ipodshuffle

Mott the Hoople: “All the Young Dudes” (1972)

Volume 1 of The First Time Ever I Heard That Song: 15 songs that made an impact

Summer 1972, I'm a kid visiting relatives in England. “All The Young Dudes” comes on the radio and basically jumps out at me; my older brother starts telling me about this glam thing going on, and who this David Bowie at the center of it is… When I'm back home I go straight to the record store to pick up ALL THE YOUNG DUDES - and from there it was a short jump to ZIGGY STARDUST and then TRANSFORMER (which Dave of course also produced), and it was off to the races.

So anyway, welcome to this new feature. This list won’t necessarily be “the greatest songs” or “the most meaningful songs” – but I figure if I can still remember and describe the first time I heard a song, up to 30 years later, it must have made an impact on me, and presumably others.

Why to use Shuffle

If you're already using it, this is obvious. If not: imagine a radio station that only plays songs you like. Just bung a lot of music in and then let the machine pick the order to play songs in. If you're lucky you may come up with something you haven't heard in months or years and have one of those "f**k yeah this song" moments.

Of course, there's something to be said for the value of listening to albums as an artistic whole - so at some point, something will be said about it. But for now I'll stay with shuffle...

OK so where we?

So... "random thoughts on random songs" ... the other possible subheading would be something like "an aging muso listens to his records again." After 20+ years of record collecting it was a great thing to get a snazzy 20gig music player and start ripping things it into it, as it put me back in touch with a lot of things I hadn't listened to in a while. And of course the best feature is the "shuffle" setting, which brings things up at random, making possible any number of segues - some jarring, some illuminating.

So we can talk about a lot of music here - old country or soul, new trip-hop, some good old punk rock, who knows? We'll see what comes up on the machine and where it takes us. It may be random, it won't always be completely satifsying, but let's get started...