Musical note to Larry
Posted By BillHeise on March 1, 2009
This note began as my long answer to my friend Larry. It was too long to fit in a Facebook note, so I decided to post it here. It was intended to explain my logic in my choice of “15 Albums that Changed Your Life.” I actually believe that only one album—the first on my list of fifteen (Béla Fleck’s The Bluegrass Sessions: Tales from the Acoustic Planet Vol. II)—has changed my life in any considerable way.
I wanted to explain this to Larry, because music was an important part of his life in high school. But as for me, I was a musical follower. My father, like many fathers in the 1960s, hated rock ‘n roll. He was a jazz fanatic, and he steered me away from rock and roll. As a result, at the point when I met Larry in eighth-grade, my favorite album was probably Glen Campbell Live. (Still available).
This used to make Larry apoplectic. He was a passionate follower of the Who. My other friend, Charlie, was a passionate devotee of the Beatles. So I was constantly being asked my opinion on questions like “Which song is better: the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” or the Who’s “A Quick One.”
Neither of those groups made it into my top 10 most important albums. In fact, only two albums made it onto my list from high school. The Scorpions’ Tokyo Tapes and Led Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin was an important part of my 1970s adolescence, but it was something that Larry introduced me to when he took me to see The Song Remains the Same. I didn’t know that Led Zeppelin was a group, and not lead singer Robert Plant; so I went to church the next day and announced that I thought the movie was good but that Led didn’t have many parts.
I don’t believe I ever lived that down.
My feeling is that most people who answer the question by thinking of themselves in terms of where they were when they heard these important albums. They are markers in people’s lives. This is why I think most of my friends on Facebook answered with albums that they listened to in high school. High school is an important point in a person’s developmental life. But I had not been especially engaged in music myself at that age; I took the challenge a little differently.
The fact is that I did not discover this sort of music I like until I was out of graduate school. I’d been flipping through the channels in 1999 and I happened upon Béla Fleck on Austin City Limits playing “Spanish Point.” (Still my favorite song.) I decided that I would pick up a copy of that album the next day. I was 37 years old.
That album really did change my life for a few years. I was fascinated by the range that he was able to get out of the normally tinny banjo. Investigating further, I found that
Béla Fleck has been nominated in more categories than any other musician in Grammy history.
I couldn’t believe it. A banjo player? A banjo player!!??
This led me into the only music mania I’ve ever experienced in my life. I bought all of the Flecktones albums and as many of the solo Béla works as I could find. Took me a couple years to work through all of Béla’s catalog.
When I posted my list of the most influential albums of my lifetime, I could’ve filled it up with the works of Béla Fleck alone. Here’s how that would have looked:
Bluegrass
1. Drive
2. The Bluegrass Sessions: Tales from the Acoustic Planet Vol. II
3. Natural Bridge
New Grass (Acoustic bluegrass)
4. Tales from the Acoustic Planet
5. Deviation
Jazz
6. Greatest Hits of the 20th Century
7. Live Art,
8. Outbound
9. Little Worlds
10. UFO Tofu
11. The Enchantment
Classical
12. Perpetual Motion
13. Béla’s Music for Two
World Music
14. Tabula Rasa
15. Tales from the Acoustic Planet, Vol. III: the Africa Sessions
I could’ve been happy citing an all-Béla catalog. After all, Béla Fleck was the only person I had ever had an interest in following. I was working at Accenture when I was going through my fascination with Béla, and there were a bunch of young people who led me to groups like Phish and String Cheese Incident. But I was really only interested in Béla.
Eventually, I got over my obsession with Béla Fleck. And, yes, my wife thinks I’m an idiot, too.
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