Framing DeLorean: A Review

July 23, 2020October 29, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

John Zachary DeLorean’s now historic tale has three bullet points, fraud, embezzlement, and an embarrassing cocaine bust. Those of us who knew next to nothing about the story, prior to watching Framing DeLorean, knew John DeLorean built a “car of the future” that few, outside the producers of the movie Back to the Future purchased. We read those “Metoric Rise and Dramatic fall” magazine articles. We heard that story on late-night talk shows, and we repeated the jokes that dropped from it, “The DMC DeLorean looks great … from the outside. If you’re on the inside though, you’re probably not going to think that, because you might not be able to get out.” Bottom line, we thought, the main character depicted in the now historic tale of John DeLorean was a bad guy, on par with Oliver Stone’s bad guy Gordon Gecko. After watching Framing DeLorean, the viewer finds that it’s a lot more complicated than all that. We see an ambitious, talented man who got so caught up in the tent poles of glory and fame that he ended up kicking them all down to bring the tent down on himself? We find ourselves asking the questions was the DMC DeLorean a fraud perpetuated on the public, or did its engineer/CEO fear what others might think of him so much that he allegedly engaged in fraudulent activity to try to prevent others from seeing him for who he really was? Even if he wasn’t what they suspected?

No one cares, you say, because law enforcement officials believed he engaged in fraud, and they gathered enough evidence to successfully indict him on those charges. They also arrested DeLorean after a sting operation, in which they caught him, on tape, taking part in proposal to sell cocaine. A jury found him not guilty in both cases, but no one cares. The charges, alone, damaged his legacy beyond repair. He became a laughing stock, and that was the end of the story as far as we were concerned. As detailed in the documentary Framing DeLorean, the full story is so much more complicated than that. The first two-thirds of the movie, depicts an ambitious, talented man chasing an impossible dream, and the final portions detail what happened when that dream wasn’t realized as flawlessly as the genius thought it should’ve been.

No one in the film disputes the notion that John DeLorean was an ingenious and wildly successful engineer. After succeeding beyond his dreams as an engineer at General Motors (GM), DeLorean could’ve landed just about any job he wanted in the automotive industry. He decided, instead, to leave the security of his job at GM, and employment altogether, to pursue the impossible dream of beating the Big Three in the automotive industry at their own game. He also left behind the structure that he had at GM (and by the end of the film, some viewers might say this is key), and the system of checks and balances GM exerted on his designs. The final portions of the documentary cover what happens to a dream, when a man hits a series of roadblocks, and he is not as capable as those in the foundational structure at GM, who could’ve helped him solve them.

When DeLorean left a secure job at GM, he took a team of talented, some say brilliant, minds with him. Those brilliant minds thought DeLorean was so brilliant that they left their own secure jobs to make history with him. Private investors considered him such a genius that they scrambled to gather whatever funds they could find to back whatever project John DeLorean chose to pursue. He also received $140 million, in public funds, from Great Britain for the work he proposed to do in Northern Ireland, and he had the sentiments of the entire country of Northern Ireland behind him. A majority of Northern Ireland residents still consider John DeLorean a hero for everything he did to revive the economy of their then war-torn country. The employees he hired in Northern Ireland considered working for DeLorean a “dream job”. All conditions remaining constant, those workers probably would’ve worked for DeLorean for the next twenty to thirty years. DeLorean also convinced what many considered a brilliant engineer, named Bill Collins, to follow him from GM to the DeLorean Motor Company (DMC). Collins was purported to be the kind of genius who could make all of John DeLorean’s dreams come true, and he could augment some of the particulars of DeLorean’s dreams to make the DMC DeLorean a top performer.

Even with all that behind him, we learn that the talking heads interviewed for the documentary considered DeLorean’s dream improbable. During that era, becoming a car manufacturer was near impossible, they said. The Big Three, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler controlled so much market share that everyone involved in the industry considered it laughable, even for a genius on DeLorean’s level to think he could even carve out a small niche. No person, in their right mind, would attempt to go it alone, they said. Against everyone’s advice, John DeLorean tried it, and he nearly did it. He nearly accomplished the impossible dream.

