A friend on Facebook posted a challenge to list in no particular order 10 influential albums. Now I want to dig a little bit deeper to make that list not so random. There have been albums that influenced me for a short period of time like Michael Jackson’s Thriller (who wasn’t influenced by that in 1983) or even Dokken’s Tooth and Nail (“Straight to the tahhhhppp…”). But they were gone from my life in a few years and never had a lasting impression. Other records have stuck with me for whatever reason.

I don’t think there needs to be a good reason why these albums stuck around. Most did so because of drumming. The records that influenced my playing are ones I listed to over and over again to learn how to do all that crazy shit and stayed there. But for others it was more about the aggression or serenity I thought needed in my life. Most I will pop in and give a play still today while others set me off on a path. In organizing this little list, I am thinking about Rob Gordon (John Cusack) who in the film High Fidelity organizes his immense vinyl collection not alphabetically, nor chronologically, but autobiographically. Brilliant. So here they are with the song that hooked me on each.

Metallica – Ride the Lightning

My musical taste started with metal. The pounding intro to “Fight Fire with Fire” followed by that killer double bass groove is the real origin of my musical legacy. This was trash metal and I got hooked. With the exception of “Fade to Black” which everyone seemed to love, but I thought was full of melodramatic ennui, this is still a kick-ass album. Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeth finished out the early phase of my junior high life.

Bad Brains – Bad Brains

If I found my deep-seated need for an aggressive outlet in my youth in metal, the political core of who I am started in hardcore. DC Hardcore was always loaded with aggression and an intelligent fed-up attitude with bourgeois, Reaganized, yuppie culture from Minor Threat and Government Issue and many others who would stick around only for a few months. I was a quiet and pretty sheltered kid so music was my one means to escape a sort of rage I had inside of me. I had a fire and Bad Brains spoke to it. This album still does. I play it regularly as the greatest achievement in hardcore music by the greatest hardcore band.

Rush – Signals

That double bass groove by Lars made me curious about drumming. But that drum intro to “Digital Man” and the wicked 7/8 business of “Subdivisions” baptized my hands and feet forever. Yes, most drummers will look at Moving Pictures as that album that made them drummers. But I must have played “Digital Man” 1000 times just to learn what a drumkit was. I played it horribly to start with nothing but a pair of wooden spoons from the kitchen and some boxes I set up like a New York busker in the Jay St. station. But I got better with practice. Through the blisters, this album made a drummer and prog-rock fan out of me for life.

Primus – Frizzle Fry

It starts with that 5/4 intro to Rush’s “YYZ” on the bell of the ride. Then the groove morphs into something utterly awesome. Tim “Herb” Alexander became a new kind of drumming model for me and “Defy the Laws of Tradition” became my warm up groove for all occasions. It’s to tight, intricate, and feels so good to lay down it hurts. That changed my approach to drumming which would follow its way into Sailing the Seas of Cheese and…

Fishbone – The Reality of My Surroundings

This shit got me the real funk. Fish’s grooves kill so much on this album they stank. I got blisters playing through “So Many Millions” and “Fight the Youth.” Every song cracks with a political lightning bolt that spoke to the problems in L.A., police brutality, and the awful living conditions of black folks living in ghettos constructed with the hands of white racist policies and the movement of segregation from the enforceable laws of the state to the shady practices of property developers, real estate agents, and a fucked-up welfare system designed to keep people poor, violent, and ruled by drug lords. I saw my whiteness through this album for the first time.

Pearl Jam – 10

I became a college student and this marks when I got drunk, I mean really drunk, for the first time. “I’m Still Alive” was something I screamed before I passed out a few times. I put that on a wash/rinse/repeat cycle for a while. I can almost feel hungover when I listen to “Black” even today. Shiver. Through the trajectory of my drinking career took a sharp nosedive when I found Jesus in the form of speaking in tongues and all other manner of strange, mind-bending, pseudo-cultic activities, a few years later, I returned to my home that I found in liquid courage. But this album is like a hanging chad in my existence.

Radiohead – OK Computer

In grad school I finally left the awful prison of Christian contemporary music when I first hear the line, “In the last world war…” What is this?! If there is a perfect album to be heard in existence this is it. I was deep into questioning every damn thing about reality and the technological structures with which we have surrounded ourselves and mediate our senses of self and purpose. In comes this album that transformed and fed my internal dialogue and research mission at the time. “Pull me out of the aircrash…” Who doesn’t resonate with that feeling of being crushed like a bug by forces we cannot control. This is an album about feeling the anxiety of those forces and feeling virtually powerless to do any damn thing about it. It is precisely how I felt at a time when I was comparing my finite existence to the infinite reality of the cosmos. I felt small but burdened with purpose to figure out a means for liberation. Damn, I really was a graduate student of theology in Princeton, wasn’t I. When I heard Fear Factory’s Obsolete, I resonated on the same intellectual frequency, but there was enough anger there to solve the philosophical conundrum. Now OK Computer is just a great album.

Nine Inch Nails – The Fragile

I owed taxes and had no money. I was just rejected from the PhD. program I was “called” to. I was angry. Before that rejection I had decided that I could not be a pastor of a church, the vocation for which I was in an M.Div. program, and I was now totally confused. All that existential muck rose to the top and then this album came out. When Reznor wrote it, he was not in a happy place either. It captured both my existential misery of not knowing what to do with my life and the aggression I wanted to get out of my system. It was something I could scream to in the privacy of my own car. Through Reznor’s “void” I felt a strange comfort as he spoke about it in his lyrics. On a strange level I indeed was “Too fucked up to care anymore…” But I was still young and overthinking everything. I eventually got a scholarship and a fellowship to continue with my studies. But at the same time I felt the first kick in the gut that God was not real and that my entire education in theology was a waste of time and money. I continued with it for another year and another degree getting a job in education shortly after. But this feeling of missed opportunities, misread tea leaves, and a miseducation haunted me.

Helmet – Meantime

This was an album I had for a long time, but never appreciated it until the same year The Fragile was released. I was finding my roots in metal again. But it was Stanier’s tight grooves, high-pitched snare, and that signature stop/start pattern of Page Hamilton’s that reinvigorated my taste and returned me to my musical home for good. I find peace in the heaviness. I bought Betty in 1999 after I returned to Helmet on the old tape I had all but forgotten about. Helmet captures the best of the hardcore growl and rage with the clean and aggressive structures of metal. It’s a controlled kind of crazy. I think that’s how I saw myself emerging at this point in my life. Controlled, but inside there was something crazy. It was a little too prescient perhaps. But since I put this in again at the twilight of the 20th century, I have never really looked back and continue to find my home in the heavy.

Slowdive – Souvlaki

At some point you have kids and things are so chaotic on a normal flow, some semblance of peace is necessary. This was an album and a genre of “shoegaze” I never paid attention to until kids entered the picture. None of their stuff had been in print for a while and I had to illegally download crappy copies of it from Napster for a while. Then legal digital music happened and I got my first iPod. I bought everything of Slowdive’s starting with this album and I have been a total shoegazer for the past 11 years. While the instrumental “Missing You” kind of mesmerized me, the epic sounding swell of “When the Sun Hits” nailed me. Now I want to go back to 1992 at Reading just to be at one of their shows. That wall of sound is something wash over me in all forms of music – including the REIGHNBEAU album I am listening to right now.