Do records define certain periods in your life, regardless of when they come out? They do for me, sometimes just a specific couple of months, especially when I was younger. I suppose this is inevitable when music plays such an important role in your life.
This has reached the point where certain songs or albums have become bookmarks in my early life and with Dawn ever since. It shows, I suppose, how my life and music is inseparable and has been since I was 4 and apparently I used to wiggle around the room to Manfred Mann’s Do Wah Diddy Diddy, playing it over and over, piling 8 singles onto the record player. Listening to We Can Work It Out in my tiny bedroom, curled up on the bed. That’s one of my earliest memories. Then when I was a bit older, 6 or 7, I recall falling asleep on a summer’s evening after being at the seaside, listening to Do you know the way to San Jose? With the sun streaming in.
Into the 70s, there was the 1972 Christmas when I was listening to Echoes and my grandma said ‘this is a bit weirdy’ and I couldn’t stop laughing and when I was 12, staring out my bedroom window listening to Band On The Run and wondering what life held for me.
Then there were the angst teenage years, when I released my angst by playing Deep Purple every day. Falling asleep every lunchtime listening to Focus at the Rainbow or Ricochet. The first encounters on the living room floor with girls while listening to Jethro Tull, Zeppelin and Live In The Air Age by Be Bop Deluxe. Going to a party and storming out because no one there liked Traffic’s On The Road and feeling alienated.
Being a ‘rock lad’ at school and playing loud Uriah Heep albums, Live Dates and Barclay James Harvest’s live album. And being told off for playing King Crimson. That was so important to me at an important time in life. Gave me an identity I could embrace and a tribe to belong to.
And my little cell/room at college in my first term reverberated with Presence, Cry Of Love and The Doors Absolutely Live. Memories of listening to Long Live Rock n Roll and Rainbow Rising while getting some distance from sober. A hedonistic lifestyle that I thought was normal. The early days of falling in love to Todd Rundgren and Ten Years After and John Martyn. Taking mushrooms every other day of 1982 but still getting a degree, listening to Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and the instrumentals on Sheik Yerbouti while higher than God.
Being in the City Tavern when it had a big video screen and seeing Sweet Child O’ Mine for the first time and thinking rock was reinventing itself.
Driving down Sunset Boulevard in the midday heat, blasting the just released, White Lion’s massive sounding Lights And Thunder with Vito Bratta’s guitar absolutely crushing, skin prickling, feeling like a rock star, long hair flowing.
Swimming in our Palm Springs pool in the burning heat to Heart’s Magic Man. Pulling into Joshua Tree with the High Desert stretched out in front of us, Ry Cooder’s Vigilante Man on the radio.
Filling the car up at a desert gas station, standing there in a Van Halen t-shirt, sunglasses and old jeans as Bon Jovi’s Tokyo Road echoed into the massive empty hot air.
Hearing Moontears by Nils Lofgren in the Hotel Mondrian on Sunset.
Back home seeing Steely Dan at Edinburgh Playhouse, the best gig of my life.
Being too upset to listen to Steve Vai’s For The Love Of God just after having had a stroke because it evoked the days when I was well. (I can now)There have been many, many more
It’s been a helluva ride when I write it all down and hey, it’d make a great soundtrack album.
