I was having this really dumb conversation with Steve the other night, who I barely ever speak to since his move to San Francisco, and the horribleness of that Nada Surf song “Mother’s Day” came up in conversation. On my first trip out to LA in January of ’07, when I was here looking for an apartment, I was hanging out at Steve’s place with his roommate Lyz, his older brother, and Ilya. We were basically sitting around their living room boozing and trying out out-joke each other when that terrible song somehow crept into our conversation. It really is awful. Is it supposed to be like a freestyle delivery or a rap or what? It’s too wussy to have any sort of impact. I loved Nada Surf throughout middle school and high school, and even I had to skip that song whenever I came to it on The Proximity Effect. Somewhere amid our silly-dumb, surrealist conversation, I got to thinking about all the music I listened to in high school, and how none of it even remotely appeals to me anymore. That’s when I decided to devote this week’s top ten list to the albums I most frequently listened to and enjoyed during those awkward, than slightly-less awkward, than excruciatingly awkward teen years. 1997 through 2001. Ranked from tenth most favorite to most favorite:
10. Blur – 13 (1999) – If you’ll allow me to “overshare” for a moment, I want to tell you about the importance of this album. When I was a sophomore I had this crippling anxiety problem. I didn’t tell any of my friends about it, and I think all through school some of my closest friends were unaware as to my frequent panic attacks mid-class. Anyway, I became very superstitious regarding daily routines — almost like a ballplayer — and repeated the same actions from day to day if I felt the previous day had been a “good day”. This led to my listening to the same three albums every night before bed for an entire year. It wasn’t that I loved the music contained on them (one was a fucking Ben Lee album my friend Dan gave me, one was that Ben Folds Five concept album with the black and red cover, and the other was 13), it was just that they happened to be in my three-CD stereo on a “good” day, so I refused to change the CDs for the next eight months. I’m pretty sure by the end of that school year I knew every single note of every single song on this album. If you gave me two random words from the song “Coffee & TV” I could tell you how many bars separated them. These days I can’t listen to the album too often, and when I do it brings back a lot of weird memories.
09. Ash – 1977 (1996) – I think I’ve written about this before in another Top Ten, but I’ll do so again in case you’re reading this page for the first time. I ordered 1977 during my freshman year from one of those Columbia House mail-order catalogs where you are promised ten CDs for one cent. The name and title looked familiar, and I tried to convince myself that a British camp counselor had played the album for me before, but the truth was I had no idea what it was. It became one of my favorite albums almost immediately. It appealed to my inner Weezer fan but it had way more balls than anything Weezer had ever recorded. I always preferred their Live At The Wireless CD, which I remember purchasing at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square also during my freshman year. I still listen to Live At The Wireless sometimes. It’s all the best songs from 1977 and Trailer but played at a ridiculously coked-up tempo.
08. Foo Fighters – The Colour And The Shape (1997) – I grew up on Nirvana. One of the first cassettes my mother bought me was Nevermind. It was only natural that in 1995, at the age of 12, I would make the short jump over to Foo Fighters fan. My Hero and Everlong were the songs I usually skipped (they were overplayed on the radio), but I would listen to Hey, Johnny Park! and New Way Home incessantly. I saw them live twice during high school, I think in early 1999 and late 2000. My first band The Ian Weinberger Trio performed Stacked Actors at our first concert, and I think Ian and I played New Way Home in my basement for a crowd of 10 or 15 half-stoned friends, my father and my uncle towards the end of my senior year.
07. moe. – Tin Cans And Car Tires (1998) – You can’t go through a stoner phase without having a favorite stoner band. I was way early on the bandwagon, as my old camp counselor Seth introduced me to them when I was 13. I saw them first in at the Hammerstein Ballroom in April of 1998 with my friends Dan, Scott, Adam and Dave. I remember the band opened with a song called “Plane Crash”, and in the middle of the song Dave was sparking a bowl with one of a lighter that remained locked in the “on” position and he accidentally lit his shirt on fire. I went on to see Moe. five or six times in high school with various friends who usually hated them or couldn’t care less, but it always made for a good excuse to get out of the house and get high, especially at fifteen years old. No one should have to sneak around the house hiding things from their parents, they should just get into bands like moe. and they’ll always have somewhere safe to get stoned.