To accomplish such an impossible dream, one has to have an unusual amount of confidence, and John DeLorean obviously did … in the beginning. When he experienced some roadblocks, and the talking heads in the documentary suggest that most of these roadblocks were manageable, DeLorean’s unusual level of confidence began to waver. Did he begin to see the impossible dream for what it was?

How many people love to play “poke the genius” in scenarios such as these? “He’s a genius, you say? Did you know that once you close those beautiful gull-wing doors, you can’t get out?” “Did you know that critics suggest that the performance and power of the car are not as advertised? Genius you say? I say piffle.” Americans say that Americans love to build someone up only tear them down, but how many of us truly adore genius? We might use the ingenious products of Apple, for example, but we prefer to gripe about the legendary product’s few, relatively insignificant flaws.

How many people tell us that our dreams are unrealistic? How many of us can weather those storms no matter what hurdles cross our path? How many of us truly believe we can accomplish that dream? How many of us eventually find ourselves beat down by all of the naysayers telling us that our dreams are unrealistic?

When the DeLorean DMC finally hit the market, after eight grueling years, it hit a major roadblock. People weren’t buying the car. The car hit the market during a recession, and few were buying brand new cars, and critics began slamming the car for a variety of reasons, including the idea that it didn’t test well.

“All John DeLorean had to do, at this point, was halt production of the car and fix the errors [exposed in the tests],” one of the talking heads said in the documentary.

Those words probably haunted John DeLorean for the rest of his life. For a litany of reasons that might forecast the actions of John DeLorean, he didn’t halt production. This is the pivotal part of the story, and I’m quite sure this is the point where the cynical among us began sniffing out the fraud. Why didn’t he just halt production? It might have cost him millions to do so, but those of us who know the end result know that this would prove the ultimate downfall of the DMC DeLorean car. This gap in the story line requires explanation, and when we don’t receive it, we fill it in. When we fill it in, we fill it with information we already know. We know that at the end of the story, John DeLorean will go down for fraud, so this is the first chink in the armor, and the place where the fraud begins.

Another key point in the documentary involves the suggestion that DeLorean secured enough money from private investors to save the company. His brilliant engineer, Bill Collins, would tell us that a suspicious clause in a contract, led to him to be somewhat suspicious, but no one else saw any telltale signs of possible fraudulent activity. The talking heads in the documentary express their confusion over what DeLorean allegedly did with the investor’s money (again, a jury of his peers found him not guilty), because they suggest he had enough to save the company. The details are either a bit sketchy, or it’s difficult to follow talk of money, but it appears as though DeLorean secured the necessary funds from investors, he embezzled it, and then he agreed to take part in the sale of cocaine to replace the investor’s money he stole. (A jury found DeLorean not guilty of attempting to sell cocaine, but he was caught, on tape, in an FBI sting operation.)

One plus one equals two and a group of accountants found the missing investor money that John DeLorean hid in various accounts. We were right. This man was a fraud. The question we keep coming back to throughout Framing DeLorean is, was he fraudulent all along, or did he get too caught up in being a successful genius and a renegade who decided he was the one to take on the Big Three of the automotive industry? Did he love the fame, fortune, and the accompanying family life he enjoyed so much that his passion for the DMC DeLorean diminished by comparison? Did he love his pep rally presentations so much that he didn’t want to taint the character he created and others adored, and he didn’t want to give any “poke the genius” players material with a production delay to fix the structural errors of the car? We can guess that whole idea of structural errors and production delays are a pain in the tailbone for auto manufacturers. We can guess that testers always find something, because that’s their job, and a big-idea-genius-engineer often mischaracterizes their findings so often that he begins dismissing so many of them that he ends up dismissing all of them.

