I trained for and ran the 2001 Seattle Half Marathon, the 2002 Portland Marathon, the 2003 Vancouver, B.C. Marathon and the 2004 Vancouver Half Marathon. During this period, I also undertook my most challenging backpacking yet.  I hiked longer trails and climbed some major peaks like Mount Baker, Mount Shuksan, Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens and others.  I also did a multi-year run of annual trips to the high Sierra Nevada range. I walked up or scrambled up a half dozen peaks above 12,000 ft. I even “speed scrambled” up a 13’er one year in a lightning storm.

You’d think this period of fitness and multiple climbing experiences was the opportune time to attempt Rainier, right? Well, Rainier just didn’t beckon me. It was a combination of factors. First, I only heard that the climb was overcrowded. So much so, the main route was often called a cattle trail. Secondly, I did actually hike solo up to the 10,000 foot level of Camp Muir shortly after moving to Seattle. Seeing all of the climbers camping there with their gear made me feel like a green flatlander and I thought I achieved all I needed to on this mountain.

During this period I became  aware of a picture (and accompanying story) of my grandfather that had supposedly been taken before a successful climb of Rainier in his youth. While I thought that sounded pretty cool and gave me a dose of family pride, I never really knew my grandfather. Plus,  Dad was never one to share much about his own father.  You’d think that would further motivate me to climb the mountain but I didn’t feel  any connection there. Grandpa as some kind of mystery man didn’t hold much intrigue for me because the facts about him seemed a little too difficult to track down. Rather, they may have been difficult for those who knew him to share.

This was made all the more ironic because of the extensive family history I’ve done with my mother’s family. It should’ve been a no-brainer to jump right into who John LeBlond was.

While I continued to backpack and did some minor mountaineering, I pulled away a bit from the outdoors and turned my focus to Seattle and getting other things back on track in my life, like finding a social scene. Hiking was a solitary sport for me and fulfilled my need for a break from the day to day. But, I was getting lonely for new friends and was interested in returning to the dating scene by 2003. At this point though, in the back of my mind, I thought Rainier would be a cool climb when I turned 40. What a way to enter my 40s in style!

I met Kursten in 2004.  The woman who would become my wife and I shared the same love of the outdoors. Interestingly, her outdoors resume included bagging Rainier just a couple of years prior. The mountain had gained her utmost respect. My favorite illustration of her feelings towards Rainier involves her preparation for the birth of our daughter in 2008. In order to keep labor pains in perspective, she brought a reminder of something very physically and emotionally demanding that she succeeded in doing.

She brought Rainier pictures.

After many shared adventures with Kursten –  including a harrowing trip to Alaska’s Brooks Range and several trips into the Cascades and Olympic Mountains – Kursten and I married in 2007 and shortly thereafter Hattie was born. Our son Sam arrived in 2010.

The time away from serious outdoors adventuring also led me to think more about my career path and its limits. I then decided to attain another long-desired goal, my master’s degree. In 2007, I earned my Masters degree in Public Administration from the University of Washington.

All of these events were cause for much joy in my life but also resulted in my outdoor pursuits falling further down on the priority list. When Sam was born, I was 38 and still planned on climbing Rainier when I was 40.  After getting used to the new world order of having two kids, the time was closing in to get in shape and figure who would help me get to the top.

Thinking about Rainier then led to the old trailhead picture. The black and white of Grandpa sat in a plastic memories box in the attic for the last 5 years. I pulled it out one day and started putting some serious interest into the story of Grandpa climbing Rainier.

Did he really do it or was it just some family legend?

Grandpa and his climb

John Knight LeBlond, Sr.

I have few memories of my grandfather. My older sister and I spent some solo time with him and my grandmother in their homes in Ohio and their cabin in Indiana. He was just a quiet man. He died in 1980.

What I do know about Grandpa when the trailhead picture was taken was that he likely had some money to spend on traveling. His family owned a large successful factory in Cincinnati, the “LeBlond Machine Tool Company“.  Grandpa’s father was on the board of directors and Grandpa worked in the factory.

My dad said that when his father talked about the Rainier climb, his dad would also say “And I didn’t do anything else the rest of my life”.  Wow. What a crushing thing to say to your son or anyone else who knew you and your family of 3 kids and wife.  My dad and my aunt also mentioned that at some point in Grandpa’s later years, he had was what was called at the time a “nervous breakdown” and “stayed in bed” for a year.

