10 Childhood favourite tracks!

[Zzzptm]

Just realized I got two songs to go and two years to go, when I was 15 and 16 in 1983 and 1984. Working out nicely!

[Vyn]

Going backwards a few years. I bought this 45 when it came out and played it all the time.

I loathe this song now. In fact, when I went looking for a YouTube video of it, I played the first few seconds just to make sure it was the real thing then I stopped it. I can't even listen to it nowadays. For as much as I was enthralled by its atmosphere, and ethereal-like wistfulness, at some point its overwhelming sappiness did me in. I clearly recall my parents hosting a bunch of people prior to heading out for the Bicentennial celebration in 1976, and I gathered up the handful of records I owned, to toss on the pile of records getting played on the stereo. And I looked at that Terry Jacks 45 and said to myself, "Hell no".

But for a year or two, it was my number one fave:

[KiloDeltaCharlie]

^^^
That was a big number 1 in the UK around 1974(?), and even to my young ears it sounded corny and cheesey. We did have fun at school re-working the lyrics in humorous ways.

SBS is my favourite song off my favourite album. It first came to my attention when I was 15 around the same time that the re-issue of Paranoid and Neon Knights were charting... that was a transformative period for me.
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My Pick #8

The Damned - Love Song

This song from early 1979 was my introduction to The Damned (although I later realised I knew a couple of their earlier songs). Still one of my 5 favourite bands.

[Charger]

My Number 9 is from a childhood favourite tv show!

Frankly there were a lot of cartoons with great themes. Biker Mice From Mars, Pinky And The Brain and ofcourse Looney Toones that I watched but Ducktales I think was the all around favourite.


And this was still a time they did NOT dub these things so I was treated with the original not the idiotic finnish version that was later shown in the late 90s.

[Vyn]

^^^
That was a big number 1 in the UK around 1974(?), and even to my young ears it sounded corny and cheesey. We did have fun at school re-working the lyrics in humorous ways.

...

This song from early 1979 was my introduction to The Damned (although I later realised I knew a couple of their earlier songs). Still one of my 5 favourite bands.

Mocking Seasons in the Sun must have been a universal activity, we did the same thing. Used to bug me when my friends would get into it. I mean, how could anyone possibly make fun of such a deep, introspective work of art? It hurt, man. It was painful. Somehow, I battled through the anguish and came up with a couple of good ones myself

Love The Damned - here's the first one that caught my ear back in the day:

[KiloDeltaCharlie]

^^^
Yes, New Rose was one that I was aware of but couldn't at that time have told who it was by.

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Pick Number 9

The Jam - Going Underground

I think when this came out in the first half of 1980 The Jam were still my favourite band. I was aware of Black Sabbath at this point but it would take a few months before they steamrollered everyone else out the way!

Going Underground was their first (of 4) number 1 singles in the UK. It was the first single in 6 years to debut at No. 1, that's why I chose this over the marginally superior Down in the Tube Station at Midnight from a couple of years earlier. I still remember listening to the chart rundown, and thinking "Where's the new Jam song? We're nearly at the No. 1 spot! Did it not chart at all?!" I really wasn't expecting it to debut at No. 1... it was special in those days... these days it happens every week!

And now one for Zs to recognise the reference!

[Vyn]

I guess my musical taste was starting to gel mid-late 70's. I was into punk before I got into hard rock/metal full time, but my tastes were all over the board for a while. Sabbath had been a big name in my musical world since hearing Paranoid a few years prior to learning about Thin Lizzy. But when "The Boys Are Back in Town" came out, I was all over it. I really liked this song, and jammed to it every chance I could. Sadly, wasn't able to buy the album (the case with most of what I was digging) since I was a broke ass kid, and when I managed to save up enough odd-chore money, hard decisions had to be made lol

[Charger]

My final pick is going to be the one that changed my musical direction once and for all.
Old story so no need to go to much detail here but I was in the 8th grade and walked into a second hand music shop we had in town and saw the cover of this album and was totally blown away by the sheer awesomeness of it. Never had I heard about the band before but the album art just looked so damn amazing that I had to buy it....and I was hooked for life.

The album was ofcourse DEHUMANIZER by BLACK SABBATH and the first song on that album is COMPUTER GOD!

[Vyn]

It's interesting to look over the selections we've posted and realize that though our musical paths have differed to varying degrees, there are still touchstones of familiarity across time.

Of course, Mr. Z could blow my thesis out of the water with his last two selections

[Zzzptm]

My more surprising directions start up after I turn 18. Most of my junior high/high school years were a period of consolidation, as it were.

After getting all the albums from the Heavy Three - Zep, Purp, and Sabs, I was branching out into other bands like Grand Funk, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Uriah Heep... research was done by reading about them in rock almanacs and illustrated encyclopedias of rock and stuff like that. But those books only covered the really big names, mostly in the USA. Acts that were bigger in Europe or the UK than they were in the USA, I didn't have much to go on.

What I *did* have were used records at the ol' Half-Price Books & Records. I could look at the covers and read the lineups and make judgements based on the art. I had gotten burned with Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell - great cover, good names in the band, material TOTALLY not what was advertised. But, I pressed on.

And I got these two gems that I played over and over and over again. I got these with that method and I feel greatly rewarded, as I still love 'em today:

Those opening lines of Rainbow's Tarot Woman and Rory Gallagher's Shin Kicker got me sold on those albums and on exploring more music based on where the musicians and the history led me.

Ten years later, I got the Internet and that made doing research that much easier. But in the intervening timespan, looking at those covers could tell me so much. It's how I got into Mountain, Motorhead, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth, loads of good bands.

[KiloDeltaCharlie]

My final pick

The Stranglers - Walk on By

A cover from 1978 of the Motown classic originally by Dionne Warwick, but done very much in their style, I defy you to find much "Motown" in this song, although there is a definite 60s feel to the lengthy instrumental section.

[Charger]

Quite a variety of stuff here.

I took a concious choice not to include stuff after I got into metal when I was 15 part from the track that launched it all.

Bunch of great songs got left out...and theme songs and such that could have been included.

[Zzzptm]

But keeping it to pivotal tracks made me think hard about what guided my direction. I liked this exercise.

I'd like to investigate the explorations of our 20s, should be interesting fun. What did we get curious about, whether or not we liked what we found.

[KiloDeltaCharlie]

20s? Hmm! That's 1985-1995 for me, I'd need to think about it, but at first I'm not sure my tastes changed much in that time... but I can think of a couple of acts, but also it excludes 16-20 years where a lot of changes happened. Hmm

[Zzzptm]

Mine were 1988-1998 (I seem to be 3 years your junior, KDC!) and I got very exploratory after about 1990. Happy to toss in post-16, make it a long decade of young adulthood.