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Stereo Steve's Autobiographical Song List
by stereo steve
I was born feb 18 1965. For most of my childhood I had no friends and most of what 'normal' kids liked I found pretty boring. Instead my head was full of idiot savant-like music trivia. The following list is one song for each year of my life with brief comments:
1. righteous brothers - you've lost that lovin' feeling
[playing in the car while fresh outta the womb yours truly was being taken home - allegedly made me stop crying]
2. henry mancini - baby elephant walk
[age 2 learning to walk - sure, why not - hatari soundtrack is great!]
3. paul mauriat - love is blue
[I have some kind of scary childhood memory related to hearing that song on a car tape player I think cuz when I was seven that song would trigger something when I heard it]
4. elvis presley - hound dog
[I had a little toy record player and my parents old elvis 45s by this point]
5. ccr - lodi
[song reminds me of age 5 when my brother was born]
6. kinks - rats
[b-side of APEMAN 45 I had - very angry dave davies tune!]
7. thelonius monk - blue monk
[found a bunch of jazz records in the garage - ruined most of them - liked jack mcduff and monk right away - found the complexity of john coltrane intriguing]
8. hot butter - popcorn
[heard it on a commercial for ktel's 22 explosive hits - asked for it for christmas]
9. wings - band on the run
[did I mention I liked the beatles? I used to listen to the radio all day waiting for this song to come on. this one and 'radar love']
10. carl douglas - kung fu fighting
[to commemorate my failed attempt to take karate lessons and the lost art of 70's am car radio sing along tunes]
11. Dickie Goodman - Mr. Jaws
[probably the first time I heard what is now known as 'sampling'. basically a comedy skit with questions from the interviewer and answers from songs, e.g. "Q: what will you do when you see the giant shark? A: Do the hustle!"
12. Meco - Star Wars disco theme
[star wars was the first time I had ever heard of anyone seeing a movie more than once. I saw it three times - most of my peers saw it dozens of times!]
13. Electric Light Orchestra - Ocean Breakup/King of the Universe
[when yr 13 and haven't heard DARK SIDE OF THE MOON yet, ELO sounds pretty good. I decided to pick an obscure one instead of 'Turn to Stone'.]
14. Van Halen - Eruption/You Really Got Me
[yeah, time has rendered them buffoons but back in the day after two years of nothing on the radio but disco and songs from GREASE, this felt like a breath of fresh air]
15. Barnes and Barnes - Fish Heads
[the Dr Demento radio show was very therapeutic in the days of raging hormones and reagonomics, if not always PC. Billy Mumy from LOST IN SPACE was responsible for this song I learned years later.]
16. Jeff Beck with the Jan Hammer Group - Darkness [earth in search of a sun]
[Starting to branch out a little - older kids in high school turned me on to this record, I was discovering punk/new wave, the velvet underground, and 70's prog all at the same time. I was hard pressed to find people who agreed with all my musical chioces at any given time in the early 80's]
17. New Order - Ceremony
[The original 12" with the green cover just leaped out of the stereo when I was 17 in a way that no subsequent digital version ever has. Written by Ian Curtis, recorded by the rest of the band after his death. That's respect.]
18. REM - Sitting Still
[they seemed pretty profound when you couldn't understand what they were saying, heheh. Best live show of Summer '83, or at least I thought so at the time]
19. Charlie Parker - Ko Ko
[one of his greatest performances - heard this in a jazz class first year of college - no less brilliant now after hearing it thousands of times.]
20. Subhumans - Where's the freedom?
[question on everyone's mind in 1985. I was a broadcasting student struggling to express myself. Sun Ra's NUCLEAR WAR would be a good one for this year, too.]
21. Flaming Lips - Jesus Shooting Heroin
[from HEAR IT IS. I remember seeing some blurb I wrote about this struggling oklahoma band in some zine reprinted in one of their press kits - shouldn't have lost it.]
22. Sonic Youth - Schizophrenia
[best live show of 1987 - they did a bunch of ramones covers for encore! - the SISTER album and a demo tape from a Santa Cruz band called RAINING HOUSE got me through that insane year. The fact that my idiotic band could never be as good as those should have been a warning sign to quit while I was ahead]
23. Hawkwind - you know you're only dreaming
[found a nice copy of IN SEARCH OF SPACE for a buck on haight street. Reminds me of the beginning weeks of my first real relationship cuz I put it on a mix tape.]
