an Aerosmith record, the sloppy rock guitars, the wailing harmonica, the glammy singer but it had an unstable energy that created, (and I hate this expression) a sense of danger that was wildly appealing to a teenager.

Search And Destroy Iggy was yet another fixture in Creem and part of my pre school for punk rock. I think Jackson was the one that purchased Raw Power and we all became obsessed with it. There isn’t much to say about this masterpiece that hasn’t already been said. The odd thing for me was how bad it sounded. It sounded like it had been mixed by a couple of drunk interns who’d never actually been on the console before. I always wished it could be remixed so that it didn’t sound so horrible. But, years later, it was and it wasn’t as good. Part of the charm, bad word to use, was how the terrible mix aided in the chaos of the album. Also, I think we get used to something and then hearing it a different way interferes with our nostalgia for it. I feel the same way about a track on the Foo Fighters debut. The track is called Exhausted and when I first heard it, I was charmed by the beautiful chords and melody. But there was this scratchy, white noise guitar that was messing things up. I remember thinking, this would be so great if it just had a less offensive guitar sound. Years later, I watched a You Tube video of the band playing it on acoustic guitars. This should be good, I figured. I only got about half way through it. I realized the scratchy guitar was part of the song, part of what made it unique and contributed to the idea of the song. I suppose that’s how I feel about the original mix of Raw Power. The new mixes sound like cover versions of the songs.

Pretty Lady I mentioned Lighthouse earlier. They were a band whose singles you would hear all the time on Canadian radio. I am thinking they were the beneficiaries of Canadian Content rules. Their big hit was a song called Sunny Days, which is kind of dumb. But they had a few better songs. One was called Little Kind Words that was more sort of psychedelic and baroque. And then they had Pretty Lady. The chorus had the most beautiful harmonies over amazing chords. There is a thing that happens to songwriters where they write a song and then they think, did I hear this somewhere? It used to happen to me a lot when I was a kid first learning to compose. I once wrote a dead ringer for Rock Show by Paul McCartney without realizing it. The Modern Minds and all the bands I had with Bob and Kim before that, used to practice in Bob’s basement. We made an unholy racket and kudos to his parents for letting us torture them. The basement was kind of open and one day Bob’s dad approached us about building a makeshift wall to keep the sound somewhat enclosed. But we were too lazy and inconsiderate to do something like that. Bob’s dad would often try to get us to do some manual labor as I don’t believe he thought music was something that held much of a future for us and we should learn the value of hard work. One day, I brought in a song that was a rip off of Pretty Lady. It was probably the song I was the most excited about in my early songwriting career. When I think of it, I see the roots of where I was headed musically, so it may be one of the most significant songs I’ve ever written even though it wasn’t that great. Bob’s dad took us to a WHA game, the short lived alternative to the NHL where I first saw a young Wayne Gretzky. I think he was 18 and he just dominated the game. Bob had some mental health issues and many years after this though at far too young an age, he passed away in his sleep. He was one of the best musicians I have ever played with-technically amazing but full of rock and roll spit. The real band we had, The Modern Minds were sort of the grandfathers of the Edmonton punk/New Wave scene. We released a 3 song single called Theresa’s World. It didn’t do much outside of Edmonton. But it was included in a catalog of Canadian punk called Smash the State. I think, because of that, I would occasionally get requests for it. Mostly from Japan. Eventually a Japanese record company contacted me about releasing a long form CD of the band. I was able to cobble together the single, some demos and some radio show recordings. It was kind of thrilling to see this band get a new life. Then, years later, a guy named Simon Harvey asked if he could release a vinyl version on his label, Ugly Pop. It didn’t set the world on fire but again, so cool to see it live on all these years later. Rest In Peace, Bob.

Days Gone By. After Joe Walsh left The James Gang he released his solo record The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get. It is an incredible document. It became a very popular record because it contained one of his biggest hits, Rocky Mountain Way. For those of you who are not familiar with the record, Rocky Mountain Way is the worst song on it. Rocky Mountain Way was a song that every Edmonton cover band played because it was so friggin’ easy to play. But it’s horrible. However, the rest of the record is breathtaking. The Smoker You Drink was ostensibly a record by Barnstorm, which is the band Walsh put together after The James Gang. Many of the songs were written by or collaborations with the drummer, Joe Vitale and, whatever happened to him? Not only did he drum on the record and sing some but he also played completely appropriate flute. This record falls into the category of records I could never get sick of listening to. It reminds me of a time when I could be completely blissed out by a record, it would be on my mind all day long and the songs would buzz around in my head, no matter what I was doing, drowning out the noise of the world and my life. Some of the records on this list (and some that I really like that are not), are records that I love and are influential. And some are records that are so beautiful to me that they are like a wildly sensual experience for which there is no equal.

