No. 51

Pink - Aerosmith (1998) Video - There are a small handful of songs that were responsible for completely changing the direction of my musical voyage. This is one of them. For a few months in the summer of '99 this was my favorite song in the world. As a result of this song, Aerosmith was my favorite band for the next several years. You know the feeling you have when a song is so catchy that you can't wait for it to end so you can begin it again? Pink gave me that feeling, only I didn't have the CD, and anyway I couldn't listen to it around my parents anyway.

Aerosmith's Nine Lives is an eternally underrated CD. When I got my grubby little hands on that album, it was, I would imagine, like the first time trying heroin. To quote Steve Martin in The Jerk, "if this out there, then what else must be?" Unfortunately the CD, which was borrowed, had a huge scratch in the middle of Pink so I could only listen to about the first 30 seconds before static set in. No matter, the opening harmonica is still one of my favorite moments of any song. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of leaving it in the CD player where my Dad would encounter it, rather than the Paul Harvey he was anticipating.

As I awoke, listened to the opening bars of the opening track, The Farm, which opens with a sarcastic line from Wizard of Oz and phases into a primal Steven Tyler scream, I suddenly realized what was about to happen. Suddenly I heard the sound of buttons being pulverized in an effort to remove the devil's music from his stereo. I sat bolt upright in bed, paralyzed by fear, both that the CD would be destroyed and that I might have the very large stereo hurled at me. As luck would have it, he found the right button and quickly became entranced with a Paul Harvey commercial, to which he so seamlessly fades. My brother's Queen and Dr. Dre CD's had not been as fortunate.