24. CAN - future days
[I discovered can's EGE BAMYASI when I was 16 and one of my jerk-ass new wave pseudo-friends gave me a lot of schidt for listening to "that heroin-rock hippie crap", kinda ironic that asshole loved the buzzcocks and pete shelley was quoted as saying "I never would have played guitar if not for... can". Ha ha, now they get the respect they deserve! This album was the soundtrack for what was probably my best and least paranoia-ridden psychedelic experience]
25. LOOP - Sunburst
[worst live show ever - worst psychelic experience ever - except for when they opened with this song, brilliant shifts in clear light so loud I'd be able to see it even without drugs - I Beam security guy chased me across the whole place cuz he thought I was trying to steal their wah wah pedal. Jerk!]
26. WINDOWPAIN INDUSTRIES - Owls and Blind Wolves
[for 1991 one of my own compositions - the five year struggle to get enough money to release this on vinyl began in this year, along with peaks of joy and sorrow never paralleled - I still have many unsold copies - ask me!]
27. ORB - a huge ever growing pulsating brain that rules from the centre of the ultraworld
[besides the rise and fall of grunge, the early 90's were great years for electronic music cuz it was still pretty much under the radar]
28.Vampires Sound Incorporated - The Lion and the Cucumber
[from the Vampiros Lesbos soundtrack - the fuzz guitar and monster growling sounded great blasting out of noc noc.]
29. Future Sound of London - Smokin' Japanese Babe
[see comments on 27 - great bass line]
30. Hell Preachers Inc. - Spy in Space
[rare exploitation psych record I found at a swap. I was selling a lot of stuff at record fairs this year and the one I got this record from was especially memorable for a hellish van breakdown on the way back. For a long time there was a rumor that Richie Blackmore played on the Hell Preachers record because the first song is a ripoff of Deep Purple's 'wring that neck', but songs like 'spy in space' are just too damn wierd. I think it's a bunch of German studio musicians.
31. Radiohead - Nice Dream
[coulda been Led Zeppelin 'that's the way' to commemorate a doomed relationship from '96 or it coulda been something a little more indie cuz this is the year I returned to KUSF full time, but this song sums up the mood of that year the most accurately in retrospect.]
32. Olivia Tremor Control - Green Typewriters
[finally after all these years a neo psych band from Athens GA gets it right!!! I was a bit disappointed when I played them for a brit friend of mine who said, "What's with the fake English accents? Blur is much better!"]
33. Food Brain - Liver Juice Vending Machine
[I almost never travel anywhere but in the year 1998, when not one but two friends of mine committed suicide and others I thought were my friends were playing horribly disrespectful mind games with me, I had to get out of the city and I stayed with some friends in Portland OR for a few weeks. At a cool little store called JACKPOT RECORDS I found a bootleg of this amazing japanese prog-psych supergroup. Just phenomenal rockin'! I recently saw an original for $600 on ebay]
34. Jimi Hendrix - Pali Gap
[from RAINBOW BRIDGE. Beautiful instrumental. Ran through my head while I sat on a sand dune and watched the sunset and little dots of my friends running on the beach]
35. West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band - Child's Guide to Good and Evil
[LA 60's psych from a band that spent their entire short career fighting over whether to sound like the byrds or zappa. "The rest of the world is wrong, don't let anyone change you" became like a mantra for me in 2000.]
36. Wesley Willis - Suck a Caribou's Ass
[in 2001 the momentum from the last five years was really rolling. People were meaner, more selfish, and more flaky than ever! that is, until the wake-up call on September 11th. As more and more frustrations mounted I'd think to myself, "How would Wesley Willis deal with this?", and listen to that song, 'they threw me out of church', or 'I whipped Batman's ass' as affirmations of triumph over oppression.
37. Beast - When we rise
[entering the 21st century I bought this record off the internet, not from ebay but from someone who was in the band www.bobyeazel.com. I knew that since this guy was in Sugarloaf and West Coast Pop Art, there'd be at least one perfect song on here and 'when we rise' was it!
38. Stark Reality - Junkman's Song
[I think this reissue and radiohead's 'hail to the thief' will be the music that reminds me of 2003 in the future]
so there you have it. and no I wasn't listening to "too much time on my hands" while compiling it.
peace out.
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