My grandmother, Elizabeth Kinsey LeBlond, lived for about a decade after Grandpa died. I have nothing but fond memories of the good times I shared with her. “Amie” (French for “friend) as we called her, was the one who really interacted with my sister and me. I now wish I had been old enough to ask her questions about Grandpa. I’m sure she would’ve shared much about him.

The picture

In the early 2000s, shortly after moving to Seattle, I visited Dad in Missouri. I noticed a striking photograph on his bedroom dresser. It was a black and white portrait of seven climbers from a long time ago. One of those climbers was a young John Knight LeBlond, a.k.a Grandpa.

A trailhead somewhere in the 1920s or 30s? Grandpa is third from the right.

John Knight LeBlond, a.k.a. Grandpa

Grandpa told Dad he made it to the top of Rainier.  However, once I started asking questions again about the picture, Dad’s older sister Susan said that she thought it actually was not from Rainier but rather from Pike’s Peak in Colorado, a peak also reachable by car and train. She said her father never made it as far west as Washington.

Now, enter into this mystery The Mountaineers, a long standing outdoors club in Washington. After finding out that some members were also historians, I sent them the picture and asked if they could verify whether the picture was indeed taken at Rainier. A day later I heard from a member of their historical committee, Lowell Skoog, who was convinced that the picture was taken at the Paradise Visitor’s Center on Mount Rainier. Mr. Skoog also said the large guide in the picture was one of only a few taking climbers up the mountain in the 1920s and early 1930s. He was a Swiss-born guide named Hans Führer. What a name! (Dad told me Grandpa said his guide was “Scandinavian or something.”) So well-esteemed a guide Führer was he actually had a part of the mountain named after him, “The Führer Finger”. (Führer was possibly outdone in names but another guide who worked at the time named “Joe Hazzard”).

I know nothing specific about Grandpa’s climb. Other pictures taken in the 1920’s of the mountain show large groups of men and women using gear much seen in the picture. The route the guided climbs used back then has since been wiped out by a rockfall.

I asked Mr. Skoog about if and where summit registers were kept for Mount Rainier, he told me they reside in a library only a mile from my home. All this time, the answer lay waiting for me and my family less than a mile from my home in Seattle.

Sleuthing the mystery

In March 2011, I visited the Special Collections room of the University of Washington library system.  In hand were Grandpa’s picture and the suggestions from the Mountaineers. With help from the great staff, the summit registers from 1917 to 1934 were easily located. I knew that Grandpa’s climb occurred before he married my grandmother in 1934. I was only guessing that he made the climb in his adult years before then.

I started looking.

Almost immediately I came across a signature of someone named “John Knight”. Was this Grandpa? Why would he sign his name without his last name? I bookmarked the page and kept scanning the brown and tattered pages.  Signatures in pencil would not smudge as easily as if they were done in pen. I was getting more and more hopeless as I went through the late 20s and early 30s first. No signature.

Then I went all the way back to 1917 and started working forward in a register that ended in the early 20s. This was the last register to look through for this window of time. I didn’t really think Grandpa climbed Rainier in his teens. As I scanned the signatures from 1917 into the early 1920s with no luck. I thought, “It’s not here. When I’m done I’m going through these one more time. I hope I missed it the first time. Maybe ‘John Knight’ was Grandpa.”

I had another shred of evidence to help me identify Grandpa’s signature. It was a copy of my aunt’s report card in 1943 which he signed. Or did he? It was so neat and perfect that I just figured my grandmother signed it for him.

Aunt Susan's report card (1943)

Scanning through the signatures from the summer of 1923 I finally found what I was looking for.

Mount Rainier summit register, August 2, 1923

On August 2, 1923 there were only three signatures. Paul Rice from Ithaca, New York, Ralph Arthur from Los Angeles, California and John Knight LeBlond from Cincinnati, Ohio.

“You really did it, I’ll be damned!”, I whispered through tears of happiness.

August 2, 1923 struck me as ironic. It was one day less than 21 years to the day before my dad, John Jr., would be born. For Grandpa, I’m sure the thought of being a father someday was one of the furthest things from his mind as he topped Rainier.  Interesting, his signature really was that neat even after such a tiring climb! (His son and grandson didn’t carry on the same penmanship.)

