My dad stopped buying vinyl after my mom burped me out the babeslot. There wasn't much of a need to purchase shit your kids might potentially snap in half while playing topless toddler frisbee. His collection wouldn't cause any audiophile to orgasm, but the motto of quality over quantity prevailed and nearly everything inside that area of the living room (with the exception of Procol Harem, c'mon pops) is shit I still listen to today.
Once I got closer to fourth grade, when on more than a few occasions I'd wake up with my arms wrapped around my pink electric guitar, I started to snoop in the cabinet below the stereo where pops kept his vinyl a bit more. That was when I first started connecting the music I had been listening to since birth, with the images of those who created it. It seemed the people that made the music that meant the most to me were hairy, lived outside, had an affinity for cowboy chic fashionz, and collected rather large dogs; or at least that's what I gathered from the Deja Vu album cover from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, which is quite possibly one of my top 5 albums of all time.
Deja Vu is one of my barometers of awesome. It will fix with what's right what modern music has fucked up with what's wrong. I might not be able to compare hip hop or delectronica to it, but if I can comfortably suckle upon something's teet when everything else fucking sucks like I do with CSN&Y's Deja Vu, that's a huge fucking compliment.
CSNY doesn't just remind me of why I love music, it reminds me that I'm grateful as Fuck that I was brought up around music in a way that allowed me to appreciate it as deeply as I do. I was never forced to listen to anything, or really banned from listening to anything (except AMG's Bitch Betta Have My Money on the way home from chuuch), but when my dad put on Deja Vu, I could be on the way anywhere and be completely content. Deja Vu is my first Allman Brother's Greatest Hits CD, as that fucking CD is my stranded on a deserted island album.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young remained such an important musical influence to me throughout high school and after, that when I moved to California at 18 and finally arrived in Santa Barbara, my second stop (after finding pot) was to sit and listen to Deja Vu near the harbor. I never intended for that to be such a huge memory for me, but it was. A few weeks after my arrival, I was out walking that same stretch of beach and saw David Crosby's yacht up close. The same boat he wrote Wooden Ships on, among many others. It was a stoner Disneyland kind of moment. I'm not a big fan of being on the water, I feel vulnerable like a guy without drawls in a spike shop, but here I was remembering listening to Deja Vu as a kid on my parent's living room floor while staring at the album cover, and I'm standing just a few feet from dude's boat.
Whatever, I never met dude or saw dude or even met anyone who met or saw dude, but as a fan of the music, and the pot, I was geeked.
Yes, standing next to a boat that I wouldn't want to ever fucking be on, stoned as the day is long, 2,221 miles from home, and listening to music form 30 years prior, I was pretty fucking excited about it. Kind of like pissing in the same toilet James Brown just pissed in, which I did in Solvang, California a few weeks after this.
If you aren't aware of this album, or only equate it with Teach Your Children (which is fucking gorgeous no matter how you came across it, life insurance commercial or not), I urge you to fucking let it ruin music for you as well. Sure, not much lately can stack up to it, but when you know what sounds awesome, glimpses of that awesome can make modern music better than it might've sounded had you only thought Thriller was the epitome of musicawesome.
There are many moments from Crosby, Stills & Nash (& Young) that have completely ruined music for me, but Deja Vu contains a handful that are extremely personal to my musical testicles.
The 2:13 mark on Carry On.
Getting the flu for Christmas on Almost Cut My Hair.
The first 17 seconds of Woodstock.
The entire 4:15 of Deja Vu.