Was John DeLorean a victim of big-idea-guy disease? Big idea guys who turn into acclaimed geniuses often have a difficult time dealing with the minutiae of their craft. Big idea guys enjoy stepping on a stage to present their big ideas to their audience. The other guys, guys like Bill Simmons, often prefer to execute their genius in the shadow of the glitz and glamor of the big guys. In DeLorean’s former world, as an engineer in the Pontiac subdivision of GM, he had a number of little guys check and balance his idea on his designs before they rolled off the assembly line. He probably took that part of the process for granted as an engineer, but when he became a CEO he couldn’t ignore that part of the process anymore, and it appears as though he did. We can guess that the star child engineer at GM grew tired of everyone questioning him and diminishing his status, and that that drove him to go it alone. At GM, he probably felt like a Rottweiler in a world of Yorkies nipping at his heels. When he opened the doors to the DeLorean Motor Company, he began building a car of the future, and when those pesky Yorkies began telling him that the car’s performance and power weren’t as advertised and the gall wing doors had a tendency to lock up and prevent exit, he considered these issues small matters in the grand scheme of things. Who cares that the car may not be as powerful as critics would prefer, we’re selling Shangri-La here. When DeLorean was an engineer at GM, he could be a big idea man, because he had a team of engineers and higher ups who would shoulder most of that mindless minutia, and he could be the big idea genius who soaked in all the accolades of the finished product.

Take everything we’ve discussed thus far and add an unbelievable dose of pressure on top. He probably placed most of the pressure on himself to maintain his star status, but we have to imagine that he felt pressure from the family to maintain the lifestyle. Add to that, the pressure of having someone like Johnny Carson as a private investor. Having Carson on board was probably a boon in the beginning, as all DeLorean had to say was, “Carson’s on board,” to entice future investors. That line alone, probably quintupled his investments. When matters go awry, as they did for DeLorean, he likely feared Carson using his late-night show to exact revenge. Coupled with all that, was the idea that Britain invested $140 million, and DeLorean had the economy of Northern Ireland counting on his success. That unbelievable amount of pressure might have played a role in John DeLorean eventually doing what he did.

The final truth is we’ll never know why DeLorean did what he did, but the otherwise unwatchable movie Game Change served up a quote that sums John DeLorean up well. When speaking of why presidential candidate John McCain does what he does to try to have even his most ardent adversaries love him, his campaign adviser says, “If we could explain why they do the things they do, we’d probably have more of them.”

Is it possible that John Zachary DeLorean was the equivalent of an early 20th Century huckster? Of course it’s possible, but I don’t see how anyone can approach the full story of DeLorean’s career, with an open mind, and walk away thinking it’s probable that he stepped out of the offices of GM set to defraud the world.

When I watched Framing DeLorean, I did not think of Oliver Stone’s malevolent Wall Street character Gordon Gecko, and I did not think about one of the main characters of Back to the Future, the DMC DeLorean. Framing DeLorean reminded me of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo. Like Fargo character Jerry Lundegaard, John DeLorean finds himself falling prey to a series of self-inflicted ramifications based on ramifications that resulted from other ramifications from his prior actions. Like Jerry Lundegaard, if Delorean did that one thing, just one, (halt production and fix the errors) he could’ve solved most of his problems early on, changed his history and his bio, but for whatever reason (ego, he was already in too deep with investors, or he cherished his celebrity stature of his genius too much) he wouldn’t or couldn’t do it.

A Review of the Netflix Series: Home Game

July 6, 2020December 8, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

Most of us love sports, yet we never bother to ask why. The wide variety of answers for why we love sports might never be apparent to us, until we meet someone who doesn’t. We might not be able to learn why we love sports by watching the Netflix series Home Game, and it won’t curb our appetite for specific sports, but it will show the uncomplicated love some people have for their sport, and it might remind us why we love ours.

