The Record That Changed My Life Chuck Berry -- Chuck Berry's Golden Decade 1955-1965 There was a time when it seemed Rock & Roll could only be played the way Chuck Berry played it. Regardless of w  

The Who, "I Can See For Miles" When I was 12, my oldest sister left home for college and I gained access to her large bedroom to make room for my first band to practice in. My friend Steve Alberti  

The Record That Changed My Life - SPK -- "Slogun" I was 14 years old in a college town in Michigan, hanging out in the dirty, smelly one-room apartment of a clinically insane friend, with a Si  

Jimi Hendrix -- Electric Ladyland Since I own around 10,000 records, CDs and cassettes (yes, I know I have a problem), picking the record that changed my life is not an easy task. Was it my paren  

The Kinks, The Kinks' Greatest Hits The year was 1964, and I was a scant 5 years old. The Beatles had conquered our universe. My elder brothers and I drew facsimiles of guitar strings on wooden b  

Weather Report, Night Passages September 1997 was wrapping up and I was sitting in Sudsy Malone's on a Saturday afternoon drinking cheap beer, when a friend asked me if I was sad because Jaco P  

The Record That Changed My Life Soundgarden -- Superunknown The arrangements are deceptively complex and airtight; Kim Thayil invents notes that had not previously existed on this planet; Ben  

Crowded House, Woodface In the early '90s I was detoxing from years of writing long, aggressive Prog Rock that celebrated weird time signatures and alienated Sudsy's audiences night after nigh  

Tiny Tim, God Bless Tiny Tim and Lil' Kim, Hardcore I was 11 and I got it at Mole's on Short Vine. It was water damaged and had a picture of Tiny Tim with his ukulele on top of a mountain of fl  

Gang of Four -- Entertainment! A confession: I mostly hated the popular music of the '70s. With no interest in hand-me-down Rock & Roll, Punk had a magnetic attraction. But shock appeal wanes. S  

Dead Kennedys -- Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables The album Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by the Dead Kennedys was introduced to me in fourth grade. It was one side of an Elvis Costello t  

Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV It was 1985 and I listened to a lot of Top 40 until Mr. Bowden's Summit Country Day class covered a section on Rock & Roll. With one headphone run of "Hey, hey, m  

Wendy Carlos, Switched on Bach; and Howard Jones, Human's Lib There are really two albums that set me on my way to making music. The first is Switched on Bach, the 1968 album by Wendy Carlos. T  

K's Choice ­ Paradise in Me For me, there have been many crucial turning points in music that made me not just "listen" to music anymore but made me feel that I'd become more a part of   

Sonic Youth -- Sister The screaming feedback. The elbowed guitars. The tight drumming. The pounding bass guitar. The brash vocals. The detestation in the lyrics. The utter disregard of semblance