The following is from a series of posts culled from my Geocities site that I abandoned in 2001. Having finally gotten around to deleting it, I saved a few articles that I thought I'd share here. Remember, this stuff was written in '01. It's not my best, but here it is...
A Music Diary... begun Thursday, February 15th, 2001 by James Arthur Casey
NOTE: This "Diary" turned out to be little more than a slipshod batch of recollections, all of which were written down on one day...in other words, not much of a diary. I post it here for nostalgia's sake.
15Feb01
It was a pivotal moment in my life. No doubt, the single MOST pivotal moment of my entire life, and that's no exaggeration. It happened when I was 6 or 7 years old, I'm surprised I can't remember. But it was the moment when my mother presented me with my first record player...a little mono, no frills number like a lot of kids had back then (we're talking 1968-69), and a selection of 3 albums.
The first was a sacred music & gospel record which, to the best of my knowledge I never even listened to in it's entirety. The devil in me had shown it's ugly head even at such a tender, young age...
The second album got quite a bit of rotation on my little record player. It was a compilation of country and western songs that seem ancient now, but at the time weren't really all that dated. Songs like "The Wings of a Dove" by Ferlin Huskey (which I never cared for) and "Detroit City" by Bobby Bare, I believe (I liked that one considerably better). It had several other good songs on it, and since my parents listened to country music exclusively I had developed a little bit of a taste for it (which I soon disowned when my rebellious teen years and a love for rock and roll came along). I enjoyed that album, the cover of which depicted a nice looking saddle with a cowboy hat perched on the top, but it nevertheless will always take second place in a beginner's 3 record collection when the other record in consideration is:
"TRY TOO HARD" by the DAVE CLARK FIVE
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it was the Dave Clark Five who turned me on to rock and roll music. And to this day all I can remember of the whole album...not song titles, not lyrics, not melodies,...the ONLY thing I remember about it is the cool album cover shot of the band riding in that slick, white Corvette convertable and the tag line of the title track, "You don't TRY TOO HARD...You don't TRY TOO HARD!!!"
Nevertheless, despite my amnesia in regards to the content of that album, it by far got the most spins on my lo-fi. I would use butter knives as drumsticks and hardback Golden Book encyclopedias as drums, with cake pans for cymbals, and play along with all of the songs on "Try Too Hard". I'm sure I had all the song lyrics memorized, as I have always had the gift of lyrical/melodic retention.
That was the only record I had, of the three, that mattered, and it was all I needed for a long, long time until the afternoon when my cousin, Cathy, while teasing me by taking my Dave Clark Five album from me and riding away on her bike with it, had a serious wreck. Serious in as much as she had managed to break my precious "Try Too Hard" album in the crash, and I confess I have never properly forgiven her for that.
And now the emberassing parts...
The first 45 RPM single I ever bought was by the Carpenters...I can't recall the title right now. That's not such a shameful thing, in my opinion, but the first album I ever bought certainly was..."The Partridge Family Album" by...uh, I don't wanna have to type it again.
Yes, I was a naive pre-teen and I watched that stupid show every week along with the Brady Bunch just as every one of you out there who are close to my age did as well, so don't anyone get to thinking how uncool it (obviously actually) is to have a Partridge Family album...especially when it's replacing the much loved Dave Clark Five album! Sue me. I actually liked most of the songs (especially "I Can Hear Your Heartbeat"), and you'll just have to be satisfied that it wasn't long until I saw the error of my ways and dismissed the Partridge Family as anything more than pop culture kitsch.
And I atoned in a hardcore way by getting into Bloodrock, a Fort Worth, Texas band who had been getting considerable airplay with a morbid song about dying crash victims called "D.O.A.". I was hooked immediately because along with comic books and monster movies, songs with siren sound effects in them are something every boy likes. I know it was that way for me...
So I saved up my allowances and went down to Drury's Five and Dime, conveniantly located on main street in my old hometown and the only store in town that had a selection of record albums. You'll notice that I didn't say "good selection"...I didn't even say "decent selection", but they DID have "Bloodrock 2" and that's all that mattered to me.
No more would I have to rely upon feeding dimes to the jukebox in the cafe where my mother worked and where my brother and I hung out just to hear "D.O.A." and especially it's flipside, the exuberant "Children's Heritage". Now I had the whole album, and that meant a collosal 8+ minute version of "D.O.A.". (Incidentally, I can't stand to listen to "D.O.A." anymore, having survived a serious car crash that song bums me out in a big way, and I ALWAYS skip over it to good old "Fancy Space Odyssey" when I play the album these days.)
It also meant that I had CLASSIC Bloodrock songs like "Lucky In The Morning", "Cheater" (which may well be, along with "Breach of Lease", one of my two favorite Bloodrock songs), "Fallin'" and "Dyer Not a Lover" (you've GOT to check out the drum intro to that one...).
