What was the THE album that truly changed your life to make you want to play guitar?

equalsql

chillidoggy;31539" said:

Interesting that there's quite a few Slade Alive's in there. One of my all-time favourites, proof that Slade was a serious rock band, and Noddy Holder's voice was awesome.

 Oh yeah. That was one hell of an album. I remember at the time I couldn't get my head around the difference between them on TOTP and what I was hearing on THAT LP!

vasselmeyer

chillidoggy said:

Interesting that there's quite a few Slade Alive's in there. One of my all-time favourites, proof that Slade was a serious rock band, and Noddy Holder's voice was awesome.

I would argue that Slade were at least the equal of The Faces in terms of songwriting. They somehow got this cartoonish image that has defined them for people. Criminally underrated.

Rocker

Jonny Cash.  As a child I thought that Jonny did all the guitar playing, it was years later I found out that the chugga chugga beat was played by Luther Perkins.  Anyway I wanted to be Jonny Cash.  Even now my default strumming pattern is dum diddy dum as per Luther Perkins [rather my take on what Luther Perkins played which may or may not be the same thing]

Grunfeld

U.F.O.  "Strangers In The Night" 

I'd been playing guitar for a bit already, just cos of the punk thing and the desire to show off and get girls, but "Strangers..." was the album that made we want to play better.

What I didn't realise for way too long was you're not automatically entitled to play like that.  But be able to play to some kind of standard then I'd have to put some effort into it.  Still got miles to go.

Kebabkid

axisus;31482" said:

I used to listen to Tommy Vance's Friday night rock show all the time (wish there was still a great show like that!). The one thing that blew me away was Stevie Ray Vaughan live at Reading (83 I think?). Tommy introduced it saying "unbelievably, this is just one guitar ..." SRV ripped into Testify and I was mesmerised! It was the first time I listened to music and thought about the guitar player rather than the music. It was so organic, visceral, tangible .... it was about one man forcing the guitar to submit to his will and making it scream for him.

Big +1 to The Friday Rock Show. So many fantastic introductions to bands/music and such an entertaining show!

Zodiac51

Grunfeld said:

U.F.O.  "Strangers In The Night" 

I'd been playing guitar for a bit already, just cos of the punk thing and the desire to show off and get girls, but "Strangers..." was the album that made we want to play better.

What I didn't realise for way too long was you're not automatically entitled to play like that.  But be able to play to some kind of standard then I'd have to put some effort into it.  Still got miles to go.

YES YES YES!!!!!!!! ^ Wot he said.. beat me to it!

Bellycaster

Mine was a Video, not an Album. I watched Queen's Greatest Flix when I was 14 and I wanted a Guitar straight away. I went out and bought Queen's Greatest hits after and had to wait till Xmas for the Guitar. Soon after that, Iron Maiden kept me hooked on Guitars. So earliest influences are Brian May, Dave Murray and Adrian Smith.

Wolftone

Hello! - The Quo

I still have a love affair with the Telecaster forty years on.

littlegreenman

I just dabbled in guitar until I heard (at around the same time) Abraxas by Santana and Devotion by John McLaughlin. Gave me the kick in the pants I needed to start playing seriously.

And then similarly a few years later with Surfing with the Alien and Passion and Warfare.

John_P

Misplaced Childhood by Marillion.    I've almsto started to lapse as a fan after the recent albums,  but at the time I was hooked on listening to it and the first time that I had really noticed the guitar playing as opposed to it just being music.
By coincidence, I lived near Whitby at the time and it turned out I had the same tutor at school as Steve Rothery and loads of friends in common...   everyone else knew who this hero was and took it for granted.   He'll always be one of the greats imho and he is such a nice guy as well.

Deadman

I was 11 when I first heard The Jam's 'All mod cons' and I fell in love with Rick 330's. So much so I used to make them out of cardboard and paint them. It wasn't until I was 21, 10 years later, on the release of 'Under the bridge' by RHCP that I bought my first guitar. The album Bloodsugarsexmagik was the catalyst for me. I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever heard.

Deadman

Wolftone;31749" said:

Hello! - The Quo

I still have a love affair with the Telecaster forty years on.

I've been to John Coghlan's house! He's a lovely fella.

the_jaffa

There was a very clear tipping point for me.  Overnight I went from recording crappy chart tunes off the radio to wanting to be a guitarist.  Combination of the music, the B+W pic on the back cover, the attitude, me being 15 so pretty impressionable and all the stars aligning all at once I think.