Besides shedding tears of happiness, I was shocked that I actually found a record of this amazing thing my grandfather did 88 years prior. Added to that was the fact that this amazing record had been waiting for me just minutes from where I had lived for the last decade. Kind of unbelievable, right?

Many questions flooded my mind as the magnitude of my discovery took hold. What happened to the other four climbers from the picture? What happened to the mighty Hans Führer? Did Führer stay with one or more disabled climbers, then tell the remaining three that it was ok to go on without him? If Führer made it to the top during other climbs, as I saw repeatedly in the summit registers, he signed the register as “Hans Führer, Swiss Guide”. After Grandpa summited, did he and the other two help Führer bring the other climbers down?

In order to glean further insight on what Grandpa’s climb would’ve been like (short of climbing it myself!), I looked further into Mr. Führer’s story.  Mr. Skoog from The Mountaineers suggested I look into Dee Molenaar’s book, “The Challenge of Rainier”. The book was a jackpot of information.  Hans Führer guided more that 3500 climbers up the peak during the 1920s alone. Führer later worked as a guide in Canada and has several major “first ascents” to his credit in that area of the world.

But what caught my interest even more was a picture in Molenaar’s book of a much older Führer with twins Jim and Lou Whittaker in the early 1950s.  The twin Whittakers are probably the most well known climbers in Washington, if not the United States. They embody the term “living legends” in the outdoors world. Jim was the first American to climb Mount Everest in 1963. Lou founded Rainier Mountaineering, Inc. which has guided clients on the mountain since 1969. I sent separate emails to the now 83 year-old Whittakers in hopes of getting some information about Hans.

Here’s what Jim had to say via email:

“Hans was a nice fellow and treated us new guides like gentleman. He was a popular man and treated both clients and other guides with respect. He had to be a good guide because those alpenstocks (the long poles the climbers were carrying in the picture) weren’t ice axes and not made for a self arrest.”

I spoke with Lou by phone shortly after my email exchange with Jim. Lou said Hans was “tough and competent but an easygoing guy”.  Neither knew what happened to Hans in his later years.

To speak to someone who knew Grandpa’s guide 88 years after the climb was very powerful to me. It felt like speaking to Hans Führer himself.

Now with the family history of Rainier confirmed, I moved on with my planned trip in the summer of 2011.

I recruited two close friends, Jesse Burns and Heather Dowey, who both had mountaineering experience and an interest in climbing Rainier with me. In fact, Jesse had climbed Rainier multiple times as a guide for Alpine Ascents International. Heather, like me, would be attempting Rainier for the first time.

Enough of my writing.

Watch what happened. After you watch the movies, read on below.

During this journey through mountains and my past, I didn’t have any grand notions that climbing Mount Rainier would bring me any closer to Grandpa. I gained so much respect for the 22 year-old from Cincinnati who did an amazing thing that obviously left an impression on him in his later years. Maybe too much based on the things he said to his kids about his accomplishment.

For me, the familial tie to the mountain served to strengthen my focus on the longer experience of being an engaged father and husband. Without a doubt, Mount Rainier is about personal achievement.  Further, I still like challenging myself outdoors but the experience really doesn’t mean much to me unless I do it with people I care about.

The shared memories last years and years longer than the event that sparked those memories.

My friend/enemy for the last 21+ years.

Dear Sony Corporation:

Yaaaawwwwwnnnn.

I’m not one to write “love letters” to corporations but I have to say that you got it right with one of your products.  I’m writing thank you for 20 years of “getting it right” for me on a daily basis.

I’m guessing alarm clocks are not usually the types of products that get you strong positive reviews but I just want to say that I love my Dream Machine. The attachment I have to this clock/radio is not unlike what I’ve had for certain cars I’ve owned or houses I’ve lived in. For example, someday we’ll move out of my family’s house in Seattle and we’ll think about the home we made, the kids we’ve raised, the money we put into it and the neighborhood and city that surrounds it.

On a much smaller scale but with the same kind of attachment I’ll be sad when this collection of plastic parts and wires are no longer working.  However, over the past 21 years I’ve not yet experienced that sadness.

I got the Dream Machine in 1989 for my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I don’t remember if it was a gift or if I purchased it for myself.  I did have a need for it now that I was no longer living at home and the parental units no longer served that function for me (usually by pulling me by my leg off the bed).