Home Game’s documentary about Florence, Italy’s sport of Calico Storico will not satisfy anyone who misses American football or rugby. The documentary about the Kyrgystan sport of Kok Boru will not satisfy anyone who misses basketball or polo, and a horseracing fanatic is probably not going to experience satisfaction watching riders pushing water buffalo through a flooded rice field, in Bali’s sport Makepung Lampit. What we will see are the staples of sport. We’ll see the passion, determination, and the temerity it takes to conquer an opponent. We also see an element of sports that we don’t talk about enough, the arduous, sometimes excruciating training it can take to become a champion. Our initial response might be to view some of the games depicted in these episodes as silly, particularly the Makepung Lampit sport that involves throwing a dead goat in a large, cement vase, but from that vantage point, all sports seem silly. In many first world countries, ten guys try to force a ball through a hoop in basketball. In the third world country of Kyrgyzstan, four guys try to force a dead goat into a large, cement vase. What’s the difference? Would the Kyrgyz or the Balinese people view the idea that first world sports involve crossing lines and putting balls and pucks in goals of various sizes silly too? What would they think of the sport that involves an athlete putting a ball in a can from a great distance, in as few attempts as possible? The point is that we can view all sports as silly on a micro level, but on a macro level they but a vehicle for displaying discipline, temerity, athletic prowess.

We can be sure the documentarians of Home Game did not choose the relatively obscure sports they did to help those sports achieve more popularity, and I doubt the sports will gain a greater following. It’s more likely that they chose the most obscure sports they did to examine the psychology of sports through an alternative lens. When we hear/read interviews of our favorite top tier athletes, they often use boilerplate language that becomes so common we don’t remember much of what they said five minutes after the interview is complete. It might have something to do with the fact that almost all of these episodes deal with sports in different countries, but they appear to give fresh insight into the art of competition, and the desire to win. English is not the native tongue of most of the competitors in the interviews, but we realize that the desire, the will, and the temerity it takes to win and eventually become a champion are a universal language. Most of the episodes require subtitles, and while that might turn some viewers off, it’s equivalent to watching sports with the volume off.

In one episode, we meet a champion named Guyga. Guyga is the champion of West Kinashasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s version of WWF that they call Catch Fetiche. We see kids and teenagers triumphantly run alongside Guyga. We see him train, we hear him talk about his training, and we witness his drive to be the best. After meeting Guyga, the documentarians introduce us to other Catch Fetiche wrestlers, and they engage in similar rhetoric. It’s similar, but for reasons we can’t put our finger on, it’s different. There was something there, and we missed it, so we rewind back to the introduction of Guyga. We see the difference in his walk, this time, and we know we’ve seen that stride before. It’s Mike Tyson entering the ring in the late 80’s, it’s Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan in the 90’s. It’s a champion at his peak. It’s in his shoulders when he walks, and in his stride. When we see Guyga’s face again, we see, without knowing anything else about the sport of Catch Fetiche that Guyga is its champion. In a later shot, Guyga flexes before the camera, and his musculature is impressive, but his face is what we find captivating. He doesn’t appear as thrilled to be on camera as the rest of us are, but he doesn’t shy away from it either. His far off stare suggests he’s seen battle many times before, and he wins far more often than he loses. The Congolese who run with him make a big fuss about him, and again, he doesn’t appear to need their adulation, but he doesn’t shy away from it either. He’s accustomed to it. He’s accustomed to glory. His stride, and his demeanor, reminds us of the quarterback of our state champion high school football team, the Heisman Trophy winner in college, and the MVP in the NFL. We recognize that for all the tangibles we attain from athletic pursuit, an intangible quality reveals itself in the walk and the face of a champion.

If Guyga decided to retire from the Congolese, voodoo version of the WWF, Catch Fetiche, and he moved to America, and worked in a cubicle next to ours, we’d know there was something different about him. “What’s up with you?” we’d say. “You’re the new guy, yet you walk around the office like a rooster in a henhouse.”

“I used to be a champion in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” he’d say. “Have you ever heard of Catch Fetiche? No one around here has, I used to be the champion of it.”