This album was it and still is for me:

OilCityPickups

We had a second hand 'junk shop' up the road from my folks house. It was in an old church building ... and was stuffed with old fridges, airguns hung on the walls, and a big glass cabinet full of old watches and bric-a-brac. Rebember the 'old building' smell and especially the big rack of records. It was 1973 (I think), I was 14, and I only had singles at home for my PYE mono record player. That fateful day I walked out with Masters Of Reality by Black Sabbath ... it looked cool with the wobbly writing and the 'Vertigo' label so I bought on a whim. I'd never heard Sabbath before ... so you can imagine the shock of hearing the 'atomic weight' intro of Sweet Leaf ... I was hooked ... I learned every Iommi riff I could 

ICBM

Wolftone;31749" said:

Hello! - The Quo

That's a fantastic album. I got into them a little later than Deep Purple... so not my first influence as a guitar player. I still play more like Rick than Ritchie though .

ChrisMusic

I had started playing a bit before, but living in the sticks, there wasn't much going on.

The first real concert I remember going to was Focus at the Rainbow, May 1973, which was immortalised with a recording, thank god.

I was just blown away.  Could you really do all that stuff with a guitar?

There wasn't even video back then, let alone DVDs or the InterWeb, so learning the techniques etc was tough back then.  (life was tough -cue Monty Python sketch)

But I cannot overstate the impact it had on me, or Jan Akkerman's mastery of the guitar.  (There really weren't that many real players back then either, so it had real impact on me)

Hocus Pocus, which was recently used for a Nike commercial, this is a great version off of US TV Gladdys Knight show in 1973.

" Best live rock peformance ever! Focus- Hocus Pocus (''73) Killer-- " so it says on YouTube.

- - - - -  

Jan Akkerman remains both hero and nemesis.  A couple of years playing guitar and I had that to aspire to !    What was a poor kid to do?

This is one track, in any guise, which I would love to have in the Song Analysis discussion @Clarky.

I still have a few old ghosts to lay to rest.

the whole performance is here, 44mins of - Focus - Live at the Rainbow

- - - - -  

equalsql

ChrisMusic said:

The first real concert I remember going to was Focus at the Rainbow, May 1973, which was immortalised with a recording, thank god.

Whoa you were at that concert. I had the album and literately wore it out. Akkerman's solos on the Focus II track still sends chills up my spine to this day.

ChrisMusic

equalsql said:

ChrisMusic said:

The first real concert I remember going to was Focus at the Rainbow, May 1973, which was immortalised with a recording, thank god.

Whoa you were at that concert. I had the album and literately wore it out. Akkerman's solos on the Focus II track still sends chills up my spine to this day.

I sure was, it was a day that changed my life.  Just amazing playing.

I put the album onto reel to reel tape and played that to death.  Still have the vinyl somewhere.

There was a theory going around that you could study in your sleep, so that was put on night after night, to play for as long as the tape lasted, and then again if I woke in the night.  God knows what my poor parents thought, they never said a thing, luckily.

I vainly hoped that just a bit of technique or approach would rub off on me.

It feels good after all this time to see Akkerman's name on a forum like this, nice to share too.  

Good idea for a discussion @equalsql, I am so glad you liked it too, nice one.

monquixote

There are two things for me, both from around the same time.

I grew up in the 80's when as far as the charts were concerned guitars didn't exist. I know for you guys who were born in the 70's you were probably drinking from the fountain of shred in the 80's, but I never heard anything like that on Radio 1 (I don't think I heard EVH until my teens). 

For a kid the music world was owned by PWL and the Casio keyboard shit they pushed out. 

I didn't really even understand what a guitar sounded like because of things like Bros where the video would show them playing guitars and drums, but the song was 100% keyboards. 

It's hard to express to younger people what the world was like back then with no Youtube/Spotify or Kerrang TV etc. Liking metal/rock was genuinely an underground thing and unless you hunted it down you just didn't hear it. 

I vaguely became aware of rock music, but the only stuff that entered into my world was Meatloaf and Bonjovi which seemed unsatisfying and a bit limp. 

A friend of mine introduced me to Kiss Alive and all of a sudden it was like a jigsaw piece fell into place (I'm talking early 70's raw glam rock Kiss not shit 80's Kiss). The staccato guitar style of Ace Frehley just spoke to me and I loved how all their songs were about shagging and parties. 

The second and equal experience was another mate who did me a tape with Black Sabbath on one side and Paranoid on the other. I'd just bought a guitar and he showed me how to drop tune, explained tab, and then wrote out all the classic Iommi riffs from the first two albums so they could be played with one finger. That kept me going for my first 6 months. 

littlegreenman

Forgot all about Hocus Pocus. I was probably about 15 when I first saw that and it was a proper mindfuck. Solo-ing with chords? The man's a lunatic! Probably heard FZ's Absolutely Free in the same living room right about the same time. Also cemented guitar in my life.

I think that I hear new albums that make we want to play guitar just as much as I did back then. i.e. rarely, but when they do crop up it's always nice.