As a freshman, I lived in the 10-story Witte Hall. Each floor had about 30 rooms, 2 people to a room. This meant life in a 15 foot by 20 foot box with another person, who was a total stranger to me. That person, a friend to this day, brought in a bunk bed set-up and I slept on the top bunk. I set the Dream Machine on a shelf that was just high enough to be perfect for holding a clock, a book and the ever-present ear plugs. However, there existed a gap large for my items to fall through should they be bumped hard enough.  See where this is going?

One night, I rolled over in my sleep, knocked the clock off and it hit my roomie in the head while he slept.  He woke up, but being the nice guy he is, he laughed it off. As a further testament to his niceness, he also laughed off a dropping of a Stephen King paperback and a basketball later that year.

While for the next 20+ years the Dream Machine has been personally reviled for a minimum of 10-30 seconds every morning it has gone off, it has performed for me valiantly and faithfully.  It woke up me for classes for 5 great years of undergraduate education, never failed me in getting me up for work for the dozen or more jobs I’ve had since college (I was never fired from one for being late or for any other reason for that matter!),  woke me up for airport trips at god-awful hours to make many trips domestically and internationally, got me through my graduate school classes at the “other UW” and made sure I didn’t nap too long.  As mentioned before, each alarm blast or radio volume explosion has been met with a less than delicate response from me to extinguish it.

Through all the rough handling, it’s never let me down. In the many cases I’ve overslept it’s been because of human error by forgetting how to program it. I can’t count the number of times I’ve set it for 6pm instead of 6 am! I have to also give thanks for the fail safe trick it displays in the event of power loss.  When power to the Dream Machine is cut, it gives one last belch of sound that always wakes me up and thus makes me aware of the outage. In other words, it’s never given me an excuse for being late, no matter the conditions.

For something that has been on 24 hours, 7 days a week for over 20 years it’s been a one of a kind appliance for me.  BUT, don’t just take MY word for it. What makes this even better is my wife has the SAME model Dream Machine that is actually a year older and it’s still working great, too. So, make that two satisfied Dream Machine owners!

Kursten and Ken's Dream Machines

The Dream Machines are getting a little less used these days since my wife and I have the challenges and often times joys of being awoken by our 2 year old daughter and 6 month old son.  While I can’t say that being woken up from nights that rarely seem long enough is ever enjoyable  I would like to thank you for making such a great product that has not only lasted a long time given the miles its travelled and the abuse it’s received.

It’s still ticking away or whatever it does to keep alive. I haven’t dropped it many years, by the way. I also wouldn’t dream of selling it.

Sincerely,

Ken

I’m not really sure who was the hockey fan in my household growing up that got the whole family into them but there we were several seasons watching every away game on KMSP and listening to every other game on KSTP radio.

With the exception the one Cup series home game, the only other home games I ever saw were in-person. The memories are fuzzy since I was just a little boy but the family made a weekend out of them. We’d travel all of 20 miles from Lino Lakes down to Bloomington and stay just across the parking lot from the Met Center. Our lodging was the dumpy/reverent/irreverent Thunderbird Hotel. The excitement of attending a game was followed closely by the fact my sister and I could run around in our bathing suits indoors all day and swim and play mini-golf in the middle of winter.

Anyways, we’d get to the Met early enough to see the shoot-around. This was when you actually got to see the players with their helmets off yet they weren’t fighting (yet). I distinctly remember Dino just firing pucks into the top of the lower level stands for the fans. Once the game was underway, there was nothing better than the crowd roaring for a goal (cue Kool & The Gang), a fight or a really good check. Cue the organ, too. I think they actually had a real one there.

Who was the guy that came out in the tux and sang the h-e-double-hockey-stick out of the national anthem? He always hit”home of the freeEEEEEEE!!!” just right, right?

The North Stars made it just once (during my heyday) to the Stanley Cup finals. They lost the series in 1981 to the New York Islanders in five games. (Mike Bossy, anyone?) However, they did win their one game at the Met. So cool to see it on TV with all those ads all over the boards and the colored seats. One of the more memorable moments came in the post-game locker room interviews afterward where, on live TV, one the players walked across the frame in their birthday suit. Was it Greg Smith’s bare ass? We never found out.