Strutter. When I was a kid, music wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now. There actually wasn’t much music on TV. I think the reason The Beatles made such a huge impact when they played the Ed Sullivan show is that everyone watched it because there wasn’t a lot of opportunities to see music. Most music I saw on TV during my childhood was lip synched performances of a band’s latest recordings. The exceptions were shows like Midnight Special and Don Kirchener’s Rock Concert, which would have limited runs of six or eight weeks during the summer on Edmonton TV stations. These were the best days of the year. Watching live music on television was just amazing. There is a fair in Edmonton, my hometown, called Klondyke Days. I went with my brother and cousins one year and they had a concert with a bunch of local bands. I was probably about 7 or 8 years old. I was absolutely gobsmaked at what I saw. I’d never really seen live music before. The performers were just a bunch of half assed cover bands but I sure didn’t care. My cousin Rob called the house a few days later, looking for John but he wasn’t home. So, we ended up talking about how awesome the concert was. He stayed on the phone with me for about an hour talking music and playing records over the phone and I’m not sure if I’ve ever had a more enjoyable conversation about music in my life. Years later, I recall a show that I believe was filmed in Edmonton, probably some kind of CanCon requirement, that featured young musical artists. It ran after school and I think there was only a handful of episodes. But one episode had a band, all dressed in black, who played Strutter and Firehouse by KISS. Holy crap, how cool were these guys, they looked like they were still in their teens. I wasn’t really that aware of KISS up to that point except that Strutter had been on Hard Goods. I remember getting a letter from a fan years ago saying she’d heard our record and it sounded like it was recorded by a band who lived in a big city. That’s exactly how I felt when I heard Strutter. It’s also how I felt when I first heard The Strokes. My little brother Kelly bought Dressed To Kill, which remains my favorite KISS album but I include Strutter in this playlist as it was the song that first drew me to KISS. Whenever I hear the song, I think about the band playing it on that crappy show and how much it made me want to leave St Albert and become a rock star.

Ogre Battle I think it was Kim Upright who turned me onto Queen. I’m not sure if they had played Edmonton and he’d seen them? They were so original, they played hard rock but their lyrics were intelligent and weird. Everything about them was unique, Freddy’s voice, the guitar orchestrations-there really wasn’t anything like them, at least that I had heard. At this point, we had only heard their debut record. I went out and bought their second album, Queen II. The whole thing just killed me. but the song that has stayed with me over the years is Ogre Battle. It was so heavy but still kind of cerebral, something that was becoming more and more important to me. The track is sophisticated in a way that makes me feel like the people creating it weren’t pretending to be smart, that they actually were smart. This is a huge point to be made as a lot of rock bands seem smart to people who aren’t smart. All of my friends loved Queen. I remember Jackson saying that Queen were like a hobby for him. The next album, Sheer Heart Attack was a real tour de force. Killer Queen seemed like the perfect Queen song, a catchy song with a complex structure and crazy, poetic lyrics. But the record was the beginning of the end for me. The vaudeville tendencies that were introduced here would overwhelm the band in subsequent releases. For most of the rest of their career, they would intersperse the dance hall stuff with the sort of generic rock that I think was beneath them. And then a bunch of half assed R&B approximations. While I must confess to liking Bohemian Rhapsody when I first heard it, it kind of makes me cringe now, especially knowing what the band was capable of. Even though I had written them off long before this, Freddy Mercury’s death was the first celebrity death that hit me hard. I remember being at a Pursuit of Happiness rehearsal when someone came in and told us the news. He and Queen had meant so much to me in the period that those first three albums lived in that I felt a genuine sense of loss.