“I knew it,” we’d say. “I knew there was something different about you.”

In the roller derby episode from Austin, Texas, we see some subtle contrasts between Guyga and the Mad Maxican. After witnessing the glory of an individual champion who has it dripping from every pore, we listen to the roller derby team members speak, and we play a game called spot the champion. We might know more about roller derby than we do Catch Fetiche, but we still know very little. After witnessing Guyga, we think we can spot the look of a champion from a mile away. We think we see it on the face of a key player, who calls herself Ninja Please. The meeker Mad Maxican doesn’t quite have the confident/arrogant demeanor about her that Ninja Please did. Yet, when they take the floor, the Mad Maxican thoroughly outperforms Ninja Please. Why were so wrong about the Mad Maxican? Does it have something to do with the elevated expectations we have when someone says all the right things, as the Ninja Please character did? Does it have something to do with the idea that women, in general, are more humble, and harder to read in this sense, or does it have something to do with the difference between a team player and one who achieves individual glory? Is there an unsung player on the Mad Maxican’s team, who makes her success possible? Is this unsung hero equivalent to an all-star guard on the line of an NFL team, without whom the stars on the team couldn’t achieve half the success they do? We don’t know, because the documentarians don’t delve into those particulars. Perhaps, the Mad Maxican has a quiet confidence about her that doesn’t shine through in interviews. Whatever the case is, we see the contrast of individual successes can have on a person like Guyga and the team success the Mad Maxican enjoys.

In an episode that covers The Highland Games, in Scotland, the documentarians introduce us to a former champion training an individual who wants to become a future champion. We see the faded glory in that former champion’s face. The athletic achievements of his past instill in him an apparent lifelong confidence, but there’s something missing in his face. We see how much he misses the glory of being a champion. We see the “Youth is wasted on the young” Churchill quote personified in the man that suggests the former champion wishes he appreciated his moment in the sun more.

The episode that Netflix used to promote the series and the one that appears to be garnering most of the critical attention is the first episode in the series depicting a sport called Calico Storico (historical football in English). Calico Storico is the equivalent of rugby meets martial arts. There are linemen who fight on the front line, as in American football, and two ball carriers. The ball carriers attempt to drop a ball in a field-length net. Four teams fight to be champions of Florence, Italy. There’s no money involved, just the pride of the players. The prize for victory is a cow. They don’t slaughter the cow to triumphantly eat it. They simply just walk down the street with it, in a victory parade. Some criticize this episode as a bunch of meatheads plowing into each other, but that criticism misses the mark. Those critics don’t see the passion, the will, or the sheer determination these men put into achieving victory. They prefer to see the sport through a political lens. If the documentarians chose to focus on a woman attempting to enter into Calico Storico, these critics would enjoy the episode more, but there is very little politics in any of the documentaries of Home Game. The documentaries choose to place their focus on the simplicity of athletic competition and athletic achievement. As opposed to modern American football players, the athletes in Calico Storico love their ultra-violent sport so much that they want their children to play in it. One athlete chooses to live in a specific part of the country, so his kid would have a chance to play for the team he did. They suffer minor to severe injuries for their sport, but the prospect of such injuries doesn’t diminish their love of the game.

The beauty of Home Game beauty is that it reminds us of the unadulterated love of sports. Their love of sports calls to mind the prima donnas of most sports who take their status as a top-tier athlete for granted. If some of their athletes depicted in these documentaries play their beloved sport for money, the documentarians do not mention it in the episodes. The conditions of the countries of most of these documentaries suggest that if the athletes make any money, it’s a relatively paltry sum and not the reason they play the game. The documentarians focus each episode on the beauty of sport without much distraction. Almost all of the sports depicted are unique to our experience, but they detail in the faces of fans and athletes alike, that the language of sports is universal.

