Most Influential Albums: Zakk Wylde - Book of Shadows

Zakk Wylde... jeez. My first real rock concert was Ozzy Osbourne & Alice in Chains at the Tulsa Fairgrounds race track, next to Driller Stadium in the early 90's (the now laughably titled "No More Tours Tour"). That Ozzy album & tour was a wake-up call to guitarists everywhere. Ibanez guitars, rack effects, and solid-state amps got ditched for Les Pauls, Marshalls, and stomp-boxes. Why? Zakk freaking Wylde, that's why.

Zakk was amazing. Yeah, he had chops for days, looked cooler than anyone on MTV (who else could wear a bowler hat with a bullseye painted on his guitar and still look cool??), but man - that SOUND. I was addicted to that buzz-saw guitar tone and those signature screaming harmonic squeals.

So all of us recently-converted Zakk addicts were crushed when Zakk left Ozzy. We waited in anticipation for his new project, Pride & Glory. When it wasn't metal, but rather a swamp-blues infected Southern Rock that had more influence from the Allman Brothers than from the Van Halen brothers, most Ozz fans were bummed, myself included (I later rediscovered the Pride & Glory album and still dig it immensely). I was also shocked that his voice sounded so deep and bluesy, when he looked much more like a Sebastian Bach-esque pretty boy from that era.

A few years later, I saw this CD in a record store. Given my previous let-down with Pride & Glory, I passed it over a few times, but kept going back whenever I'd return to that store, wondering if it would be as cool as No More Tears. Keep in mind this was before you could preview tracks on the internet... buying an album was a dice roll, so with no radio play, you might be flushing $15 and won't know it until the crap is already in your ears. So I never pulled the trigger...

Fast forward a few years - my buddy and fellow Ozzy fan, Homer Robison, was commenting about this CD one night. He gave me the impression it was worth a listen and offered to let me borrow it. I was working in web design at a company in Tulsa at the time and took the CD to work with me to plug into the headphones while I designed websites for people who always just wanted us to rip off someone else's work... not expecting the disk to be anything more than mediocre.

I was so stunned by how amazing the opening track, "Between Heaven and Hell", was that I was literally immobilized by it. I sat there with my jaw open, staring at my CD player wondering what in the world was going on. I listened to it again... and again... and again... the whole album can't be this awesome, can it?? I decided to find out. Yep, it was.

Given, some albums/songs/movies/books/cult leaders hit you at just the right time in your life to make a life-changing impact when they might not have even scratched the surface a year previous. Maybe that's what happened, but this record resonated with me then beyond anything else I had known.

Truly though, Zakk got ripped with this project. If this had been released by an up & coming black kid from Louisiana and had been executive produced by Clive Davis, this thing would've stomped the Grammys that year. Hard.

It's the perfect marriage between swamp blues, acoustic folk, and heavy rock (if a 3-way marriage can be considered perfect - maybe the album is Mormon?). Yeah, he's still got the riffs & chops (I don't think it's physically possible to play any faster than he does on the solo to "Throwin' It All Away"), his piano work is practically a religious experience, but its the songs on here that seal the deal. Raw, vulnerable, yet lush and undefeatable at the same time. He's hitting the target he aimed for dead-center and then some.

So I absorbed this music for months, indoctrinating anyone who would listen. It sparked a writing streak of southern-fried rock songs in me that lasted for years. The undisputed fan favorite from my band's album at the time was a song called "Better". It's hard to say if that tune, "A Beautiful Girl", "Don't Walk Away", "Southern Highway Love Song", or several other songs I've written would even exist if I hadn't heard Book of Shadows.

Since I was late getting on the bus for this CD, Zakk released yet another new album several months later. This time it was with a new group, Black Label Society... a heavier than hell, grungy, decrepit, tuned-down, scare your mom, beat up your dad, kill your spatula dealer, set fire to your elementary school, and run away with your bus driver's wife, metal band. The kinda crap that weenie, young, white-trash teen boys listen to in order to make themselves seem scary and tough... audio testosterone substitute. Garbage.

However, Black Label would be playing in Joplin, Missouri, and my buddy Homer and his wife were going. I hitched along and experienced the loudest concert ever.

What's that? You have a loud concert story you're thinking of? Nope. Yours wasn't as loud as this. No, it wasn't. We're talking 'Boeing 747 landing on your ear drum' loud; praying for your ears to bleed so the blood can act as an insulator between the razor-blade sharp sound waves and the liquefied brain stem you're trying to prevent from spilling out of your split skull.

And Zakk was scary. By this time he had transformed from pretty boy glam rocker to demon trucker with arms the size of Hulk Hogan's torso, who used gigantic chains for a guitar strap. To top this off, his first guitar, the infamous bullseye Les Paul, had been stolen a few nights previous. He looked like some sort of crazed, beer-guzzling Norse God who hates... well, everything. When he demanded the crowd "Make some F***-ing NOISE!!!", his ice blue, bloodshot eyes got the size of circular saw blades, and we all screamed out of fear, not willingness to show him we were rockin'. We honestly just did whatever he said so he wouldn't come down into the crowd and eat us.