Doctor Wu. Steely Dan has had one of the oddest trajectories of any band in history. They started out as a radio friendly ‘session’ band, sort of like Toto but good. Then they became a super hip New York band. Then they became associated with Yacht Rock and became really uncool for a while. Recently, they’ve had a resurgence and maybe it’s because people finally figured out how great they were. They were famous for the incredible fidelity and extraordinary musicianship on their recordings. They stopped touring very early in their career and were able to make a go of it as a studio band, something that would be impossible today. I envy that, being able to fiddle around in the studio for as long as you want until you found something magical. My understanding is that they would get multiple instrumentalists to play solos and then pick the best one. Wow. For me, the first Steely Dan record, Can’t Buy A Thrill, which I did buy with my own money, is their least satisfying. It doesn’t really sound much like them and lyrically, it’s pretty dopey. They caught fire a bit on their next record, Countdown To Ecstasy, and you could tell something was shifting. They canned the vocalist who sometimes took a lead and the lyrics seemed slightly better. The third record, Pretzel Logic, (what an amazing title) was the moment where they became who they would eventually be. The songs had the amazing chords and song structures that would define them. The fourth record was called Katy Lied and is, in my opinion, their best. It has an edge to it that none of their previous records had. There is also a sadness to it that lies beneath the surface. Doctor Wu is a good example of what I’m talking about. I’ve never been able to figure out what it means but it feels dark and hopeless. The track is full of angular chords and unexpected changes. This would be a good example of a song that needs to be listened to a few times before you get it.

Diamond Dust. My introduction to Jeff Beck was Truth, a record I believe my sister’s boyfriend, Derek brought to the house and left there. It was a bit over my head but I loved Blues Deluxe, with its completely off the hook guitar solo. I heard Beck Ola and the aforementioned Beck Bogart and Appice but it was Blow By Blow that was the big Beck record for me. The Modern Minds’ bass player, Bob had been getting into jazz and instrumental music and was trying to turn Kim and I onto Stanley Clarke, Return To Forever and Weather Report. So the instrumental ideas of Blow By Blow weren’t completely foreign to me. Beck’s playing on this is truly spectacular and understated. Diamond Dust is a beautiful and sad piece. This is amplified by the final pass through the structure being performed by the strings to give it more drama and darkness. Weird way to end the album-really leaves you emotionally spent. Great job, George Martin.

The Boys Are Back In Town. I heard this on K 97 and wow, there was a chord change almost every bar of the song. This whole album, Jailbreak, is amazing. I feel like Thin Lizzy would be a hard band for people to hate. It’s all cool guitar riffs and fancy chords and a sexy vocalist. There’s nothing ornamental or corny and when it is a bit corny it’s corny in the sweetest way. Like the guitarmonies. They weren’t new but I think the fact that they had nothing to do with southern rock made them seem hipper to me. The music on Jailbreak sounds like the music your supercool uncle’s band would play. There is a timeless quality to this that a lot of songs from the ’70’s have. There isn’t a bunch of period specific ambient effects on the mixes or anything in the recording process that’s distracting. But the fidelity is good enough that it doesn’t sound too retro like a song from the ’50’s or early ’60’s would sound. Phil Lynott was a terrific singer. On this track, the flow of the lyrics is ever changing but always sounds musical. The melody in the verses dances around to accommodate the story but never sounds out of control or like he’s trying to jam too many words into too tight of a space. I feel like he would have been an amazing MC had he been born 20 years later.

Just before I got back together again with Bob and Kim to form The Modern Minds, Jackson bought a copy of the Sex Pistols single Pretty Vacant. He brought it to Kevin place and we put it on the turntable. The slow burn of the intro had us looking at each other with anticipation. Once Steve Jones’ guitar started hammering out the power chords of the meat of the song, we were high school boy dancing. And when the music stopped and Johnny Rotten yelled, ”and we don’t care.” you could have scraped us off the ceiling. It was the most exciting moment of my life to that point and may be the most exciting moment of my life EVER. Better than losing my virginity. What was so transformative about that moment was that it was the first time we had heard music that was ours. Most of the music we had listened to before that was music that our brothers or sisters liked or music that had roots in a time before we came of age. Every generation has music that is specific to them and I think punk rock was the music that timed to my generation. It was unavoidable, you would have had to be a complete cowboy to not be moved by what the Ramones and Sex Pistols and Clash were doing. So much of how I play and how I write is still tied to learning songs from that era.

