Ever Get Into An Artist For The First Time, But You Wind Up Buying The Wrong Album First?

A friend of mine would always talk shit about the Velvet Underground, and I never understood why. A few years later, I was looking through her CD collection and saw that the only VU she had was the 1993 reunion concert. I asked her if she'd heard any other VU and she said she hadn't. Actually, she didn't realized that they wrote their songs in the 1960's. She thought they were 90's group.

I could have very nearly included the Velvets in this lineup, for the first LP of theirs I got was LOADED, at a collectors' store in the early '80s. I remember dropping the needle on "Who Loves the Sun" and thinking, is THIS supposed to be the badass protopunk that all the rock critics are raving about? (1)I later learned that it was considered their "accessible" album, and (2) it grew on me - I slowly "got it," within two weeks of buying it.

The funny thing is, I could see that being an appropriate response not only to the opening track on LOADED, but also THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO and the selftitled.

"The funny thing is, I could see that being an appropriate response not only to the opening track on LOADED, but also THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO and the selftitled."

I know - Spanky & Our Gang could have done "Sunday Morning." (Although they DID have a totally unrelated song with the same title...) I think WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT is the mind-fuck most people remember the Velvets for, but at this point I pretty much celebrate all four of the original studio albums.

Another LP where I got on at the wrong stop: the Dictators' MANIFEST DESTINY. I'd have made out better if I had gotten the one before it or the one after it...

First Dentists album was one of the later, mediocre ones.

The first Flipper album I bought was American Grafishy, and to this day I think Flipper is overrated, even though I've heard the 'good stuff' since then. In fact, I think a lot of people who grew up in the Nirvana days had the bad luck of buying Piece of Cake or Stoner Witch from the cutout bin and not realizsing how fucking awesome Mudhoney or The Melvins really were.

Are you talking about FLEETWOOD MAC IN CHICAGO? The one where they're at Chess Studios with all these blues legends like Otis Spann and (I think) Buddy Guy? If that's the one...I know about their blues years and as a matter of fact the only Fleetwood Mac I listen to is from their blues years (as long as Peter Green is in the band), and I think that one's pretty good!

But then again, I don't really listen to the later pop stuff they became famous for, so that's just different tastes, I reckon...

Others include:
The Dismemberment Plan - Change
Sunny Day Real Estate - The Rising Tide
Liz Phair - Whip Smart

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NEED I SAY MORE

which would you recommend, then?

(always liked 'em casually, just never got around to buying one of their records - and ive been avoiding DOUBLE NICKELS ON THE DIME cause thats the one where the songs are a minute or less long and all them drastically short songs might come off as too much of a novelty to someone who isnt already familiar)

Project: Mersh, the EP with longer songs, is out on CD in a collection called Post-Mersh Volume 2. But really, if you want to get into the Minutemen, everything begins and ends with Double Nickels. It's about as much of a "novelty" album as London Calling or Blonde On Blonde.

i can't speak for anyone else but Isolation Drills is one of their top three albums IMO. if someone was likely to be put off by the lo-fi-ness of B1000 or Vampire then i can't think of a better entry point

haha I did this

That's my problem with this classification of albums--despite the possibility of these being the "wrong" ones to be the introduced with I still enjoy them and don't regret their existance just because they were the first one's I heard. I would say Isolation Drills is my second favorite Guided by Voices album, if only by default, because I don't like BeeThousand nearly as much as Alien Lanes and I don't have any other albums of his/theirs besides these three.

It, er, lacks focus. It wasn't till someone played me Haleluwah that the scales fell from my eyes. I love The Empress and the Ukraine King on it now, and Connection.

It's still not really that good, though. Still, worth a bob or two, I expect.

I first heard Beefheart playing 'Hothead' on SNL but couldnt find the album that was on, so I ended up getting the only one they had, ie. 'Trout Mask', which I guess most people will consider as the 'right' album to get, but which threw me off for a while.

Heh heh...Imagine how I felt back in '85 when I bought that newly-reissued, long-awaited banana album: My first chance to hear 'em, finally! Put in the cassette (ignorantly) expecting psychedelic acid-rock, get "Sunday Morning" instead. Dismayed, I stop the tape a few seconds into "Waiting For The Man" and turn it over: Horrible racket! "European Son", what is this shit? Rewind for a bit, play, same arrhythmic racket again. And again! Jesus Christ, how long is this thing?! Is this a joke? etc. A week or so later and I decided that it was maybe my favourite record in the world. (I didn't start a band of my own, tho.)

Now if you bought Washing Machine first...well...

i bought dirty first, which i don't like at all, but recall liking at the time