Dissected properly, just about every episode of Home Game teaches us a different element of sports that we might not have considered before. They provide us an outsider-looking-in perspective of what it means for the athletes to compete, what it takes to win, and what it means, to them, to become a champion. We see the captivated fans in the stands celebrating goals of a game hundreds to thousands years old. As we watch their game, we see the thrill of their favorite team scoring a goal, the disappointment of seeing their team scored on, the thrills they experience after victory and the agony of defeat. We see ourselves, from their perspective, we remember vicariously enjoying and celebrating the athletic accomplishments of others, and we realize how much we miss it. We appreciate their love of sport from a distance, and it touches us in a very familiar place at the same time.

The Organically Weird, Strange, and Just Plain Special Music I Enjoy

May 17, 2020August 2, 2023 Rilaly1 Comment

This is not a complete list of my favorite albums of all time. To make that list, I would have to include popular, mainstream albums. Saying that I enjoy popular, mainstream albums might get me kicked out of some clubs, but I do like some of them. I just find it less interesting, and redundant, to write about them. This is a piece about some relatively obscure albums that I love so much that those who care about me ask me not to play in front of friends they hope to impress. I write the term relatively obscure because some on the list are certified platinum, and some might consider it odd to list any platinum selling album obscure. Others might see some of the albums listed here and say they are not obscure by any stretch of the imagination. My excuse for listing them is that age has led some of these albums to the dustbin of history, and experience has informed me that a wide variety of people have never heard of albums that I consider the greatest of all time.

I’ve read seasoned musicians I respect list their favorite albums, and most of those albums are truly obscure. I’ve tried to listen to some of those albums, but I’m nothing more than a fan of music. I don’t appreciate music on the granular level that most seasoned musicians do. That having been said, I am a music aficionado, whose music appreciation is not that of a player or a critic, but greater than the casual fan who only appreciates the surface level of music that spent time on the Billboard’s top 100 or repeated on classic rock radio ad nausea. By the end of this, the reader might consider the albums selected purposely obscure. If I am purposely obscure, or I seek some level of contrived weirdness in my music, I have been doing so for thirty years, and I can now tell the difference between those artists who attempt to achieve something different in a less organic manner and those who just plain weird, strange, and special. Many have used those adjectives to describe me, at various times in my life, and if I do hit any of those marks (others consider me so normal I’m boring), all I can tell you is I’ve learned to embrace them in my life, and in the music I enjoy.

8) Captain Beefheart—Trout Mask Replica—This is the strangest album on this list, and one music magazine rated it the second strangest albums ever made (behind Todd Rungren’s A Wizard/A True Star). We don’t know what went on in the mind of Van Vliet, when he created this Joycean mess, that some call “anti-music in the most interesting and insane way.” The most listenable track, and that’s compared to the others on this album, might be Ella Guru. Cartoonist and writer Matt Groening tells of listening to Trout Mask Replica at the age of fifteen: “I thought it was the worst thing I’d ever heard. I said to myself, they’re not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. About the third time, I realized they were doing it on purpose; they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I’d ever heard”.

If Trout Mask Replica is one of the strangest albums ever created, Pena might be the strangest, most inaccessible song ever made. It’s so discordant, we might want to reconsider whether to classify it music. It is, but it stretches the boundary that much. If you convince a friend to listen to this album, prepare for the backlash, as they might consider it a mean practical joke. If you listen to this song, do not do so at high volume, for you will run across the room to shut it off. It might be one of the least melodic songs ever made from the least melodic album ever created. Friends don’t understand why I love this album, and to tell you the truth I can’t explain it, but it’s not weird for the sake of being weird. It has its own inexplicable mathematical appeal that very, very few will appreciate.

If you brave all of these disclaimers and decide to listen to this album, and you find yourself getting “fast and bulbous” after repeated spins, you might want to reconsider recommending it to friends. Be prepared for some of them to hate this music with such feverish intensity that they hold it against you personally for recommending it to them.

