I, like most people who have seen High Fidelity several times, enjoy making top 5 lists. But these lists are not static, they are subject to change. If I were to attempt a definitive, for the ages top 5 Nick's Favorite Albums of All Time list I don't know where to start. Certainly, I'd have to establish a criteria and assign points based various benchmarks. One such benchmark is Number of Times I've Purchased Said Album.
Like great books or great movies, great albums are often purchased many times. I will typically buy a few copies of something I think is wonderful and give them as gifts. Also, I often lend these albums out and never get them back. Hopefully it's because the person enjoyed it so much they want to keep it. But often, I fear, I lend these records to people I hope will enjoy it but in fact they never even play it and it gets lost (see previous entry). Ultimately, after some time has passed, I will have an overwhelming need to hear this album again. So a definitive top 5 list will have several factors, and one of which is certainly number of times purchased.
September 11, 2001, couldn't have happened at a better time in my life. I was 21, working at a camera store, living on my own for the first time, and attempting to play in a band. When I was in my most formative age, America became one for an all too brief period. Suddenly everything meant more, which is to say everything meant what it rightfully should have but up to and including September 10th everything meant less. Nobody stopped to ponder the importance of a sunny day, or hearing a great song for the first time, or The National Anthem, or the beer garden at Oktoberfest.
September 11, 2001, came at a great time for Ryan Adams too. The former Whiskeytown front man had the good fortune of filming a video for his most feel-good radio-ready single to date on September 7th, right in front of the Twin Towers. The song was called New York, New York. It received heavy rotation on MTV (yeah they used to play videos) and Ryan subsequently performed it that winter on Saturday Night Live. Back then, people watched MTV and SNL. I saw that episode of SNL and Ryan and his band really struck a chord with me. The next day, on my lunch break from the camera shop, I was doing what I did on every lunch break- thumbing through every album in the record store. I saw the Ryan Adams album, it was on sale and it came with a 4 track bonus disc. I bought it.
I loved this album so much I lent it to Brian Bergstrom, whom I'd been friends and bandmates with for about a year at that point. Brian didn't love it at first, but he put it in his CD player in his bedroom and played it every night as he fell asleep. This was a whole new sound for both of us. Alt-country. Music by guys only a few years older than us. They had grown up listening to punk rock, but they had also grown up in the South and were thus surrounded by pedal steel guitars and banjos. These were songwriters who had all the angst and anger of someone growing up in the 80s, but also had the musical chops to craft songs with more than just three distorted chords, smashing drums, and bad vocals. Suddenly a genre of music we didn't even know existed a few months prior was changing our lives. Suddenly it made perfect sense to call the girl I knew who played viola and see if she'd like to come jam with us. But this particular blog post is not about that album.
This is about Whiskeytown's masterpiece / obituary, Pneumonia. I just bought this album today for what has to be the 8th time. I was sitting in a Starbucks and Sit and Listen to the Rain came on. Funny how Starbucks is one of the last remaining bastions of good music. Anyhow, since I had lent out my last copy a few years ago, it'd been a long time since I'd heard this song. Suddenly I needed to once again own Pneumonia. Thank God record stores still exist, because this album is far too beautiful to listen to in mp3 form. It was recorded to tape, without computers and patches and autotune. This album sounds like Pet Sounds, but with better lyrics. Horns, mandolins, mallet instruments, lush harmonies, it's got everything and everything fits perfectly. It took U2 five attempts to make The Joshua Tree, but Whiskeytown had done it in three.
In a parallel universe, Whiskeytown hands the finished record to the label, the label believes in it and puts a bunch of promotion behind it, and Whiskeytown fulfill their destiny by becoming the Next Great Band. But in this universe, they finish the album and before it can be released the label folds. The big money is in boy bands, this is 1998 and there's no profit to be made from great songs with real meaning played by musicians. The album rots in a vault somewhere, the band breaks up, and Ryan launches a solo career. Eventually, in 2001, Ryan's new label will release it. But with the band no longer in existence there is no promotion. What few copies it does sell are to pre-existing Whiskeytown fans (of which there weren't enough to keep the whole machine in business in the first place) and to new Ryan fans like me with a suddenly insatiable appetite for more Ryan.
The redeeming value of this universe is that record stores do still exist and that as recently as 10 years ago, record labels still believed in good music enough to pay people to make it and then to press enough copies that the music will always be available. It's not on the rack at Walmart, but if you look you can find it. As recently as 10 years ago, corporations still believed in art enough to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to put enough copies of it out into the world so that someday, someone making a mix tape for Starbucks could find it.
The best part about great albums is that you listen to them a lot when you first get them. You listen so much that they become the soundtrack for that particular time in your life. You will, no doubt, move on to other albums. And likewise, you will move on to other stations in life. But great albums never disappear forever. And when they suddenly pop back into your head and then into your CD player, you are transported back to that place in time.
Today I am remembering the time when new doors were opened, when lifelong friendships were forged. I was 21, living on my own for the first time, and trying to play in a band. Brian and I, for the first time, had an artist we were both passionate about. Melissa and her viola came along. She and Brian got married. I auditioned for a group that sounded like Whiskeytown (sort of) and I got the gig.
