Classic albums?

The Record Peddler! God, I loved going into the city to buy music. Sam's and A&A, those were the days.

 

The first time I heard "Smells Like Teen Sprit," I was like, Holy shit, what is that, and when can I hear that again? It was like nothing else on the radio, raw and visceral, a sound that I felt as much as heard.

To a lesser extent, "Welcome to the Jungle" and "Another Brick in the Wall Part II" had that effect on radio listening me.

 

Welcome to the Jungle was crazy. I was never a metal fan, but they made all other bands look like soft-rockers coming out like that.

 

Boston's self-titled debut. Could probably listen to it front to back several times in a row. I do have one slight issue with it, I feel it should've opened with Foreplay/Long Time (insert joke here).

 

Another round of Seger jokes, I guess, but "Stranger in Town" accomplished that. It was so huge in the summer of '78.

 

Drunken Warren Zevon teaming up with Drunken REM (except Stipe) to
demolish "Raspberry Beret."
Awesome.

 

I like that version even better than the original. Zevon's voice is such raw muscle.

 

I put that in my random playlist sometimes and people say, "what the hell is that?!?"

It got a little airplay on AOR stations when it came out, but not much.

 

This is a criminally underrated record. The REM guys were a great backing band for Zevon. Killer cover of the Georgia Satellites' "Battleship Chains" to go with that awesome cover of "Raspberry beret".

 

Sticky Fingers
The Colour And The Shape
The Blue Album

 

I don't remember the exact chronology, but I think that album kinda fell between the marketing cracks: Zevon was in kind of a mid-career lull waiting for his next big hit after "Werewolves" and REM hadn't hit it mega-big yet so their management didn't really want to push a side project that didn't include Stipe.

Kinda similar, I suppose, to the whole Power Station episode except in that case, the record companies involved decided they really wanted to make a hit out of it, so they shot MTV videos and everything.

 

Television’s Marquee Moon
Violent Femmes’ first album