Another defining image of the Cup playoffs was that every player had a beard because of the superstition about not shaving until you get kicked out of the playoffs or win the whole thing. It was different look for some of the baby face players like Hartsie and Dino not so much a stretch for the mustachioed players like Payne, MacAdam, and Meloche.

My favorite player all-time was Al MacAdam. He seemed like the quiet type that did all the utility work. (The guy that took over for him at #25, Tony McKegney, was the only black player in the franchise’s history???)

Bobby Smith could do no wrong. Even on the rare occasion when he messed up he seemed to eventually and quickly make up for it. Plus, he loved him some Kemp’s Ice Cream!
Dino: My sister had a beefcake poster of him in her room but as long as he pissed off Secord he was alright with me. What was the deal with the “Dino the Dinosaur” shwag? I get the Flintstone’s reference but why did they choose a brontosaurus as the inflatable toy to go along with it? Was there some kind of Sinclair Oil cross-promotion going on?
Steve Payne: The moustache, that’s all I remember.
Craig Hartsburg and Curt Giles: Solid defensemen who rarely did anything to hurt the cause. Hartsie seemed to keep a post-retirement higher profile later on with his coaching. Just found out, he’s now coaching a Western Hockey League team up the interstate from Seattle in Everett.
Favorite goons: Willi Plett and Jack Carlson
Gilles Meloche always seemed to be cool under pressure and Donnie Beaupre just a punk kid. Don’t forget Rollie the Goalie!

Guys I loved to hate: Bossy, Secord, any of the Savards, any of the Sutters, Doug Wilson, Chelios, Eddie Olczyk, Belfour and the rest of the Blackhawks. Secord sucks!

The announcers were Bob Kurtz and Tom Reid. Hell, I just found out that they are still announcing for the Wild (a team I have never seen skate). But, we always had Al Shaver on the radio and that’s really all you needed. We often turned down the Tv volume to listen to his calls. Thanks to the these guys and all the Canadian players in the league, I was able to get a headstart on pronunciation for the French classes I would take years in the future in high school and college.

All of this nostalgia seemed to come to a head for me (literally) when I was traveling through the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport last year, I stopped in a sports clothing shop and there nestled in the back corner was North Stars garb. I bought a black hat without hesitation and I wear it with pride.

Like I said, I’ve never seen a Wild game in-person or otherwise. Do they do the fan experience right? Was there any respect shown to the green and gold when the Wild started?

Come to think of it,  my only other flirtation with pro sports fandom was dashed by the Seattle Supersonics leaving my adopted hometown much like the Stars. Weirder yet that Texas and Oklahoma border each other. But, that is another story. Funny, Seattle has a hockey team in name only as the Seattle Thunderbirds just moved last year to a suburb to play their games.

Thus, I’ve been widowed twice by pro sports. Perhaps I should stop following pro sports altogether, I seem to have a cursing effect! Maybe I should grow a beard until the North Stars come home.

Famous musicians are always asked in interviews about the first album they owned was who were their musical influences. I’m no musician but I would consider music my main hobby since I was kid through listening, reading or talking about it.

Many times I’ve thought about how I got to the place I am now with musical tastes. I started listening, REALLY listening, to music starting with what my parents had on in the car or the stereo at home. I didn’t have a choice in the matter so I can’t help but have those experiences as square one in my musical tastes.

After writing down some of those memories, I’m not as embarrassed as I thought I might be in some of those musical steps.

Additionally, after taking some time to list the bands and albums in the order by which I was exposed to them or chose them (see below), the progression seems to make sense. At least to me. There is a nearly constant stream of rock or rock-influenced music over the years.

I still actually have a lot of the early parental music in my collection if not only for the sake of nostalgia but some of it is still damn good.

Without further ado, in rough chronological order!