Trapped. Anyone reading this knows that Todd Rundgren is my biggest influence and the artist that I am the biggest fan of. Getting a chance to work with him, was/is one of the greatest accomplishments/thrills of my life. I came to his music a bit late. I feel like I had heard, Hello It’s Me but I can’t be sure. He wasn’t much of a sensation in Edmonton. I had tickets to see Blue Oyster Cult at the Edmonton Coliseum. Utopia, Todd’s band, was the opener and I didn’t think much of it at the time I bought my ticket. Then something happened. K 97, our FM station, used to have a show on Sunday nights hosted by Ted Kennedy. It was like a new release show where they would play a new record in its entirety, with a pause for a commercial when they had to flip to side 2. A couple of weeks before the concert, they played Oops, Wrong Planet, by Utopia. It feels a bit redundant now that I’ve gushed about so many songs completely blowing my mind, but this was probably the ultimate mind blow. Then I went to the concert, which was amazing. I feel like I was in a trance for about a month after hearing the record and seeing the show and it reminds me of when you are young and you first kiss a girl and you bask in the afterglow for weeks afterwards. I spent the next couple of years catching up, buying all of the Todd solo and Utopia records, each one its own revelation. There were songs I heard that I couldn’t believe could exist, like Don’t You Ever Learn, Real Man and Breathless. They were so unique and there was nothing I could compare them to. I was listening to a true genius and it was the most inspiring time of my life. Alan Zweig, the filmmaker that I referenced earlier, once said to me that he would never write a book because it could never be as good as one by Cormac McCarthy. I think I said to him, well no one can write as good as he can but that doesn’t mean you don’t have anything meaningful to say. I guess that’s how I felt when listening to Todd. I felt inspired to be great and, even if I wasn’t ever going to be as great as he was, I could still do something worth sharing.

Don’t You Ever Learn. As revelatory as Oops Wrong Planet was, Todd’s solo stuff was even more so.
From Something/Anything to Acapella, Todd’s music was completely original. Nothing else sounded like it except if someone was trying to copy him. Todd’s story is well know to his fans and people in show business. He released Something/Anything, his breakthrough record complete with multiple singles and critical praise. On his next record, he did pretty much the opposite and released a weird, noisy, psychedelic masterpiece called A Wizard, A True Star, that was like a huge middle finger to the music business. This defiance defined the rest of his career. He spent the next few decades as a musical explorer and each new recording seemed to have some sort of conceptual narrative that gave it purpose in a continuing story line. Each record was slightly or sometimes completely different from the previous effort. Don’t You Ever Learn is from the follow up to Wizard, simply called Todd. It lived in a middle ground between AWATS and S/A, weird but tuneful and less overtly obtuse than its predecessor. Two of Todd’s greatest songs are on this record, this song and The Last Ride. Don’t You Ever Listen starts with a spooky, odd piano melody that moves through several chords. It eventually reaches a climax into the main chords of the A section. There are basically two A sections that are the vocal sections of the song. They are sung over a difficult string of chords yet the melody is incredibly musical. We go into a reintro that is more playful than what we got the first time. The second vocal section is also looser and ends with some lovely three part harmonies. The song resolves into an extended coda with harmonies singing the hook over some carousel like synths. Like I said, I’ve never heard anything remotely like it. God, to be that original, to be that groundbreaking. It makes me feel small and insignificant. The sad thing is he, to this day, hasn’t received his due commercially. He has spent the largest part of his career as a cult artist with an adoring legion of fans. However, recently a new group of young musicians have discovered his music, his experiments with synthesizers and his psychedelic wizardry and his esteem in the music community has risen dramatically. Like The Ramones, the artists he influenced did better than he did, which is the curse of the innovator. However, it should be noted that he is in his ’70’s and still out playing to his rabid fans, still making records on his own terms and that all sounds pretty great to me.