After the show, a line was forming for autographs with Zakk. I didn't really need the signature, but I just had to tell him what I thought of Book of Shadows. The line went pretty quickly. The metal-head fans in front of me would rave about what a great guitarist he was, and 8-foot tall, world-devouring Zakk would just grunt and sign, without ever looking up. I finally got up to him, and muttered out, "Book of Shadows is my favorite album of all time" (which it honestly was at that point). Zakk stopped, put down the black Sharpie marker, looked me right in the eye, and said, "Man, thanks... that really means a lot. I worked really hard on that album." He shook my hand (HARD), patted me on the back, and said, "Thanks for coming out, dude." Then he went back to grunting at people.

At first I was confused why he took the time to address me personally out of the crowd. My brother put it together and told me, "That's the only album of his that he put his own name on. It's obviously the most personal representation of himself".

Don't own it? Buy and listen here:



   

Most Influential Albums: Common Children - The Inbetween Time

I've been a fan of Common Children (and all of Marc Byrd's various projects after their demise) since the very first disk. My friend Chad Bonham had a copy of their debut, Skywire, on cassette and let me listen to it during a nighttime drive to a friend's house. He explained that they "are totally awesome" (true), "rock so hard that you need to pad your pants with double-ply Charmin, because of how hard they're going to kick your butt" (also true), and "sound like a mix between Candle Box and Goo Goo Dolls" (very, very, very, absolutely, falsier than the falsiest of false).

I heard "Hate" followed by "Treasure" and I was hooked. I won't go too far into that experience, because that album will surely get its own entry eventually. They released the album Delicate Fade not long after and then promptly vanished off the face of the earth. Their label (Tattoo records) was gone, no more tour dates were announced, and there wasn't even a peep of them on the web anywhere. I was shattered.

Years passed, and I had all but given up hope that I would ever hear them again. Then one night, on a whim, I did a search online and found a single splash-page announcing an upcoming 3rd album by Common Children, The Inbetween Time. I freaked out.

Needless to say, I signed up, paid the $15 and waited patiently. Ok, rabidly might be a better adverb there... It arrived. I couldn't make myself wait for the typical "at night, in bed, through headphones" approach I preferred, so I threw it in the player in my car (still at nighttime, thankfully) on a drive out to my grandmother's house in the badlands of far West Tulsa. Winding through rain-covered country roads lined with aged, decaying trees, under the stars, the album unfolded like the masterpiece it is.

On a sonic level, you won't ever find an album with this many guitars layered on top of each other that still sounds this present and clear. Marc Byrd is an unparalleled master of manipulating ambient guitar sounds in my opinion. Your mind bathes, swims, and drowns in a universe of echoes and distant melodies. But the real strength of this album is in the depth of feeling it conveys; a flood of emotions from grit-your-teeth anger to heart breaking sadness, contemplative, aching loss to reverent, bliss-filled awe - all compounded with the overwhelmingly immense scope of the soundscape all around you.

There are no singles on this disk. Nothing "radio-worthy". Nothing that the mainstream music industry would bother giving the time of day. But The Inbetween Time can break you and rebuild you over and over again if you let it.

It's one of the best albums ever released. Ever.

Don't own it yet? Listen & buy it here:

   

Most Influential Albums: Tugboat Annie - The Space Around You

This is quite possibly the best album you don't own.

I stumbled across this disk back in 2001. I was in a glorified cover rock band called San Dimas and we put a CD up for sale on CDBaby.com. Besides providing album distribution for independent artists, the site also makes recommendations for other bands/CDs that are similar in style so that fans of your stuff can find more music they dig. This album was one of those links from our page. I gave the samples one listen and knew I was on to something amazing. So I bought the CD...

The first day it arrived in the mail (I was living with my brother and sister-in-law in Tulsa at the time), I did my normal CD listening routine: wait until dark, lie down in bed with the lights out, put on my headphones and blast the album all the way through uninterrupted. I was in heaven. I listened to this CD 5 times through that night. For about the next 2 weeks, every night I would repeat the routine, listening through the entire album 2-3 times.... often skipping back over Stop, Wishing Song, Helen of Troy and Away.

This is a disk of flawless, noisy, shiny, battered pop songs. The sonic layers and textures these guys achieved are so lush that you feel like your sense of hearing has gained extra dimensions. Michael Bethmann's voice is an otherworldly, haunting, raspy, yet deeply expressive wonder. The guitar work is unparalleled even by the artists that obviously influenced it. The drumming... kinda sucks, yeah. But if you know what a huge nit-picker of drumming I am, then you know it is NO small statement for me to say the strength of the songs and other performances on this album completely make up for what the drummer(s) lacks.

There are a few albums that are such complete works of art that it is a heinous crime to skip songs, even for the purpose of previewing, and this is one of them. So whenever I attempt to introduce anyone to this disk, it comes with the caveat that they're in for the long haul.

I've actually listened to this album so many times that I use it to test the sound systems of cars, stereos, etc., because I'm so incredibly familiar with exactly how the sonic range should sound on this disk.

I tried desperately to capture many of this album's finer points on my latest album, and the inspiration of simple chord structures underneath a cataclysm of guitar rage still drives my approach to many of my own songs. I'm sure I'll be chasing this sound for a long time to come.

Don't have it yet? But it here: