30 Years, 30 Days: Day 8, 1987

I'm going to be real: 1987 was a rough year to find material from. Aside from the huge hullabaloo of both Madonna and Michael Jackson launching two of the biggest tours the world had ever seen, not a lot really came out that had a huge effect on me. So I have drummed up a couple of choices that, while being huge in my personal shaping, are pretty darn obvious. And here they are.

The Joshua Tree by U2. I feel my friend and fellow picker-of-musical-bones John would probably stop speaking to me if I didn't include this, and it works out, because I would probably stop speaking to me if I didn't include this, too.

I had The Joshua Tree on cassette at about age 11. I proceeded to wear it out and buy another one, which I also wore out. I would then buy it on CD at least three times in my lifetime, losing each copy to lending out or to the void where most things you lost as a teenager end up. If something were to happen to my current copy today, I would most definitely buy another copy tomorrow, despite having not listened to it for some time. Now that's importance.

As for the meat of the record, the why and the wherefore, I have to simply default to what most people have already said about the record. It soared. And so did I. It was also a much easier record to wrap my head around. The songs were much simpler, inspired by roots music rather than trying to recreate their own 70s punk and rock influences. The politics were less heavy. Or maybe they just seemed less heavy because the songs were about a lot of things that rang true to being an America: songs about the landscape, its leaders, hope and dreaming of better things. I will not for a minute claim that I had my finger on the American dream in 1991 when I first heard the record, but all the mythos and history of growing up native born in America definitely put you in the right mindset to relate with the record.

It's also the record where The Edge's guitar playing become less of a trick, dictated by limited musicality, and becomes his Thing with a capital "T". As I've stated before, I still base most of my playing on The Edge in some way. His guitar playing always seemed so powerful and beyond me at a young age. As I grew older, and particularly as I picked apart the elements of The Joshua Tree as a musician, I realized how darn simple it all was. But none of that diminished its power or hold on me, leading me toward the path that simple, done well and done interestingly, was all you really needed.

In a blatant case of repeating an artist two days in a row, I offer up Document by REM, released just one year after Life's Rich Pageant, which I spoke of yesterday. I don't know what it is about this era of REM that affects me more than others. Both these albums are my go-to albums when

I'm in an REM kind of mood. It was a time where their sound was expanding immensely, going beyond the muted jangle-pop of Murmur and Reckoning and starting to sound like, well, an honest to God rock band. All the elements that had been building up in their arsenal (Stipe's lyrics and trademark wail, Mills' excellently executed harmonies, Buck's romp-stomping Rickenbacker riffs, Berry's simple yet powerful beats) seem to really come alive on Document. It's fitting that it's their last release on an independent label: REM had outgrown college radio.

This is not a bad thing, to outgrow a humbler kind of fame. It's what bands get into the business to do. To not get there wold reveal more about their shortcomings then any "stick-to-your-guns", "indier than thou" attitude that permeates punk and the indie rock of the 90s would prove that they were still "down to earth". I love that REM sounds bigger and more confident on this record, and that the hit "The One I Love" was such a success. They were due. And if they weren't due at this point, they probably would have gone the way of a lot of other great bands of the 80s college rock renaissance and simply faded into the woodwork, popping up on iconoclasts' "Overlooked Gems of the 80s" lists and whatnot. They simply did not deserve that. Many other bands have broken huge who don't really deserve it, so rather than bemoan our favorite underground acts for grabbing at the brass ring, we should be thankful that amidst the sea of mediocrity that is the popular music canon, a few managed to sneak in who had something to say and a truly unique way to say it.

So maybe 1987, despite not being chock full of material for me, stands tall because it brings up some important ideas of what makes popular music popular, and how the machine of the music industry churns on, pushing bits and things up to the surface for us to "ooh" and "aah" at. And how every so often, it's deserved. U2 definitely took a departure from their fiery Irish politics and began to take on fiery world politics with The Joshua Tree, and many would turn up their noses and cry sell-out. I don't necessarily judge the sentiment, there are plenty of underground faves for me that I've lost interest in once they started having a massive, faceless audience (Modest Mouse and The Shins, to name a couple). But rather than bitch and whine about my favorite bands being unsung and under-appreciated in their lifetime (I could list about fifty off the top of my head right now), I take comfort that some of them managed to crack through to the next level and delight people all over. Because if music and bands can be a bonding point between people, it helps to have more people to bond with.

-Dan

30 Years, 30 Days: Day 4, 1983

I'm going to be up front here. I just spent most of the day in the studio with my band making an awesome recording, so my head is a little more focused on music I'm making right now as opposed to older music. However, without these older records, who knows if I would have ever picked up a guitar or had the guts to actually write my own songs. So perhaps there is something valid in this exercise: you can't know where you are if you don't know where you came from.

Before I start my daily monologue, today on 1983, I'd like to point out that on September 30th (my birthday) of 1983, none other than T-Pain, the auto-tune junkie himself was born. I think he's in jail right now, which just goes to show you where all that pitch correction will get you.

I haven't talked about the following artist yet, and he's a big one for me. Frank Zappa completely changed how I thought about music, composition and pop writing. He completely removed himself from the sentimentality of songwriting and based his writing on what sounded pleasing to the ear. And while his coldness and disconnect would make him an icy, no-nonsense persona in music, I do enjoy the intellectual approach to music at times.

But when talking about The Man From Utopia, you can easily put all the comp major geekery aside and realize it's an absolute freak show, full of gross-out humor and the often spot-on political observations. My freshman year roommate Greg was a huge Zappa fan and played me this record one evening. Needless to say, I was hooked, and was moved to hook everyone I knew who had even an inkling of taste onto this record. On top of the amazingly technical playing of Zappa and his uber-rehearsed band, it was a laugh riot. An excerpt from "The Dangerous Kitchen":

"Sometimes, the milk can hurt you

If you put it on your cereal before you smell the plastic con-tain-er

And the stuff in the strainer

Has a mind of it's oh-own!!"

All this is being sung while he is matching his vocal part (which he is completely making up on the fly, mind you) on the guitar, in a kind of Slam Stewart type of way (Stewart was a hot jazz era bassist who used to match whistling with his bowed bass solos). I won't even repeat most of the lyrics from my all time favorite, "The Jazz Discharge Party Hats", it's not really for mixed company (or most company, really).

Aside from being incredibly funny, and incredibly technical, The Man From Utopia was an eye-opener in the way that Zappa would turn rock songs into little short plays. There were multiple vocalists to represent various "characters", the music would move with the action and it seemed like a performance piece as much as a rock number. I've always enjoyed that, the sense of theatricality and absurdity in Zappa's work. You can approach him from many angles, but I feel the easiest is to approach him for his "funny cuz' it's weird" and "funny cuz' it's true" moments.

Switching gears, I bring to the table Swordfishtrombones, my favorite Tom Waits album of them all. There are basically two kinds of Tom Waits songs: ballads and rants. Guess which kind I like the best? (If you guessed rants, you win.)

There are a good share of the more ballad type songs on Swordfishtrombones: "Johnsburg Illinois" is a heartfelt ballad to his girl's hometown and "In The Neighborhood" is a brass band led slice of life from a rundown urban block. But the best tracks on this record are the straight-up, howl-at-the-moon ravers. The opening track "Underground" gives you that full, gruff bellow that Waits is so known for, and "16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought Six" is a road song for the truly disturbed. With this being the first record Waits produced himself, it's the first real inkling that listeners would get into his true intentions as a songwriter and performer. Marimbas, odd percussion and shrill pipe organs replace his piano and strings of previous records.

In it's insanity, there's a sort of coherence to this record. All of Waits' characters in the songs could be him, or they could be people he knows, or they could be just based on stories he heard other gin-soaked folks tell at the bar near closing time. But it all fits in his world of hustlers, suckers, tramps, low lives and travelers. I love this world, precisely because I know nothing of it or anything like it. The greatest thing about Waits is that he could be pulling your leg the whole time, but the tales he tells are just so vivid that you could care less if you found out the truth, and would probably choose not to believe it anyway.

Last, and the exact opposite of least, is U2's War, one of the first rock records I ever owned. Everyone has their own memories of this record, or of their first U2 record, and for about three years, I considered this to be the best record ever made, period. I still get shivers when I heard The Edge's guitar tones, the soaring high notes of the riff on "Sunday Bloody Sunday", or the chugging rhythm of a delayed Stratocaster on "New Year's Day". As a guitar player rating his betters, The Edge ranks right up there for me.

This was also one of the first records about political violence and oppression I'd ever really heard (or been able to grasp at all), and it caused me to learn more about the IRA bombings and all the crap that had been going on in Ireland for the previous decades. Bono's lyrics, protesting against war, violence, nuclear arms and oppression; these were things that began to shape my young mind as a political thinker. There were places in the world where people died in the street every day, due to age-old conflicts between governments and its people. It was quite an opposition to my middle-class upbringing in America, and when you're 12 and live in comfort, you tend to latch onto stories and themes of tragedy. Or at least I did. War was my James Joyce, my first glimpses into Ireland as a country of amazing music and people, as well as a country still freshly scarred by war and violence.

When you grow up on a steady diet of music, it's no surprise that the music informs you as a person, even more so than the direct factors around you (geography, parents, social status, etc). My parents did an excellent job of raising me, and rather than instill into me their particular values and mores as the be-all-end-all, they instead gave me the tools and well-rounded mind to go out into the world and find myself my own way. They didn't play me War or Berlin or Bob Dylan; they let me find them on my own, and inform myself however I saw fit. I think that's a greater gift, and while I've often envied the children of hippie parents who grew up surrounded by rock culture and music from the cradle, I also think a lot of those kids ended up going to college for business management, currently vote Republican and think Glen Beck "may be onto something". So, a big thanks to my folks, Robin and Jim, for letting me find myself amidst the stacks of CDs, vinyl and cassettes, and for having every faith that I would find the right things.

-Dan

Me at about 2 months with my dad, Jim