My parents’ music (1970s into early 1980s)
Seals and Croft
The Eagles – “Best of My Love” has got to be the first song I remember that reminds me of a specific place and time, Bloomington, MN in the summer of 1975)
Waylon Jennings
Willie Nelson
Simon and Garfunkel
Neil Diamond
Beatles
Chicago

My older sister’s music (early to mid 80s)
Several K-Tel records (“SuperSonic, “Powerplay” and “Rainbow”)
Prince (who in the Twin Cities didn’t have “Purple Rain”? The guitar solo from “Let’s Go Crazy” was something I just liked to listen to over and over. My musical tastes would return to that kind of stuff over and over through the years)
A-ha
Duran Duran
Limited Warranty (Twin Cities 30 and 40-somethings know this band)
Tears for Fears
U2, “Under A Blood Red Sky”
Hall and Oates (“Rock and Soul, Part 1”)

My music (mid to late 80s)
Michael Jackson (required listening when it came out and “Beat It” and “Billie Jean” still hold up really well)
Styx (“Kilroy Was Here”, my first album)
Rush (“Tom Sawyer” was the theme song of my favorite professional wrestler at the time. At the time I had heard them but not give them much consideration. This led me to buy “Exit…Stage Left” and buy a used “Grace Under Pressure” from a junior high friend, and, the rest is history)
Boston
Journey
Dokken
Van Halen
Ratt
Def Leppard
Europe
Bon Jovi
Cinderella
Whitesnake
Tesla
Joe Satriani
Pink Floyd
Metallica
Living Colour
Midnight Oil
The Smithereens

Early to mid 90s (College years)
The Police
The Steve Miller Band
R.E.M.
The Cult
U2
Pearl Jam
Eagles
Foreigner
INXS
Eric Clapton (Solo)
Black Crowes
John Mellencamp
Stevie Ray Vaughn
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Smashing Pumpkins

Mid-late 90s
Led Zeppelin
Foo Fighters
Weezer
Nirvana
Bruce Cockburn
At this point I gave up on radio stations and have yet to find many new bands or sounds that I can rally around.

What is your musical timeline? Have you looped back to the old stuff? Have you never looked back at those early influences? Please share!

Now, on the same theme of the bemoaning the death of the album, I want to talk about a type of album that’s not necessarily the opposite of the perfection but close.

First, I want to think of artists/bands that you like and have followed throughout their career. Their career should be long enough that they have a few (more than 3) albums under their belt.

Now that you have them in mind, is one of those albums something that was a departure from their musical direction or momentum? This album doesn’t have to suck but when you heard it you did not like it or really wanted it to be more like the “sound” they had established. Did they add synthesizers? Back up singers? Horns? Maybe you can give them a little credit for exploring their artistic side but you wonder “why did they have to let it out of the recording studio?”

Yes, I’m thinking of “Pop” by U2 and “Load” by Metallica,  “Van Halen III”, and the disco album from Kiss. What I’m talking about is the album that you couldn’t wait for its supporting tour to be over with so they can get in the studio to make the “comeback” album. I’m thinking of just one album but maybe the artist/band musically jumped the shark and haven’t come back.

Know what I’m talking about?

Share yours and why!

I wouldn’t say that Rage is my cup of tea but love Audioslave. Tom has some great charisma on stage! He is also a big fan of the musicians that played with him tonight. So fun to see him enjoying himself on stage off stage standing in the crowd.

Kramer and the local Blue Scholars seemed out of their element at the show. Us bunch of young to middle-age white guys didn’t seem to get it. BUT, that is part of the beauty of a jam session-oriented show like the Justice tour, eh? You can get exposed to music you wouldn’t otherwise. Maybe the Seattle crowds act a little too cool for their own room. Possibly a topic for another day.

Glad I got a chance to see Earle again. Last time was at the Woodland Park Zoo with a thousand kids in attendance. A dark club seemed more fitting to his music.

I suppose an almost Soundgarden reunion that includes a run-through of “Spoonman” in a Seattle club is all anyone should hope for and it was fun to see them together. How often does Thayil come out of hiding, anyways? Definitely surreal to see Tom, Kim, Ben and Matt on stage together.

Thanks C-flo for the invite. I always love to see live music especially when it’s played those obviously love their art. Glad I came and glad to know it benefitted a great cause. Even more poignat for me that I used to work in the homeless community in Seattle. I do get THAT!

Since the record album’s demise as a legitimate unit of music has been long talked about or simply declared dead because of the rise of iTunes and digital music,  I thought it would be a good time to reflect. In other words, since we’ll not likely see another surge in album popularity, it’s time to take stock in what we had.

Do you have a “perfect” album? What makes it a perfect album? If you have to think about it, doesn’t that mean it’s not perfect?