Of course, as soon as I found out about "Bloodrock 3" I bought it...I seem to remember getting it at a Target store in Oklahoma City while visiting relatives. That 3rd album is every bit as good as the second, and I had the first, self-titled record before too much time had passed (another spooky one on that record, "Fantastic Piece of Architecture").
I guess this was all about a year after my next door neighbour showed me some of his Beatles records, which, of course, I loved, and I gravitated towards the Rolling Stones. Even moreso than the Beatles, the Stones were my favourite band in those late sixties and early seventies albums.
And of course I was of the perfect demographic and age to be easilly converted into an Alice Cooper fan. It didn't take much. I loved seeing him on ABC's then popular "In Concert" series, getting hung or having his head chopped off...that huge boa constrictor wrapped around his shoulders and he's teasing it, trying to hypnotize it with a lullaby about "Sick Things". He wore that black mascara and looked just freaky enough to make your parents make some kind of wise-ass remark when they happen to see him on TV or in your record collection. And he had a WOMAN'S NAME, by Holy Christ! What kind of flaming tosser goes by a ladie's moniker? A ROCKING one, it turned out.
Alice got his fair share of radio airplay in his hey day, no doubt about that. They played "School's Out" tirelessly, but you gotta admit, that is the PERFECT summer rock song. Who can't sympathize with blowing up your high school on the day after classes let out? I preferred the B-Side, "Gutter Cat", which sports a hell of a bass line and some nasty double entendres. "School's Out" is a great album, I'm still convinced, and "My Stars" is the high point, in my opinion.
"Killer" is an even better album, and contains one of the lost gems of rock and roll, "Halo of Flies". Along with the title track, "Desperado", "You Drive Me Nervous" and even the built-to-shock "Dead Babies", "Killer" is as solid a record as Cooper ever put out.
In the same league are "Love It to Death", with the classic "Ballad of Dwight Frye" and the Apocalyptic "Second Coming", and "Billion Dollar Babies", with it's Dentist's Chair Nightmare, "Unfinished Sweet" and solid rockers like "Generation Landslide", "Hello Hurray" and even the obligatory-by-now shocker "I Love the Dead" (I wonder, has Marilyn Manson explored necrophilia yet? Alice was truly a trailblazer). "Muscle of Love" was another very good Alice Cooper release. It came in a large cardboard box which read "Contents of Package: One Alice Cooper Muscle of Love"...The packaging would have made up for some slacking in the music, but that was unnecessarry, since practically all of the songs on the album were winners, even if a slight stylistic change for the Coop.
"Welcome to My Nightmare" was the last really good Alice Cooper album, in my opinion. I loved "Devil's Food", "The Black Widow", the "Stephen" Trilogy, even "Only Women Bleed". I was disappointed that Cooper had let go of his back-up band, the Billion Dollar Babies, and subsequent albums like "Alice Cooper Goes to Hell", "Whiskey & Lace", "From the Inside" and "Trash" , among others, went ignored as I moved on to other groups...
Somewhere along the line I had started listening to Rick Wakeman...I remember now. My uncle gave me a bunch of albums that I think once belonged to some renters he had who had left them behind...not a lot of good stuff, but a couple...the Rolling Stones "Between the Buttons" was one, and the other very good one in the mix was "The Six Wives of Henry VIII" by Rick Wakeman. I loved that pretentious keyboard noodling, and upon learning that he also played keyboards for YES, I proceeded to get some of their records. I hate to admit it, but I liked Wakeman's solo stuff even more than YES, but I wasn't a stoner back then, so who knows how it would have turned out if I HAD been? As it was, I preferred "Six Wives...", "Journey to the Centre of the Earth", "The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table", "No Earthly Connection" and "Criminal Record" over even "Close to the Edge" or "Topographic Oceans". (Don't get me wrong...I really like those YES albums as well...)
And upon first hearing Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells", at the time being referred to as "Theme from 'The Exorcist'", I decided I'd give that album a chance, even though it was drastically different to what I usually listened to. "Tubular Bells" is one long composition broken up into two almost 30 minute parts, and my attention span at that time was stretched severely by 20 minute opuses like "Close To the Edge". And furthermore, it's not much of a "rock" record, though there are rock elements in it. It's just a very complex, lengthy piece and I hadn't yet gotten into classical yet so I wasn't used to it.
I did enjoy it, though, and immensely. I bought his next album, "Hergest Ridge", and pronounced it even better than it's predecessor. The same praise was heaped upon "Ommadawn" when it came out, and it remained my favorite Oldfield album for a long time. In many ways, it still is.
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