8 Bands That Changed My Life

If there was a motto that has carried me throughout my adult life, if might be something along the lines of: “What would Joe Strummer do?” Growing up, music was the only contemporary creative art that I really cared about. And looking back over the past 35 years, I think all us music geeks have been justified, because, at least as popular culture, it is about the only one its fans can look back on and feel good about. Take movies. Name the coolest movie stars over the past 30 years: John Cusack, Johnny Depp, Robert DeNiro... oh fuck it. Why do I even bother? They all end up being just a bunch of vacant assholes with a schtick. But we have been fortunate to grow up and old in a musical golden age.  

I’ve been reading James Fearnley’s excellent “Here Comes Everyone: The Story of the Pogues.” It has me thinking about those handful of bands that took my life by storm. And, as much as I like folks such as Tom Waits or Brian Eno, this list does not extend to individual singers, songwriters, or studio producers. I come from the culture of the band, where musicians bring their skills into a common space and create a unique sound, a sonic portrait of their world, where a collaboration is greater than its parts. It is a melding of the individual creativity of jazz within the structured melody of the song. I believe in this idea, heart and soul, even if it may no longer hold the cultural hegemony that it did 30 years ago.  

So I made a list of these bands. Or at least the ones that I still feel good about today. For instance, I left out the torrid love I once held for the Exploited, along with my transitory teen obsession with Led Zeppelin, and my 5^th grade fascination with all things Wings. Here they are, in chronological order:  

Cheap Trick: I still remember the first time that I heard Cheap Trick. I had just moved into a room that my parents had built on the other end of the garage. It gave me the space to stay up late listening to music and doing other untoward things, making up for the fact that the room was repeatedly inundated by spiders. As a 16-year old boy, my two great musical obsessions were early 70’s heavy metal and mid-70’s funk. Late one Friday night, I had tuned into Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, excited to catch the Ohio Players, one of my favorite groups at the time. They shared the bill with Cheap Trick, who were still relative unknowns. It was an odd pairing, but an awesome one. Cheap Trick were in classic form, leaping, sweating, tossing guitar picks, belting out tunes from their first two albums, in particular the criminally underrated “In Color.” As good as the Ohio Players were that night, Cheap Trick were better. I became a huge fan. When “Heaven Tonight” came out later that year, I could usually get party DJs to play “California Man” even though it was the middle of the disco era. I would dance and dance to that song. I have loved this band ever since. 

Thin Lizzy: My first rock concert was to see Thin Lizzy at the Long Beach Arena. They were opening for Journey. It was my senior year of high school, and I went with five other friends from the marching band, all of whom were there to see Journey. It goes without saying that Thin Lizzy blew them away. They were awesome, even if most of the 12,000 folks that I shared the room with that night didn’t share my opinion. I love those dueling harmonic guitars. Phil Lynott could sing random names out of the phone book and somehow make it compelling. If I could have anyone sing a song that I wrote, it would have been Phil Lynott. But to the best of my knowledge, Thin Lizzy never covered “Life Like Yogi.”

The Clash: The Clash were my first punk band. They changed how I listened to music, as I chanted along to their songs: Garageland, Complete Control, Hate and War, etc. “I have the will to survive, I’ll cheat if I can’t win. If someone locks me out, I kick my way back in. And if I get aggression, I give it two times back. I don’t dream of a holiday, With hate and war on my back.” Their music was a poke in the eye to striving prep and self-satisfied hippy alike, and that made me happy. In October 1979, having recently left home for a dorm room in Sproul Hall, I caught the Clash concert at the Hollywood Palladium. I became part of the sweaty mob, chanting choruses, swinging elbows, sometimes lifted off the ground in mid-pogo by the undulating crowd. I went home that night a changed kid, the scales having fallen from my eyes. I felt reborn, like anything was possible, if only we had the courage to will it into life.    

X: I bought the first, self-titled X album the week it came out. I played that record to death. One night, I took the bus to West Hollywood to see X live at the Starwood. The Go Go’s opened. Both bands were great. And the fact that I could stand there, just feet from Exene, her eyes rolling back behind their lids as she sung the chorus to “When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch,” made their music that much more intimate and real to me. X was the first of my favorite bands from the L.A. scene. They were locals. Billy Zoom’s rockabilly riffs would be great from any stage, from the Anti-Club to the Rose Bowl. But the fact that I could practically touch his guitar, that I could almost taste John Doe’s sweat, made my fandom that much more sweet.