The topic of a perfect album has been done before on the blogosphere.  But, in this instance, this hip hop oriented blogger didn’t really flesh out what makes an album perfect. Even a corporate media blogger at the The Chicago Trib took a turn at it, too, and there are some good examples left by the commenters.

Here’s my take.

An old friend from high school days texted me last week, “I’m playing ‘Moving Pictures’ by Rush over and over and I’m not getting sick of it.” My response: “Because it’s a perfect album”.  I didn’t really think about it before I responded because I just knew it.  It’s not an opinion born out of competitive musical tastes but just a gut feeling I have for that album and several others.

Why is it a perfect album? Here are the rules that I just made up today with the help of my co-worker but also because all of the “perfect albums” I could think of in the last few hours share the same traits. It wasn’t hard.

My rules are:

1.  The album is an original collection of songs. No “greatest hits” of songs from other albums or live albums .
2.  You’ve never become sick of the album.
3.  The songs on the album fit together like a puzzle. But, it doesn’t have to literally be a concept album. Each song complements one another. For example, one song could be a lot less creative than the others but this in turn makes the other songs that much stronger.
4.  There could be a relatively stinky song on the album but, like point #4, it doesn’t stink enough to bring the album out of perfection.
5.  It doesn’t have to be an album by the same artists,  i.e. it can be a soundtrack.
6.  Nor does it have to an album of original material, i.e. it can be cover tunes.
7.  Most importantly… when you hear only one song off the album on the radio or on your MP3 player, you have a strong desire to hear the entire album because it just doesn’t feel right without doing so.

The point is that the songs feel right together, in the order by which they were decided by the artist or producer. It can capture a time your life, be technically groundbreaking or just shred but you think of the music as not just a couple good songs and the rest but rather as a whole unit.

Here’s my list of perfect albums so far, alpha by artist:

Boston, “Boston”
Bruce Cockburn, “Charity of Night”
Soundtrack, “Rush” (mostly Eric Clapton)
Foo Fighters, “The Color and The Shape”
Living Colour, “Vivid”
Metallica, “Master of Puppets”
Metallica, “…and Justice for All”
Prince, “Purple Rain”
R.E.M., “Green”
Rush, “Moving Pictures”
Rush, “Permanent Waves”
Tesla, “Mechanical Resonance” (added 4/5)
U2, “The Unforgettable Fire” (added 3/14)
Van Halen, “5150″
Van Halen, “Van Halen I”
Weezer, The “Blue” Album

What are YOUR “perfect albums”? What rules do you use to determine their perfection? Are they just perfect with no need for explanation?

This was the refrain from my classmates in my first graduate level communications class in the fall of 2005. It’s true, I had heard of MySpace but Facebook had yet to make its way to to me. At the time it was a social networking site for only students or those with an” .edu” address. I joined immediately and found only my cousin in Texas was on Facebook from my address book. Four years and 150 friends later, it’s an everyday event for me. Besides the normal crowd of local friends I have found a bunch of high school classmates that I haven’t talked to in 15-20 years. Most of these people I barely knew then and I’ve exchanged FB messages with only a few of them who I actually want to stay in touch with. The others just seem interested in increasing their friend numbers. I’m guilty of it, too. I just wanted to get “inside” some of their facebook pages to find out if they still lived in the hometown or got divorced or some other gossipy detail. Recently, I dumped about 20 of them. Only a coupole actually figured it out and requested to become friends again but I ignored them. I feel pretty good aobut it. I only so much time and energy.

Bacon is the man’s chocolate.

For the record, I have an 11 year old Black lab mutt named R.I.C.O. and I will miss him dearly when he dies. I’ve joked with friends that I’ll likely have to be on suicide watch because he’s been with me through thick and thin since 1997. With that said, I will give him a proper sendoff when the inevitable happens. I don’t want to be interned with him.

Also, in this year of economic downturn, Senator Jacobsen says this bill will not cost any money since it is a law that will affect private behavior. Except, of course, for all of the hours wasted in committees and so forth to consider such a dumb bill.

How about in this year of economic challenges, why don’t you not introduce bills that make you look like a jackass and make your constituents like me cringe.

My wife is encouraging me to run for the senate in my district to get this kook out of Olympia. My slogan could be “The Ken Who Isn’t a Krackpot” or something else appropriately stupid.