If you could go back in time to witness any musical moment, what moment would you want witness first hand?
For me it’s the afternoon of Tuesday August 5,1969.
Picture this: It’s nearing the end of the Summer of Love. Led Zeppelin’s debut blues- riffs had already dropped, Sly and The Family Stone were still riding high on their funk masterpiece Stand!, and The Who had released one the world’ first rock operas, Tommy.
And in terms of hits well, the Billboard Hot 100 Top 5 looked like this:
5. Jackie DeShannon – Put A Little Love In Your Heart
4. Neil Diamond – Sweet Caroline (Good Times Never Seemed So Good)
3. Tommy James and The Shondells – Crystal Blue Persuasion
2. The Rolling Stones – Honky Tonk Women
1. Zagar and Evans – In The Year 2525
It was a bombast of British invasion and Sunshine Pop with Motown still riding high on hit after hit. San Francisco, L.A., New York- those were the scenes where it was all happening, man!
But to heck with those scenes! I want to go to Ann Arbor, Michigan and into the home of some teenage kid who is alone in his bedroom. Probably the parents are not even home. He has just returned from a visit to Schoolkids Records. He secretly drops the needle on the debut album by The Stooges. In that moment his DNA is immediately altered by the opening track 1969. I want to witness that album become a defining musical moment where a person is one way before and another way shortly after and they can never go back. Those are the kinds of mind-blowing moments that for me display musics true power to evolve a person into a totally new identity.
I added all the preamble because I recently realized I almost had a musical moment VERY similar to the one I described. Had a few things gone in a different direction I could’ve ended up a VERY different person who had traveled in very different scenes. All because of one record. It is definitely a major, “What if…” in my past.
For me the setting is 1981, Long’s Drugs, small town Danville, CA. I am probably six years old. I am with my mother who is probably shopping for anything but records. But on a shelf I see an album that has on it’s cover a piano with candelabras. There is also an open window with flowing drapes and a moonlit night. I also remember there a some man on the cover but I don’t remember what they looked like except that they looked different from “normal” people. It is a night scene and it is haunting. And I vividly remember being very curious about the entire scene and drawn to what I felt was the darkness of it all. But at six all I had were Sesame Street records or whatever music my parents were playing; Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Carpenters, Kenny Loggins, Earl Klugh probably soundtracks to musicals. And my older brother was listening to Phil Collins and Earth, Wind, And Fire. Also I was not in any confident emotional presence to ask for such a thing for myself.
So I left without the physical album. But the album cover stayed with me in my mind and later while still in Elementary school I came across a coloring book of classic Hollywood Horror and again was drawn to darkness of the images, especially The Phantom Of The Opera. And it reminded me of the album cover with the candelabras and that window and piano. I am pretty sure I didn’t get the coloring book either. I always seemed to just brush with darkness and horror never actually fully committing as a kid. Being reminded of that album though frustrated me as I remembered nothing about it other than what was in my mind. And I couldn’t go into a record shop with that minimal information and NOT get mocked.
So off an on throughout my teenage years and on into my adult life I would think of that album cover and how it made me feel and how it still haunted me in my mind. And I would try to locate it just so I could finally learn what that album actually was. Was it AOR, was it piano jazz, was it a collection of love songs, was it minimal synth new wave or simple mall music versions of hit rock songs. All the other albums I knew of from that period didn’t evoke a haunting feeling. And I didn’t know if it was rock or maybe just a straight up silken soul record.
Well fast forward to 2024 and I am organizing music files and album art and I come face to face with the album cover and album that had eluded me all these years. I knew the moment I saw it THIS was the one.
It looked a bit cheesier than I remembered but still the child in me felt that haunting feeling and how it was unlike anything I has seen before in my small town Catholic background. I also recognized how badly my memory got it all wrong. There was no piano at all, no curtains, and no moonlit night. But there was a candelabra!
I’ll take more about the album art in a bit. But here we are over 40 years later and I finally listened to the album six year old me really wanted but was too afraid to ask for. An album that had I acquired it at age six I am CERTAIN would have altered my DNA and sent me down a totally different musical path than the one I took. So this is a review of that album and maybe a little context about where I did end up going musically.
Coincidentally this album is also part of my vertical album tasting series so let’s start with the haiku review from my series of reviews:
1981: Ozzy Osbourne – Diary Of A Madman
No one song stands out.
Still, it’s totally epic.
Best results, play loud.