I Just Wanna Have Something To Do Even though the Ramones pre dated the Sex Pistols, I came to them afterwards. The trajectory of the New York Dolls and Iggy and the Stooges led me to the Pistols and the Clash first. I think my primary interest in the Ramones came from reading Creem Magazine. I can still remember the review of their debut, never had I read a more passionate recommendation of a record. I remember when Roger Corman’s Rock And Roll High School came out. I went to see it with Kevin and loved it. I think we went to see it again a few days later. After the movie, Kevin had managed to get some Black Tower wine and we downed the whole thing. I was not a drinker at this point and got teenage wasted. I came home and tried to unlock the back door. Unbeknownst to me, I must have been making an unholy racket because, as I fumbled with the key to open the door, my brother John opened it for me as he’d been awakened by the noise. As the door opened, I dropped the key and it fell into a crack between the steps and the house, never to be retrieved. Thinking about it now, a scene similar to this probably played out a thousand times after viewings of early rock and roll movies. I think back, sadly, about how fun it was to get that excited about music.

What Do I Get. The Buzzcocks were the band that The Modern Minds were most compared to largely because of their pop sensibility. The Modern Minds used to play really fast but there was always a melody. In a style of music where darkness and aggression were becoming two of the defining qualities, the Buzzcocks gave us a place to fit in. Their collection, Singles, Going Steady is one of the best top to bottom records of all time. Every track is pretty great. What Do I Get is particularly good because of the anti-rock star lyrics. I just want a lover like any other, what do I get. Every unpopular guy’s lament.

Also part of this new personalized music was Is She Really Going Out With Him by Joe Jackson. He was talking about girls in a way that rock stars hadn’t before. About being a nerd, a loser who lost his girl to a jock or a guy we didn’t think was deserving of her. It was sublime. It completely changed the vernacular of the pop/rock song. I mean, how absurd, a rock star could get anyone he wanted, couldn’t he? But Joe was more like us. This was such a great track, with Todd Rundgren chords and harmonies but with a low fi sound that was a precursor to the sort of indie rock style that would follow. Joe was an anti rock star in a way that most of the punk rockers weren’t. Johnny Rotten and the guys in the Clash and the Jam still seemed bigger than life to me. But Joe seemed like someone in the neighborhood, one of the outcasts in your school, a puffy, unattractive dude that was smart and funny but didn’t have the thing that girls were looking for from a teenage boy. A lot of the more hardcore punks in Edmonton didn’t care for this but I saw a thread that ran through punk in Joe’s music. Joe also outlasted most of his peers. He continued to make interesting music for decades, always catchy but always just outside of the mainstream enough that he remained a cult artist for his entire career.

Ice Cream Man. I’m going to make a bold statement here and say Van Halen’s Ice Cream Man is the most exciting three and a half minutes in rock history. It is a studio recording that reads like a live performance. Eddie’s solo is so magnificent, without any of the finger tapping that would dominate most of his early solos. Please don’t interpreted that as me saying, I didn’t fully love the finger tapping. But it showed the world that he wasn’t a one trick pony, that he could really play. I don’t have a lot of time for most flashy guitarists. But there was something so incredibly musical about everything Eddie did. He was the Wayne Gretzky of guitar players, with an effortless majesty to his playing. David Lee Roth’s sleazy vocal on this track is so rock and roll that everyone else should just stop trying.

Confidential. I’ve told the story of seeing The Modernettes for the first time in a previous piece on this site. When The Modern Minds played Vancouver for the first time, opening for The Modernettes and No Fun, The Modernettes opened with Confidential and it was love at first listen. The opening guitar melody is one of the great intros of all time and bursts out of your turntable, instantly hooking you into the song.
And then there’s the lyrics. Everybody saw the way that I acted/last night at your party/they all saw the way I looked at you/when you left without me. What a zinger! Not only being rejected but being rejected in front of everyone. It was the perfect sentiment for a loser boy at the time and I can only imagine how many guys this song resonated with. Buck Cherry’s vocal is delivered with a perfect mix of defiance and vulnerability. It’s absolutely thrilling.

