What was the song or record that made you a true fan of music, the type who communicates with strangers on the internet about whch is the best Low album? The answer could be plural as well.

Joy Division- Closer specifically the song 24 Hours made me realize that music actually affected me emotionally & made me realize I would rather listen to records than watch TV. 9th grade.

I just classified Joy Division as emo

b-52's - planet claire-- I was 9 when I heard this for the first time.

when i was a huge dork in 9th grade or so, me and my friend played an all night game of Axis & Allies and the radio station was having a weekend of nothing but the Stones and the Beatles and we listened to that for about 12 hours or so.

shit kicked my ass.

15 years old. I bought Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits at Wal-Mart. Don't even know why I bought it. It just completely altered what I considered music, and from then I was looking for different stuff than top 20 radio. I started with other older records and moved forward.

probably something off of 'head on the door' by the cure....

I think it was the endless listening of Kiss's Double Platnum and Rock and Roll Over on 8-track as an impressionable seven-year old.


Seriously.

Embarrassingly enough, I think InXS's Kick and Depeche Mode's Music For the Masses were probably the first "real" albums I became obsessed with. (i.e. not C.L.'s "She's So Usual", M.J.'s "Thriller", or G.M.'s "Faith"--even though I do consider these to be good albums, they are more on the pop side of things).

...But I'd probably have to say The Cure's Disintegration in terms of truly blowing my mind.

Oh shit... The Joshua Tree as well.

Yeah Kick, Music for the Masses and The Joshua Tree were my first real albums, but Disintegration took it all to a new level.

This is all circa grades 6, and 7.

My sister HATED Bob Dylan when I was a kid. So I always thought I never really liked him. I was a pretty big rap kid back in the day, but a friend of mine gave me Bob Dylan "Live at Budokan" which is a weird intro to Mr. Zimmerman, but it kicked my ass. Bad.

I dunno if that is the answer to Jimmy's question, but it seem appropriate as a response to your post.

i think what really did it for me was the song step on by the happy mondays. turned me into a total record store ravaging, NME/melody maker reading, import cd-single buying nerd (not too unlike the Dalen of today).

Same here. I don't know why, but it was endless Kiss albums on my little record player. I used to be able to take them out at the library in my hometown. Double Platinum, Dressed to Kill, Destroyer. Obsessed at an early age, it never let up. My father recently asked me how in the hell I ever got so into music without ever picking up an instrument or wanting to play. I told him I had no idea.

i realize this is an event, and not an album or song so . . .

i my first albums i listened to CONSTANTLY

Harry Chapin - Greatest Stories Live
Huey Lewis and the News - Sports
The Best of the Police
Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms

and i suppose a big moment was memorizing every word of Jam on It.

I was a metal kid (not literally, I didn't have rivets) into Iron Maiden and Judas Priest and all that jazz or rather, as the case maybe, hard rock.

Anyway a friend of mine brought an album to my house called 'Hatful of Hollow' stuck it in the tape machine, pressed play and a track called 'William, It Was Really Nothing' came on and changed my life.

The guitar was absolutely amazing but not flashy and dum like heavy metal guitars. And the guy was actually singing lyrics that I, in the deep mid-winter of adolesance, could actually relate too. It was probably the first time in my life I'd heard a song and thought "Yeah, that's how I feel!". All of a sudden Rob Halford shrieking "I wanna go, I wanna go, I wanna go - hot rocking!" didn't say much to me about my life.

The Cure - Disintegration. That made me actively seek out folks on the old Prodigy.net "interweb."

Although it was probably the remix of "Fascination Street" that sealed the deal.

KPH

mom says i was singing and knowing all the lyrics to songs by age 3, but hell if i can remember what songs those were.

hmmm.... when i REALLY started paying attention to music was when i first heard "the bends" by radiohead. hence, that is why it is my favorite album. before that i was listening to rhcp & nirvana but i wasn't REALLY into the music... it was radiohead that did it for me.

STYX -- "The Grand Illusion" I remember sitting on the couch reading my friends album cover. Our families were on vacation together, and we swam all day, then played some card game called, "Kings in the Corner?", listening to this.

Summer 1977 --Star Wars and Styx... how cool is that... I was 8.5 yrs old.

fuck. maybe the Singles soundtrack, The Cure "Wish", Paul Westerberg "14 Songs", INXS albums such as Listen Like Thieves and Kick, U2 Achtung Baby

probably a combination of the Repo Man soundtrack, the first violent femmes record, Tim and some Cure album.

As a 13 year old in '73 I was totally into Alice Cooper. Their theatrics got them lumped in with glam rock (in those days it was known as glitter rock), and that led me to search out other "glitter" bands - and the album that year that was causing the biggest ruckus was The New York Dolls, so I picked it up. Hit me right between the eyes. Next "glitter" album I got was Iggy and the Stooges Raw Power. And that, as they say, was that. Life, as I'd known it, had been forever changed.

I've been listening to music since before I can remember (it's strange I'm not better at playing music...) but other than listening to Elvis and Neil Diamond as a kid, Lynyrd Skynyrd's Greatest Hits probably did more to get me into rock music as a young adult than anything else. I don't listen to them much anymore and realize they're not the coolest band to first get into but I'd say they were it.

For my modern tastes, not surprisingly, Dinosaur Jr's 'Where You Been' is the one I attribute to my musical obsession.

naked raygun 'jettison' back in 7th grade

I think it was my mom's 1812 Overture on vinyl, with nutcracker suite on the B side. It covered everything from thunderous cannon rocking, meditative musings to dancy waltzes.

From that direction anything was game and it depended on what genre I was digging at any given moment. From country, soul, R&B, RnR, ..... now of late French and Brazilian.. .

If I had to say what popular music album did it, I'd say these 3 cuz I had them all fairly young:

the B52's - s/t
Violent Femmes - s/t
Dire Straits - s/t

Sadly, MTV played a significant role in my discovering new music in the 80s; it started with Headbanger's Ball and ended at 120 Minutes. I still remember the Saturday night Black Sabbath's 'Paranoid' video freaked the holy living bejeezus outta me. Naturally, I was humming the tune the next morning and had to pick up the cassette come hell or high water. Ventured over to Vital Vinyl, snagged a copy, returned home, slapped on the tape and proceeded to be floored by the dark raw power of 'War Pigs' (still one of my favs to-date). It practically snowballed from there. BS > Metallica's Garage Days Re-revisited ep > Motley Crue's 'Too Fast for Love' > Dec. 18, 1988 120 Minutes episode feat. TMBG. I only remember this bc the following day tragedy struck the family, and all I wanted to do was to find that Fishbone record.

I think I related this story once on the CMJ board, but it's still a good one...

Went to my first local punk show when I was 14; didn't really want to go but my older friend knew I'd dig it and knew I needed to get out of the house, start separating from the parents, etc. Most of the bands were predictably bad and I complained through the whole thing until the last band — The Rugby Mothers — came on and were playing this really tight, energetic punk rock. I started to brighten up.

What REALLY did it, though, was when they covered Duran Duran's "Hungry Like A Wolf" in a Ramones-y "Onetathreefour!" fashion. I had never heard anything like it and that two minutes made me realized how vital, alive and thrilling music could be when it's played with pure heart. Shit MATTERED. That experience cut a huge trench in my psyche. Every bit of music I've liked since then has been like a tributary branching off from that river.

Grabbed Never Mind the Bullockls when I was in Junior High and was hooked ever since...