Also I am writing this on the occasion of Ozzy’s 76th birthday.
I have listened to this album two times already. But now I am listening while considering a proper review. The album wastes no time setting the tone. Opening with drum rolls that sound like machine gun fire. And while I think about what to write the music’s energy says my time would be better spent cleaning the apartment and rocking out. So that’s what I did. And I can say now being the near the end of the album, it definitely kicks ass. In today’s world metalheads would call it more hard rock than metal because…
Not heavy enough
The vocals are way too clean
Guitars way too slow
The only reason I know this is because I spent some overtime on metal threads, where some have made the bold claim Judas Preist is not even metal. I was there for research and I mention it because personally, I can’t see what makes this metal vs. say some Led Zeppelin tracks like “Immigrant Song”, which is called hard rock. Is it because Led Zeppelin traversed a few different musical lanes? Or, Heart’s “Barracuda” could easily swim alongside any song here. For this album certainly keeps it’s hard rockin’ heavy tone throughout. And that gets into the sticky and tricky weeds of genres labels and it does seem the truly greats are hard to pin down to just one genre at the end of the day. So I kinda say So what? to genres. I’m not listening to this album to see how metal it is or is not.
And to me, now, it just sounds like a solid rock record. Nothing in particular stands out as a hook I’ll take with me forever but, “You Can’t Kill Rock And Roll” is great fun. And rock ‘n’ roll after country music is the one genre that constantly talks about how great it is. Though it doesn’t do the finger pointing about rock losing it’s way like country music does. But in the long tradition of letting you know you will be rocked it is damn solid and certainly an early example of what glam metal would make cliched by the end of the 80s. The final song “Diary Of A Madman” is epic. Closing with those operatic backing vocals and a very sharp cold ending. Like a coffin snapping shut on the whole tale.
But again I can’t really hum anything here after the fact. So nothing stuck and maybe I’d need more listens to log it in the music memory bank. Even so, I really liked it. It wasn’t just screeching rough vocals over fast guitar. It felt like there were thought out runs and chord changes and modulations to create surprise or adrenaline. And Ozzy can certainly banshee wail. So yeah, I REALLY liked it.
But thinking about child me- what would he have thought? I can’t say. I was young and not focused on music like I am now. Teenage me would not have liked it much because there were no strong melody lines to sing-a-long with or any mainstream beats to dance to like say in a song like Metallic’s, “Enter Sandman” or Judas Priests, “Livin’ After Midnight”. Also I was into more into pop dance/house/trance as a teenager. That was the music that provided me an escape from my home life problems and depression. But I wonder if I would have got this album as a kid would metal have become my escape music? Would I now be listing Slayer as an all time favorite band? Would I be claiming that Nightwish was only good with Tarja Turunen. Would I be trying to figure out who is or is not doom, black, sludge, speed, death, thrash? Or moderating endless arguments about metalcore?
Probably not because at the end of the day I LOVE music, full stop. And I don’t see how this album would have stopped my musical curiosity and made me so narrow minded as to only accept metal as the one genre worth listening too. That said way before I even researched metal to any deep extent I was screaming about female acts like Girlschool, Doro, Phantom Blue etc. being left of metal lists and compilations like I had been doing with just about every genre. So I had definitely heard and come to know some of it.
In fact, fun fact: The hardest I have ever danced at a live show was seeing a triple bill of Motörhead, Dio, and Iron Maidenin the very late 90s. And I wasn’t even in the pit. The energy of the show and the fans was just that infectious. And I didn’t even know a single song. I just got invited and sad yes, because that’s what you do when the universe sends you a free ticket to see; Motörhead, Dio, and Iron Maidenin. Duh!
And back to the album art, as I said I misremembered most of it. And looking at it now it still stirs that original sense memory. The biggest difference between my memory and the reality would be two things:
1. The lack of a piano I swore was on the cover
2. The child reading a book and giggling in the background
The child adds a sense of humor to the whole thing which is interesting because, well, Ozzy was part of the “satanic panic” and anybody with a thinking brain could see the man obviously had a sense of humor and the genre clearly was not literally devil worshiping. Combining the album cover with the music it just feels all so amusing that some adults lost their minds over this music and thought it was harmful to the youth. It is not harmful to the youth. Unless you see it harmful that kids found solace, community, and a voice in somebody writing and singing music about the darkness we all experience but in a loud and playful and even humorous way. And if that is you well… Six-year-old me says, “You are the REAL madman”.
