Top Ten CDs I Pulled Off My Parents' Shelf (Part Two )

Wilco--Being There

In case the existence of this list doesn't make it clear: I get along well with my parents. The worst arguments I've ever had with my mom have been about homework, and I can't remember ever fighting with my dad. I never hit a rebellious patch, or even a mildly dysfunctional one, and so I never felt the inclination to break away from their tastes. Indeed, by the age of twelve, I'd more or less adopted a microcosm of their own preferences. This wasn't conscious imitation so much as an assumption that their predilections were correct. They did know everything, after all.

My mom largely taught me books and some basic politics; I learned music from my dad, a Deadhead.

My father likes roughed-up, rambling folk/country with emphasis on live performance and exemplary turns of phrase. And so did I.

Yet in the face of overwhelming logic, my father did not like Wilco. And so neither did I. (Naturally, I had never listened to them.)

But there it was, on the bottom shelf, far to the right: a frayed cardboard case with two CDs tucked in wherever there was room. I assume my dad bought Being There after hearing the band's name mentioned for the 1000th time in his corner of the world; he probably gave it a couple of tries and filed it away. So I don't know how our copy got so beat up. Maybe he bought it used. Maybe I'm giving him too little credit, and he rode around with it for weeks before giving up with iron certainty. Or maybe, as I now half believe, Being There is one of those records that is always beat up, never pristine, never new, old as roadside dust the day it first shuffled and moaned its way into the world.

As with PJ Harvey's Rid Of Me, I don't remember actually listening to Being There for the first time. I put it on only to confirm what I already knew, that my father was right to reject this band. So I couldn't have given it much of a chance. And Wilco, true to form, doesn't make it easy for the listener expecting easy-listening Americana. It opens with a swarm of creaking, distorted drums that even now, with the weirder parts of A Ghost Is Born long under my belt, crawl and stumble and tingle their way through my ears. It must've scared the shit out of me back then, even as it validated my inherited opinion.

And that was it, for a while--nothing shuts a door like having a negative perception upheld.

But I did listen to it again. I did so at the end of a period of musical soul-searching, a reappraisal of works I'd dismissed on first listen. The culmination came with Television's Marquee Moon, which I'd initially shrugged off (don't ask me how) as overrated tripe, only to timidly return a month or so later to be flabbergasted by what remains one of the most inventive and rewarding guitar albums ever made. So my ego was quite firmly in check by the time I came back to Being There, but this was different. This wasn't a case of me being wrong, it was my father being wrong, and while our tastes had certainly begun to diverge by then, I don't recall that we'd yet expressed wildly differing opinions on a given piece of music.

But we did this time. My dad has said that it's Wilco's use of distortion that leaves him cold, but that opening blast on Being There struck me at the perfect angle the second time around. I'd given lip service to noise before, not wanting to seem narrow-minded, but I never really understood it until "Misunderstood", Being There's first and greatest track. And then, just as I was following along with the primal groove buried in that crackling thrump, it flipped itself inside out. It became a piano note, an acoustic guitar chord played underneath it, and a voice recognizeable as belonging to a man at the end of his twenties, yet cracked and sore with age. The lyrics Jeff Tweedy sung with that voice seem so trite on paper, but he was not yet reaching for the impressionistic poetry found on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. At this early stage in Wilco's career, still shaky in the shadow of Uncle Tupelo, all Tweedy dared reach for were quiet, solitary, sorry moments, captured and starkly defined. The word and title 'misunderstood': a hopeless cliche that nevertheless composes so many of those moments. All the pretense needed to worry about cliche is stripped away: when Tweedy asks us "Do you still love rock and roll?", it's not a generational comment on the state of music in 1996. It's an honest question. And then two minutes later, the band explodes, removing all doubt as to the answer.

As with its cousin Great American Albums, Modest Mouse's The Lonesome Crowded West and the Silver Jews' American Water, Being There's opening track is so transportive that takes forever to listen past it. When I finally did, I found a treasure trove of unshakeable grooves, beautiful, rough instrumentation, and yet more perfect-crash sounds.

The first night I spent at Oberlin College, I spent in the lobby of African Heritage House, with my backpack as a pillow. Out of my pillow, I slipped my iPod. I listened to "Misunderstood", put it away, and went to sleep.

So, Dad, I love this album. Consider it my adolescent defiance, this...roughed-up, rambling, folk/country record.

I was never any good at rebelling.


Led Zeppelin--III

1, the Beatles single compilation, came out when I was eleven and knew little music. My parents have never been the biggest Beatles fans, but like millions of others, they bought 1 to give to their kids. And I, of course, devoured it whole.

My savvy parents knew a springboard when they heard one, and as I began to understand the songs on 1 as an era's ambassadors as well as fantastic slices of pop, they began to introduce me to the other classic rock monoliths scattered throughout their collection. You have your own version of the next part of the story: the hours spent inside Dark Side of the Moon, the first listen to "Baba O'Reilly" with heart rising and muscles clenched, the endless poring over the lyrics of "Tangled Up in Blue", long after the song had ended.

But my parents were and are devoted folkies, and their collection was largely devoid of the crunchier, proto-metal members of the Boomer canon: no Cream, no Stones, no Hendrix, certainly no Black Sabbath.