Let’s Groove Many people malign the Sony Walkman. That it changed the way you experienced music in a negative way. Instead of sitting down in front of your stereo and really listening to music, now music came with you and become more like a soundtrack to your everyday life. I understand this criticism. But for a music junkie like me, the Walkman allowed me to listen to music all the time, even when I wasn’t at home with my record collection. The year that I got one for Christmas happened at the same time that I was really immersing myself in Black Music. The U of A campus radio station had a program called The Black Experience in Sound that I believe was hosted by Cadence Weapon’s father Teddy Pemberton. I didn’t buy tapes, I taped records. Two records I taped were Raise and I Am, both by Earth Wind and Fire. I had a job working at a convenience store called Tops Convenience on Whyte Avenue. It was run by a guy named Richard Kim, who was one of the smartest people I’d ever met. He was one of those guys who instinctively knew the best way to do anything. The walk to the store would take a little over 20 minutes, long enough to listen to one side of a record. So, over the course of two days, I would listen to both records once. Earth Wind and Fire was a band I came upon late. But it was at a time when I really wanted to hear something funky. The interplay between the bass and drums just destroyed me and their records sounded great. This was something that had now become important to me since I was hearing records largely on headphones and becoming more interested in fidelity. Some of EWF’s stuff was a bit corny but, at the time, I didn’t notice and now I don’t really care.

Let’s Pretend We’re Married I believe I had heard, Wanna Be Your Lover but it hadn’t really hit me right. I’m honestly not entirely sure how I heard about 1999. Maybe it was through the Black Experience In Sound? At any rate, I bought it and listened to pretty much nothing else for quite a while. Prince was so unique. He was completely sexual but not in a macho kind of way that most rock stars were. I heard a joke recently that said, Prince was the only guy who wore make up, high heels and big earrings who could steal your girlfriend. And he talked about sex in a real way without all the cliched euphemisms. The music was funky but there was pop and rock elements to it. This record ran from straight up dance tracks to moody mid tempo stuff but everything felt very ‘written’ and complete. These weren’t the jams that you’d hear later on in the NPG era. And I loved the sound of it, the ambient drum machines, the synths and the distorted rock guitars, (that distorted wah guitar was really what gave the stuff three dimensions and made Prince stand out as something other than a funky dude) combined to make something that ended up inspiring an entire musical movement. Like Todd Rundgren, he did everything himself. But just because he wasn’t like other rock stars, that didn’t mean he wasn’t a rock star. He was bigger than life in the way he looked and dressed and acted and that was very inspiring. In the months before Prince’s death, my friend Nick Schiratta contacted me and told me he had tickets to see Prince on his solo with a piano tour. He was supposed to go with his daughter but she was unable to make it. I went with him and it was amazing. I had never actually seen Prince perform live. A couple of weeks later, he was gone.

Mary Anne I went to Rod’s cottage (he called it a cabin, that may have been an Alberta term) in Northern Alberta late one summer. Before I left, a friend of mine, Rob Lennon, gave me a cassette with the first two Marshall Crenshaw records taped on it. (I was still using my cassette Walkman.) I didn’t get a chance to play it until just before the trip ended. I was taking one last walk along the lake and put it in. Wow, from the first song on the debut, There She Goes Again to the final song on Field Day, Hold It, this was an absolute feast. The songwriting was exquisite and he was an amazing singer and guitarist. This music was melodic and catchy but was bursting with energy-music like this wasn’t supposed to be so danceable. I think that’s what differentiated Marshall from the other singer songwriters of the time and to any of the power pop artists of the ’70’s and ’80’s. The infectious rhythms gave this music an added, irresistible appeal. When we signed with Mercury Records for our third album, it was suggested that I try some co-writing, something I hadn’t done before. I took two trips, one to Chicago to write with Pat DiNizio of the Smithereens and one to New York to write with Jules Shear and Marshall Crenshaw. A few years earlier, someone at Chrysalis or maybe it was EMI Publishing, sent Marshall some of my demos to see if he’d be interested in recording any of them. I had a brief phone conversation with him and mostly what he talked about was how odd it was that I’d written a song about smelling a girl, (Wake Up And Smell Cathy), and also, when I told him I was originally from Edmonton, he talked about going to West Edmonton Mall, which for those of you unaware, is a massive, multipurpose shopping complex. He told me he’d bought a watch there and it “worked great and I’m still using it.” So when we met up in Woodstock, NY, we had that tiny bit of history. We worked on the song in a Comfort Inn the publishing company had put me in. He sat down and immediately said, “I have something we can work on,” which I was grateful to hear. It meant we didn’t have to stare across from each other, fumbling on our guitars hoping something would spontaneously occur. He played through the verse and chorus, and hummed a melody over it. It was pretty great. I contributed the bridge and we were done the music part of it in pretty short order. Then came the lyric writing. We talked a lot about politics and other music, one hilarious thing he said was, when talking about Wilson Phillips, who had just had a massive hit with a song called Hold On, “I can’t decide which one of them I want to kill myself over.” When working on the hook, he said, I hear ‘baby food,’ and I exclaimed that I loved it. He looked at me like I was a moron and said rather firmly, ”we’re not calling this Baby Food.” Marshall didn’t go for the weird stuff that I might have been more inclined to explore. We spent a few hours chasing our tails and broke for the day. I promised to work on it that evening and try to come up with something. I worked all night and came up with the lyrics and showed them to him the next day. I held my breath hoping he’d be okay with them. He seemed to be and liked that, even though it was a made up story, I’d based it on a real person. I think we sang it through a few times and he moved or changed a word or two and we had it. The song was called, The One That Got Away. When I got back to Toronto, I demoed it and a few weeks later, he sent a cassette of his demo to EMI Publishing, who passed it along to me. My demo didn’t capture the song at all. His demo has all the Marshall good stuff, a great beat and great energy, both of which were sorely lacking in my arrangement. When you’re in the music business and you have some success, cool things happen all the time. I think I appreciated how cool it was that I got to work with Marshall but when I think about it now, I’m a bit more blown away. Nothing ever happened with the song, I wish Marshall had recorded it for one of his albums as I think he would have done a fantastic job with it.

