Well, there I am drowning in my music collection. Before I talk about my OCD (obsessive collection disorder), let me first share my own music. in the early 90s, I collaborated with an amazing electronic keyboard player named Savvas Ysatis. We were an Erasure-esque duo called Mind in Motion. We wrote dozens of songs and went into the studio with a producer and did official recordings of a couple of our songs. The first song here is called “Stages.” This is our synthpop ‘ballad’ about how the changes of the seasons affect us emotionally. All vocals are by yours truly, and Savvas handles all the phenomenal instrumentation:
Mind in Motion - StagesThe second track is our ‘commercial’ dance song. Total pop cheese. Look out for the homage to Erasure:
Mind in Motion - I Am What I Am
Now, back to my OCD. Music is my photo album. Each song is a snapshot of the sights, sounds, and scents during a moment in my life. (How sappy is that? Comes from listening to too much Carpenters and Manilow in the 70s.)
I stopped keeping track of how many CDs and vinyl LPs I have years ago. Thanks to the treasures that can be found on the internet, new music was arriving in the mail faster than I could keep count. Last tally in the year 2,000 had me at about 10,000 pieces. To give you an idea of the depths of the obsession, these are pictures of my music room. Almost the entire lower level of our house is dedicated to my music, and the bar has been converted into my “DJ booth” (see that picture below).
The earliest memories I have of popular music in my life is…early! I remember my brother being obsessed with Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” when it came out—I myself was mesmerized and bewildered by the line “clouds in my coffee”. I also clearly recall a long ride home from my aunt’s house upstate, sitting on my mother’s lap in the passenger seat of our van, watching torrential rain hit the windshield and singing along with Mom to the Carpenters “Sing.” It so happens that both of these songs peaked on the pop charts in early 1973. So I would have been a month or two short of my fourth birthday. I was hooked on radio.
An odd assortment of musical styles surrounded me. My oldest brother started in the Doors and Hendrix era—very acid and psychedelic. Second oldest brother was all about the 70s, listening to Queen, Kiss and Heart. My mother and father were into Pink Floyd, the Moody Blues and ELO, with a history of The Supremes, The Beatles and other 60s pop groups. And my third brother, only two years my senior, was becoming attached to mainstream pop, like Fleetwood Mac and K.C. and the Sunshine Band.
While these outside forces had a huge impact on my musical range, I guess my own musical likes were out of my control as a gay boy. I was enraptured with singing to soundtracks like The Wizard of Oz and West Side Story, and was also drawn to disco: Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Village People, Abba. At eight years old in 1977, I was too young to see an R rated film, but I studied every commercial for Saturday Night Fever, and before long I was mimicking all of John Travolta’s dance moves. My mother was astounded—and immediately took to plopping me in the middle of the living room floor during family gatherings and dropping the needle into the groove of “Stayin’ Alive.”
I sang the Grease soundtrack ad nauseum in 1978. My obsession with Olivia Newton-John carried me through the early 80s, a one-way ticket to Boy George, Madonna, George Michael. I had also became drawn to this other kind of music in the late 70s, thanks to a crossover track called “Heart of Glass.” Blondie introduced me to that perfect blend of disco and rock, synths and guitars. New wave!
As this was all going on, I convinced myself to join the chorus in elementary school, despite there being only one other boy involved. How excited I was to enter junior high a year later to find a chorus full of other boys, even if none of them was as dedicated as me. By the time I got to high school, I was doing all the school musicals and being exposed to classical music, show tunes, and standards.
Next came a very Pretty in Pink job at a record store, where I found myself under the wings of a bunch of punks who taught me a thing or two about the goth side of new wave, mocking my love of Erasure’s sugary synthpop (yet still allowing me a chance at the in-store turntable to play my ‘gay’ dance selections).
By the end of the 80s, as I enrolled in college as a music major, I’d started hitting the industrial scene. Segueing into the 90s, industrial club DJs started mixing in more danceable yet still dark sounding tracks every now and then. Techno. As grunge hit the radio waves, I went underground at the clubs, raving to the fastest screeching synth riffs coming out of Europe. That was an incredible and fleeting moment in the summer of 1992. Techno died faster than rockers still want to believe disco had. But the dance scene was just starting to pick up again. One night spent at a big club in New York City and I was hooked on deep and hardhouse, which carried me into the new millennium. And the first decade of the 2000s found me obsessing over trance, electro house and the hot modern bands who model their music after 80s new wave.
While club music is such a major influence in my music buying, the pop always remains a top priority. Along with all the other music that fills my vast collection, I ultimately have one major rule: I must own every single top ten hit released since the start of the rock n’ roll era in 1955, preferably on CD. Once again thanks to the internet and the incredible research that can be done with it, I can proudly say….
I own every single Top 10 pop hit from the ‘rock n’ roll era’, 1955 to the present.
And so this loser spends loads of time on Amazon reviewing CDs in a way that I hope will benefit other serious collectors. You won’t find any “This band rocks!” or “This singer SUX!” reviews from me. I give detailed information about CD tracks: song lengths, specific remixes, sound quality and occasionally, personal opinions about particular tracks. It’s simply the information I hope to find from other reviewers when I’m looking to buy a CD. You can peruse my Amazon reviews here: MY MUSIC REVIEWS.
