Which, admittedly, I’m stealing from my Facebook page, but since we’re all at play here there and everywhere…
Because an old RayGunner tagged me, and I’m afraid to violate the chain letter mojo, though I won’t tag anybody else. And because it’s a compulsion, once started…
…the rules — and I don’t do well with rules — stipulate one album per artist, no hits packages, no Various Artists packages. This installs a prejudice against anything recorded before the 1950s or 1960s, and tilts the ground against singles artists. To which end there’s a paucity of country here (I’d take Hank, for example, but I’d take one of the box sets; I’d take Patsy, but…I’d take Elmore James and Sleepy John Estes, but they weren’t album artists; I’d take Marvin Gaye, but I’ve never known his LPs; I’d take the Soul Stirrers or some early Fairfield Four and some other gospel, but all I have are Specialty compilations).
…the reality is that I don’t need to take to this hypothetical desert island with unlimited power, and, hopefully, a fine and very loud sound system, the work of the Beatles, or the Stones, or Led Zeppelin or anybody else who was prominent on the radio or on my stereo as a callow youth. It’s all in my head, I don’t need to hear it.
So. The list following is in the order they occurred to me. If I made another list another time it would, of course, be different, except that the first ten or fifteen titles would probably still be on it. But these are albums that I have lived with for good blocks of time, they’re old friends I’m always happy to see or hear. And to hell with critical credibility. Not that I ever had much of that.
Finally…if I were to be exiled to a desert island, I don’t know that I’d want music. I think I’d want books. I think that I would want to listen to what was going on around me (the plane! the plane!), and to take advantage of the nonmechanized silence. But that don’t play here. Maybe I’ll come up with twenty book I’d want to pack and read repeatedly one of these days. That’d be about a suitcase full…
1. Jesse Colin Young & The Youngbloods, Elephant Mountain
2. Neil Young, Live Rust
3. Talking Heads, Fear of Music
4. J.S. Bach’s Partitas & Sonatas, performed by Nathan Milstein
5. Buddy Miller, Universal United House of Prayer
6. Mavis Staples, We’ll Never Turn Back
7. Ted Hawkins, The Final Tour
8. Gary Numan, Dance
9. John Cale, Live Sabotage
10. Julie London, Julie Is Her Name
11. Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Blackjack
12. Blind Willie Johnson, Praise God I’m Satisfied
13. Alejandro Escovedo, With These Hands
14. Jon Dee Graham, Full
15. Soundgarden, Loud Love
16. Mudhoney, self-titled
17. Screaming Trees, Sweet Oblivion
18. Steven Jesse Bernstein, Prison
19. Steve Earle & The Del McCoury Band, The Mountain
20. Marianne Faithfull, Blazing Away
21. Rank And File, Sundown
22. Charlie Rich, The Fabulous Charlie Rich
23. Gillian Welch, Time (The Revelator)
24. Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Brain Salad Surgery
25. Whiskeytown, Faithless Street
26. Louvin Brothers, Tragic Songs Of Life
27. Grateful Dead, Bear’s Choice Vol. 1
28. Cowboy Junkies, Trinity Session
29. Cream, Disraeli Gears
30. Dolly Parton, Little Sparrow
31. Steely Dan, Can’t Buy A Thrill
32. John Fogerty, Blue Moon Swamp
33. Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)
34. Back Door, 8th Street Nites
35. Johnny Cash, American Recordings
36. Lyle Lovett, It’s Not Big, It’s Large
37. Patty Griffin, Children Running Through
38. Thelonious Monster, Beautiful Weather
39. Public Enemy, It Takes A Nation of Millions…
40. Jimmie Dale Gilmore, After Awhile