The Pogues: The first place that I saw the Pogues was in Paris, late in the summer of 1985. “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash” had just been released, and I loved it. But Paris was a terrible place to attend your first Pogues concert. I was a drunken, chanting mess of a human being, and the Parisians at the concert hall gave me a wide berth. But hey, what’s the point in being a drunken mess if you can’t share this gift with others? That Pogues album became the soundtrack of my wandering trip through Europe. This was capped by seeing them again, this time at the Barrowlands Ballroom in Glasgow just before Christmas, where a couple thousand chanting Celtic fans swelled against the stage, and kids I’d never met before were coming up to me, shaking my hand, and telling me to “find Big Rick before you leave,” as apparently wearing a green-and-white Pogues beanie is not a safe thing to do when you leave a gig in a Rangers neighborhood, at least not unless you are paired up with Big Rick on your way out. I also saw the Pogues at the Riviera Theatre in Chicago on a hot June day back in 1988. I had just moved to town that spring, and the concert served as a christening of sorts, cementing my relationship with my new home. I went there with Patty, my Chicago Irish girlfriend, and her brother Billy. We drank Guinness in the back alley behind the Riv, in the heart of Uptown, sharing our beer with one of the local drunks. Then Spider Stacy got out of a cab and said hello to us on his way towards the backdoor of the club. I thought that anyplace where I can have moments like this is an alright place to live.

The Pixies: I will never forget the first time I heard “Gigantic.” I was working as a delivery driver while living at home with my parents, trying to save up enough cash to move out of town. I was listening to KUCI, the local college radio station, on my car stereo, driving into a multilevel parking lot to make my next delivery, when it came on the radio. I sat in the bowels of the cement parking structure with the radio blasting, mesmerized. I soon bought the first two Pixies records, first “Surfer Rosa” on cassette, and then their debut, “Come On Pilgrim,” on vinyl. Not long after that, I moved to Chicago. I saw the Pixies first at the Cubby Bear, then the following year at Metro, and then the following year at the Riviera, as they moved up the food chain. I also saw them twice in 2004 during their sold-out, five-night stint at the Aragon. Each concert was a gem in its own right. But if I had to pick one memory, it would be their show at Metro in the summer of 1989, during the “Doolittle” tour. I was tripping on mushrooms at the time, and the opening band, the Happy Mondays, were such a psychic monstrosity that I had gone into the corner of a back hallway and was pounding my head against the wall. Luckily, I stuck around for the Pixies, because they were in peak form. And where was my mind that night? Way out on the water, see it swimming?   

Joy Division: Whatever the revelations and enthusiasms of my proto-Gen X youth, our cultural zeitgeist stalled around 1990. Music, which for over a decade had seemed like the world to me, all of sudden looked like a cul-de-sac, a cultural dead end. For a while I thought that loud yet melodic walls of trippy guitar, bands such as Lush and My Bloody Valentine, heralded the sound of the future. But grunge and rave, hip hop and speed metal soon took most of the oxygen out of the room. And dance beats were replacing guitars as a vehicle for the musicians of the coming generation. So all that “music of the future,” which still used guitars and featured mostly angsty white folks with obscure complaints, started sounding more like the music of the past. I began listening to a lot of bands from around the planet, stuff that would soon be marketed as “world music.” But mostly I retrenched, immersing myself in the thousands of bands in the wave that came on the heels of punk. And slowly, Joy Division became the music of my interregnum. From their spare melody lines, carried by the bass, to the atmospheric guitar counterpoint, to Ian Curtis’s singing, vulnerable yet defiant, the band was a revelation, just one that took me about 20 years to realize.  

Sigur Ros: I had been waiting for contemporary classical music to come to pop. I saw no reason that Henryk Goreki or Arvo Part couldn’t break through into the mainstream, filling in the space that Brian Eno created with all of his ambient dreams. Actually, Phillip Glass did briefly fill that role, but it was a poor fit, as Glass’s music often seems like a forest of notes, devoid of emotion, providing little incentive for any stray pop fan who stumbled on one of his compositions from taking that next step into the classical world at large. Rather than bring contemporary classical music into the realm of pop, Sigur Ros came from the opposite direction, giving pop the tonal resonance of a classical performance. For the past six years, my wife and I have celebrated the new year by settling down with a bottle of champagne to watch “Heima,” or home, a documentary about a series of free shows that Sigur Ros gave as they toured the back roads of Iceland in 2005 with Anima, a string quartet. The film is a fine portrait of their music and a reflection of a particular place and time. The songs are gorgeous, and this is only enhanced by the idiosyncrasies of the people and the places where the band performs. I feel close to this music. Among other things, it is an expression of the four seasons, in particular the emotional wrestling that each of us face in these northern climes, and those moments of sublime reflection that result. As a voluntary migrant to the upper Midwest, Sigur Ros repeatedly reminds me why I am here.

Addendum: I returned to the world of contemporary music around 2005, feeling like the old guy coming from a different place and time. As an outside observer, it seems to me that most of the music scene these days is free from the shallow ideologies and tenancies of my day. For instance, there is little worry that you will get beat up for having the wrong haircut. Nowadays, kids don’t seem to care much about your label, and that is liberating. Musicians can use sound and melody for their own purposes, without worrying about whose camp they are in or if they will be accused of selling out. And I’ve really enjoyed a lot of contemporary music, from Silversun Pickups to the National. But a lot of it seems too clever by half, even the really good stuff. Music has become a useful accessory for active young lives, but it rarely comes across as urgent or necessary, like the Clash felt for me that night at the Palladium. Now, have the times changed, or is it me? I don’t know, but I cling to music as the voice of my time, the mathematical factoring of our essence, delivered to millions through the vibrations of the molecules in the air.