06. Silverchair – Frogstomp (1995) – Although I heard (and loved) Freak Show first, I think Frogstomp left a longer-lasting impression. The songs were way darker, and it was during my early high school years that i made a conscious effort to act and look darker and more mysterious. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t go goth or anything, I just…I wanted to be enigmatic. And it doesn’t get much darker than “Suicidal Dream”, which, after “Cherub Rock” was the second song I ever learned how to play on guitar (not counting “We Didn’t Start The Fire”, which I learned in fifth grade and promptly forgot when I stopped taking guitar lessons). I guess I felt a closeness to Frogstomp because the band was fourteen when they recorded it and I was a fourteen-year old when I discovered it. I’m also convinced that they song they recorded for the Cable Guy soundtrack is the best thing they ever recorded. [Listen to “Shade”]
05. Nada Surf – The Proximity Effect (1998/2000) – Nada Surf is actually popular now, so it’s hard to describe what a treat it was to enjoy The Proximity Effect when it came out in 1998. It was only released in Europe at first, but I remember listening to it on my computer and thinking it was amazing. When the band started playing shows in the states again (1999, 2000, 2001) I saw them more times than I can count. I recorded some of their shows and would send them to Daniel Lorca in exchange for two posters, some setlists and a Karmic-era t-shirt. It wasn’t a conscious decision to stop listening to Nada Surf, but I knew they were screwed when they signed to the same label Death Cab For Cutie were on (Barsuk), and, unsurprisingly, when they recorded and released Let Go, all the songs that I had heard live now sounded way too poppy and bland. It’s a damn shame, those were great times. Except for the Nada Surf / Rilo Kiley show, which I now consider to be one of the worst concerts I have ever seen. [Listen to “Bacardi”]
04. Jeff Buckley – Grace (1994) – This one came later in high school, towards the end of my junior year. I just got my first car (Dennis, the 1985 Dodge Daytona), and wanted some new CDs to play when I drove around town. I think Ilya recommended Jeff Buckley along with Built to Spill and a few other bands, but this is the only one that really stuck. And it stuck super hard, because I’m pretty sure I would rank Grace as one of my ten favorite albums of all time. It’s just stunning in every conceivable way, from the guitar playing to the singing to the lyrics and even the recording technique. It’s all masterful. I think the mark of a truly timeless album is its ability to constantly sound refreshing and invigorating. I’m pretty sure that over the last eight or nine years, my favorite song on the album has changed each year. I never bought the Legacy Edition that was released in ’04, but someone out there might know the answer to this question: Is the version of “Alligator Wine” that appears on the bonus disk the same version that Jeff played live on WFMU in the early nineties?
03. Radiohead – OK Computer – Although I could give a fuck about Radiohead these days, we’ll always have OK Computer. Once in a while I like to stop and thank God for introducing me to a camp counselor named Colin who absolutely schooled me in British/Irish/Scottish culture when I was barely fourteen years old. He showed me Irvine Welsh books, helped me with my golf game, and he taught me about Brit Pop. Without him, I wouldn’t have ever cared about Blur, Oasis, or Radiohead. It’s quite a scary thought. He gave me The Bends, he gave me the first two Oasis albums, and in one day in July of ’97 he played OK Computer for the first time. What happened next is still pretty indescribable, so I’ll just say this: for everything negative I’ve ever written about Radiohead on this blog (read the archives, there’s a lot of anti-Radiohead sentiment here), that album totally changed my life. I say that without hyperbole. How? Countless reasons. One example? In April of ’98 I saw them at Radio City Music Hall with Spiritualized, so I wouldn’t have come upon Spiritualized (and, by extension, Spacemen 3, and by extension, pretty much every blues and gospel musician I’ve ever heard of plus Red Krayola, Thirteenth Floor Elevators, etc. etc. etc. etc.) without Radiohead. I’d say I owe Radiohead some serious props.
02. Smashing Pumpkins – Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (1995) – Yeah, Adore and The-Album-Of-Which-We-Do-Not-Speak were both released during my high school years and MCIS was not, but I listened to it way more than pretty much anything else on the planet for those four years. I started to lose focus towards the end there, because I was in another phase of my life (wait just a moment, I’ll get to it), but the Smashing Pumpkins were pretty much the reason I took up playing guitar in the first place. It was them, Nirvana and Tom Petty. That’s why I wanted to be a musician when I was a wee lad. So I could rip off some gnarly guitar solos and sound like a bald, whiney megalomaniacal asshole. In hindsight, they should have just released the songs from the “Zero” single with one or two from the 1979 single and maybe “Where Boys Fear To Tread”, that would have been a better, more modest album.
01. Weezer – Pinkerton (1996) – I hate to put this as number one because it’s really no more than a solid pop record that has reached canonic status through the years simply because the band responsible for it has put out utter garbage for over a decade since it was released. Still, there was something about it. I must have found it at the right time. Freshman year was all about pussy, as it is for most high school freshman, and this was the album about being frustrated with women that every 14 or 15 year old dude could completely relate to in every possible way. Except for the whole thing about getting fan mail from a girl in Japan, or falling in love with a lesbian (that doesn’t happen until college!), or feeling too old and too jaded. So I guess all I related to was that the singer didn’t ever seem to get laid. And, at 14, I sure felt pathetic for never getting laid. But hey, I got the blue album when I was twelve, and became so enamored of Weezer after hearing this album that I followed them up and down the east coast during their 2000 reformation tour. It was embarrassing. Not as embarrassing as recording a song-for-song cover of their first album with the aforementioned Ian Weinberger Trio (search the archives here, you’ll find info about it), but still pretty cringe-worthy. Ah, Pinkerton. I wonder what you’d sound like today? Wait, I already know, and I’d rather listen to Helium than “Tired Of Sex,” and Big Star than “Butterfly”. The best part is, each of the tracks between those two ALSO have analogs to bands who did the same exact thing but better! HA!