Public Image The album containing this track, First Issue, wasn’t availble domesrtically where I lived. I bought it thinking it would be an extension of what Johnny Rotten had been doing with the Sex Pistols. It wasn’t really. I’m not sure how you’d descrbe the music on this record. The title track was the most accessable and the closest thing to a Pistols song though not even. It’s absolutly blistering, it fairly knocks you down with it’s relentless energy. The guitar parts are so melodic and fluid against a rhythm section playing at a ’70’ tempo. (The 70’s were great for fast songs. Even band’s like Loverboy played superfast). Rotten’s vocal is problably the finest one he ever performed, full of the tuneless rage he had perfected. My bands in Edmonton would cover this even though I couldn’t make out almost any of the lyrics. I basically just bellowed over the music until we got to the hook. Hilarious. This has to be one of my favorite songs of all time, 

New York New York Hip hop was something that I became aware of when I went to see a movie called Wild Style at the Varscona Theatre in Edmonton. It was a documentary about the birth of the hip hop scene in New York. It encompassed graffiti, breakdancing and rapping. Like many things I’ve discussed, Hip Hop seemed wildly exotic to a kid in Edmonton. Since black music was one of my obsessions at the time, this appeared to be a logical next step. Dave Gilby worked at a record store and told me that there was some 12 inch records by a group called Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. One was called The Message and another was called New York New York. They were both amazing. The power of the words and the vocal delivery was incredible. The lyrics about the inner city of New York depicted a world that was completely unfamiliar to me. Wild Style had also introduced me to The Sugarhill Gang. whose track Rappers Delight was getting a little buzz even in Edmonton. I started trying to write like that. I had a few songs where I did a version of rapping on them. Nothing was that great, obviously. But it informed my writing of I’m An Adult Now. It suggested that you could just tell a story in a song without singing it.

Yo Mamma. This was a one hit wonder by a group called Wuf Ticket. I got the 12 inch of this from the store Dave worked at after he, sort of comically, attempted to describe it to me. It is a quintessential old school rap song with the two MC’s putting down the other guys moms. The song sounded new and fresh at the time, like it was part of something breaking through, which it definitely was. Looking back at it now, I find the innocence of it charming. I don’t really get current hip hop. I’m not sure what it is trying to accomplish. OLD FOGEY ALERT. This track is introducing a style or at least continuing a discussion that the Sugarhill Gang had started. Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five brought a dose of reality to the world, describing the inner city in a way that gave rap music a purpose in terms of its ability to be a force of social change, like the music of the ’60’s. The musical innovations of sampling and scratching made hip hop a unique creative environment for artists and producers. Then groups like NWA poured gasoline on hip hop, glorifying the gangster and the underworld, which became a new, defiant take on the political ideas of their predecessors. So much of hip hop now is trap beats, spooky keyboard melodies and choppy, whiny vocal melodies that seem indistinguishable from any other track on a hip hop playlist. The lyrics typically say nothing, which is so weird in a form of music where the lyrics were once everything. There is still good hip hop and, every once in a while, I’ll hear something that just floors me but I don’t get the value in it the same way I used to. I sometimes feel like hip hop is reaching some sort of end in the same way that rock seems to have. For every Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper, there is a hundred guys who are just making noise. I feel like soon, AI is going to be able to make a beat good enough to put most of these guys out of business. But you can trivialize anything and often it’s because you don’t understand something and that’s probably where I am at with this. But Yo Mamma definitely had an effect on me and the originality of hop hop. like punk rock, gave me a jolt of inspiration that made me who I am.

