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| THE DOORS | Karen Bliss
November 2009
Movie Entertainment
Holiday gift-giving offers a chance to introduce the Lady Gaga/Jonas Brothers generation to great discs from before they were born. Karen Bliss asked some dedicated musicians to recommend essential items for any music library.
IGGY POP
Singer/songwriter, punk rock innovator
I’ll spin you a curve ball, just because I’ve been listening to it a lot lately. It’s not a rock album.
For kids who are really “musoid,” Kind of Blue (1959) by Miles Davis. It’s super, super-great musicians playing some very, very simple music in a straightforward way, and it’s just very easy going. Don’t listen to it if you’re looking for hard rock, or even hard bop. It’s just a great achievement. It’s a landmark jazz album, still the best-selling jazz album of all time.
ALEX LIFESON
Guitarist, Rush
Certainly, that first Led Zeppelin album (1969) was pretty spectacular, and the more I hear that album lately the more I appreciate it. We don’t have records like that anymore, where a record comes out and everybody just goes crazy over it, and it seems to change things and creates a whole new direction.
Maybe it was because I was15 years old and that’s the kind of music that I always wanted to hear. It just really left a huge mark on me. For me personally, Electric Ladyland (1968) was a real turnaround record. (Jimi) Hendrix was incredible, but that record just had a feel to it and a character that can’t be missed.
JERRY CANTRELL
Guitarist and co-vocalist, Alice In Chains
One of my favourite albums of all time is AC/DC Back In Black (1980). That was an album that was pretty important for me — actually Highway To Hell (1979) and Back In Black because of the transition AC/DC went through.
They’ve always been one of my favourite bands and, coincidentally, we ended up being in a similar situation with our own reality of making music and losing a friend (Layne Staley, AIC’s main singer). So they’ve become even more dear to me.
So that album, as far as coming back from that sort of a loss, is just an impressive album and one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll records of all time.
SCOTT STAPP
Lead singer, Creed
U2 Joshua Tree (1987), I think, emotionally and lyrically crosses generations and sonically is one of the best albums U2 has ever done. It’s a very passionate record.
HUGH DILLON
Musician (solo artist, former Headstones frontman) and actor (Flashpoint, Durham County)
A record that saved my life when I was a kid was Teenage Head (1979) and it’s Canadian. It was a great record. There’s a million of them. Any Doors record. Really, more than any of those, any Bob Dylan record. Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited.
DIDDY
Rapper, record producer
I know everybody, because of Michael Jackson’s passing, has been buying Thriller (1982) and the greatest hits, but you cannot be a Michael Jackson fan if you don’t have Off The Wall (1979). It may not be his biggest album, but it’s his best album. It’s when he was in his prime, before he started realizing what he was doing, when he just started making the sounds with his voice and the “hee-hees.” All those different things were just natural sounds coming out of him, instead of “hee would sound good here” or that “ooooo sound is good here.”
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