For the Record Top 10: #5 (halfway there, folks!)

The Replacements Boink!! EP (1986)

Just as kids can’t believe their parents may once have been cool teenagers, I can barely fathom a time when I did not know and love The Replacements; however, before pulling this obscure cassette from the stacks at Tu Trax record shop, the fabled quartet was wholly unknown to me. Pre-Internet there were a precious few ways for smalltown-me to discover new bands: 1) friend recommendations and 2) cover art. Boink!! was a gamble. The band name had potential--who but a truly clever punk band would name themselves after something that substitutes for something else? The cover seemed promising--a sepia image of scrappy-looking nobodys loitering in a dank alley. Then there was the record label: Glass, Linburn House, London. That’s right, I thought The Replacements were a British band.  Popping the cassette into the deck of my car, I was hooked immediately. This band was exactly what I had hoped for: raw, melodic, restless, dirty. The bullhorn intro to “Kids Don’t Follow” made me love them even more: “Helloooo, this is the Minneapolis police, the party is over!” These guys weren’t Brits, they were Midwestern cousins from the Twin Cities.

For the Record Top 10: #4

The Jimi Hendrix Experience Axis: Bold As Love (1967)

I was born on the day Jimi Hendrix died: September 18, 1970. Perhaps this explains my deep connection to Hendrix’s music. (Too bad I couldn’t have gleaned more guitar skills as our life forces slipped past other that day.) He was an odd interjection in my musical world. My older brother wasn’t into Jimi, nor, in fact, any of the other bands I would eventually embrace as my own. My dad is a bluegrass nut, and Mom loved Barry Manilow, mostly while she ironed.  Certainly the posters, T-shirts and other paraphernalia I ogled at Trucker’s Union on Water Street in Eau Claire (a nearby college town) were an influence. Axis’s cover was intriguing when I pulled it from the shelf at Tu Trax (also on Water Street), but what really tripped me out was the music: swirling, screeching wah guitars, irresistible grooves, and Jimi’s laissez faire vocals. Hendrix became the soundtrack for summer; in fact, anytime I play Jimi, especially Axis: Bold As Love, I am zapped back to the municipal tennis courts playing against my buddy Andy with “Spanish Castle Magic” blaring from the speakers of my car.