I Can’t Take It I remember seeing Cheap Trick open for Kiss at the Edmonton Coliseum. At the time. I loved anything theatrical or where the band assumed characters. Cheap Trick fit that perfectly and also, they were a killer power pop band. I got In Color and In Black And White and loved every single track. It began my life long love affair with the band. Years later, they went into the studio with Todd Rundgren to record Next Position Please. This is a record they did without bassist, Tom Peterson. I have a bit of history with Tom. I ran into him one day at the Rivoli in Toronto. Not entirely sure why he was in Toronto but he introduced himself to me, (like he needed to) and said he’d love to write with me sometime. This was wildly flattering to me but it never happened. I hope one day to connect with him again. One of my greatest memories of being in The Pursuit Of Happiness was playing a show at the Commonwealth Stadium in my hometown of Edmonton. We were third on the bill to Meatloaf and Cheap Trick. All three bands had been produced by Todd Rundgren. The guys from Cheap Trick immediately crashed our dressing room and hung out with us. Later, Rick acknowledged me from the stage. And then, after their set, he walked off towards me, where I had been watching them from the audience, and shook my hand. I couldn’t believe how cool it was that he validated me in front of my home town and I am forever in his debt for that. The record with Todd was a bit uneven but it contained my favorite Cheap Trick song. I Can’t Take It sounds a bit like a TR song, which is maybe why I like it so much. Later, Tom rejoined the band and all was well again. Cheap Trick are, to me, the ultimate power pop band. And I love that they haven’t changed, they keep being awesome and haven’t felt the pressure to reinvent themselves. This is a good lesson for young musicians. If you make timeless music you’ll never go out of fashion.

Reel Around the Fountain This is my final entry and would be a song that I started listening to just before I moved to Toronto. Again, I got this record out of the Edmonton Public Library. In many ways, this song is a fitting end to this piece as it has so many of the elements that the other songs I’ve listed have. An acute sense of melancholy, beautiful chords and amazing lyrics that describe a complicated relationship. I listened to the Smiths’ debut on my Walkman in my final days wandering the streets of Edmonton just before I left to hopefully, change my life. To me, the ultimate version of this is on Hatful of Hollow, the live in the studio version that captures the full bleakness of the song. Interestingly, the version on HFH is in a much higher key, which makes Morrissey’s vocal all the more mournful. One of the things I love most about this song, the Hatful Of Hollow version, is how much it sounds like a band. It was recorded for John Peel’s radio show and it is clearly live off the floor. It’s so rare these days to hear something so raw and organic. Whenever I hear this song now, I think of my early days in Toronto, where I was putting together the band and the possibilities of life seemed all out in front of me. Every day seemed to hold some new, exotic experience and I felt like destiny was pulling me towards something wonderful. But that was a long time ago. Many things went really well and many things didn’t. I had a lot of victories and just as many disappointments. Still, I am grateful for the life I have. I have an amazing wife and kids and have been able to make a living in music for the majority of my life. I’m reasonably healthy and still have my hair! But the sun is going down in my life and doing something like this reveals how much is behind me. The good news is, music can get you through the rough parts of life and bring extra happiness to the good parts. When I listen to an old song, I try to remember where I was and who I was when I first listened to it. I know you can’t go back but there is value in nostalgia. That fact that writing about these songs has evoked such strong emotions in me really speaks to how important music can be in a person’s life. Now that I’ve come to the end, I am thinking of so many more songs I’d like to include. But nothing lasts for ever and sometimes you just have to let things go.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1tNUVLvIUL2qSDWbTTqEzn?si=07f3cb5c401046f2&pt=613cb52fd656f4cec0bb99154b05f6ff