And no Led Zeppelin. Well, almost none.
They had this one, and my parents handed it to me with a glimpse into themselves: this was the first CD they had ever purchased. It sounds like an absurd exaggeration, but I look upon it as a peer; like me, it's a tangible part of the marriage they've built. Driven, I put it on.

At first, I just hit repeat on "Immigrant Song". Can you blame me? It's still all I ever wanted out of the hoary old Spinal Tap era: an endless slashing riff, rollicking drums, lyrics sung drunk on their own epic-ness, and those goddamned kickass Viking shrieks. Best of all, it's under three minutes--I can never get bored nor tired of it.
That last quality is what separates and raises "Immigrant Song" above most other established Zep classics, but sonically and thematically, it's still exactly what a newcomer to the band would expect. They had stayed in their corner, as far as I was concerned.

Then I flipped the case around, to stare intently at its faded back cover. The other song titles were a mix of what I already knew was standard Zep-speak ("Since I've Been Loving You", come on) and more intriguing vagueries ("That's the Way"...?) My eyes fell and hit track seven. "Tangerine." Some ghost stirred itself in the rear of my memory. I skipped ahead to it.

An opening couple of notes, a false start. For all the supposed roughness and looseness of bloozy old blues bands, the biggest of them sound depressingly professional and smoothed out in retrospect. Led Zeppelin III was released in 1970, at the dawn of an decade that would see most of rock's creases smoothed out, resulting in the clean-burning machine that made punk and DIY indie as necessary as they were inevitable. Zeppelin was certainly one of the largest cogs in that stagnant, edgeless behemoth, even if their collective muscle was often enough to outweigh their increasingly flatline identity. But on III, they were still peaks and valleys, young and human and bursting with talent, with some of the world still to conquer. A ghost in the machine, if you will.

That's there in the bum notes and whispered count-off that starts "Tangerine", and then the song starts. Its acoustic melody would be heartbreaking if played through a hulking Marshall stack, but its true loveliness is in its fragility, the sense that Jimmy Page, the most relentlessly skilled guitarist of his generation, is barely able to pull it off. The same goes for Robert Plant, who sings like his eternally beautiful voice is but a cruel mockery of success, adding insult to the injury that throbs throughout the song. The chorus is both astonishingly soft and ready to collapse into tearful chaos at any second. It ends with an electric guitar solo, but it's unexpected rather than awkward, and its circling, impressionist tones fits the song perfectly. I listened to all of this, spellbound and with a growing certainty that I'd heard it before. There is no sensation quite like that of listening to what you think is a new song only to find that you know it, that a brittle hook is still clinging to your mind from a chance listen years before. As it turns out, my mom cherishes "Tangerine" like few other songs, and played it frequently throughout my childhood. Any other Zeppelin album would have bludgeoned its way into my memory, leaving an unambiguous footprint behind. To continue the theme, III and "Tangerine" left a ghost.

The rest of the album follows different but equally fantastic and strange veins of sound. The creepy, cathartic blur of "Gallows Pole" and its opposite cousin, the gleeful, thoughtful "Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp", got me closer to the ravaged, frantic but numbed heart of the blues more than anything before or since. Even better is "That's the Way", gorgeous guitar and the band's most introspective, searching lyrics; it's perhaps the most subtle Zeppelin song, and while I love their straight ahead shit-kickers as much as anyone, it's worth listening to them sketch out a message rather than stamp it into you.

III is a scattered, decentralized record and is all the better for it, but there is a mission statement, and it's "Friends". Another beautifully shaky beginning, and then Page steps in, both keeping and taking time, his guitar none the less cutting and gripping for being acoustic. Plant comes from out of nowhere, his Olympus wail never further from self-parody, singing words that sound like "Stairway to Heaven"'s pagan poetry taken apart and fed through a genuine, freaked out exile. The horizon-spanning strings are content to linger in the background, filling in the spaces and growing steadily instead of bursting awkwardly, until by the end, they are simply all that is left.

Of course, even the most atypical songs here are recognizeably Zeppelin--Robert Plant's vocal range is wider than ever, but he is still unmistakeable, and John Bonham still torrents up whirlwinds when given the chance. And there's still "Since I've Been Loving You", the album's unavoidable tribute to slow-burning, jam-oriented blues epics. But "Since" is easily the freshest and most fascinating of those monoliths, and stands on its own rather than trying to overwhelm and dominate the rest of the album. Rather than hinge all on a tortuously slow build, or bring focus to bear on technically impressive but uninteresting virtuosity, Zeppelin takes the opportunity of a broad canvas to explore and linger on the elements of their unmatchable interplay. I remember the song for a particular shade of guitar or isolated skitter of snare, not for any bloated whole. It's a careful, skillful, and utterly fantastic balance that the band would rarely find again, and they eventually stopped trying.

It's been nearly forty years, and III is the one pedestal of the Led Zeppelin legacy whose reputation has yet to be permanently shackled down. Even its adherents struggle to describe it, because its strange, hushed pockets of blues and folk could have been made by no other band, yet it sounds like nothing else in their mercilessly exposed discography. Unlike virtually all of its more canonized peers, it hasn't aged a day, and even though it carries for me the golden-hued image of my young parents huddling close to listen to it, I listen to it nostalgia-free.