7) PJ Harvey—To Bring you My Love—This is PJ’s strongest album to date. The two albums she made prior to this one were incredible, but To Bring you My Love made those two albums look like building blocks to this one. Her albums following To Bring you My Love run the gamut from relatively boring to fantastic, but To Bring you My Love was without question her peak. One album of note following TBYML is White Chalk. It’s the most powerful quiet album you might hear. The standout tracks on To Bring you My Love are: Meet Ze Monster, Down by the Water.

6) Mr. Bungle – Disco Volante— If Trout Mask Replica is the second weirdest album ever made, and I don’t think it is. I think it’s number one, I don’t think A Wizard/A True Star compares in the category of strange, but I don’t enjoy it as much as the others on this list. If Trout Mask Replica is number two, then music critics and writers should consider Disco Volante third on this list. This is an album of songs, as opposed to an effort with a cohesive theme. Each song is so different that they probably don’t belong on the same album. The only song that is less than brilliant is Everyone I Went to High School is Dead. I am not a track skipper, but I skip this song every time. The most brilliant song on this album occurs at the 4:42 mark on Carry Stress in the Jaw. Some listings, list it as [The Secret Song]. My advice, if you choose to accept it, is listen to this album from start to finish. Then separate individual tracks out in playlists, or what have you, to appreciate each song in its own right, until you obsess over them and you know every beat so well that you might be able to play them yourself (I say as an individual who hasn’t picked up an instrument in decades, and even then I couldn’t play them).

The strange element of Disco Volante defines strange people. Listeners who have a strong foundation of normalcy can listen to this album unscathed, but if you have any fear that you might be abnormal, be forewarned that if it gets around that you enjoy Disco Volante, your friends and family will consider you strange. That sounds like a joke, but I’ve witnessed it. Those who are totally normal will not enjoy this album, because it’s so weird, strange, and just plain different from any album of music I’ve ever heard. I know that goes against everything I wrote in the previous paragraph, but I think it’s that weird. Disco Volante is only for weird, strange, and just plain different listeners who are confident that they can survive all of the recriminations that will follow saying that you like this album.

[Writer’s Note:] When I went in search of this album, as a completist who needed to own everything attached to the names Mike Patton, Trevor Dunn, and Trey Spruance, I walked into a Music Land at a mall one day (yes, I’m that old), and I asked the employee if he had an album called Disco Volante. He stared at me silently. A small somewhat bemused smile began to curl at the corner of his lips. “It’s by a group called Mr. Bungle,” I said in the weird, somewhat uncomfortable space that followed.

“Very funny,” the employee said. “Who put you up to this?”

“What?” I asked looking around. “I want to know if you have an album that I have been trying to find.” We stared at each other for an uncomfortable moment after I said that. “I’ve been to all the record stores in town, and they don’t carry it. None of them do.”

“Seriously, who sent you in here? Was it Sandy?” After a brief back and forth that consisted of me convincing him that no one sent me in his store, he said, “No, this place would never carry an album like that.”

The man was wary of me, as if he expected a group of camera men to enter the store to reveal the practical joke we were all playing on him.

“Okay thanks,” I said. As I turned to leave, I said, “Why would you think it’s a joke to ask for an album?”

“That’s my favorite album of all time,” he said, “and a couple months ago I joked with my girlfriend that no one would ever come into a Music Land in Bum[fudge], Nebraska to ask for it. So, when you asked for Disco Volante, I thought she sent you.”

5) David Bowie–Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars—Perhaps no musical artist in the history of music made the weird, more mainstream as well as David Bowie. He was an organically different man who made weird music. If he were alive today, he would confess that he wasn’t as original as critics often said he was. His music was an amalgamation of the weird.

Ziggy Stardust might be the most popular and least obscure album on this list, but it’s so old that I wonder how many people have never heard of it. A few mainstream artists in that era tinkered with the weird, but very few of them explored it as thoroughly as Bowie did while achieving some level of fame for doing it. I could’ve picked any of a number of Bowie albums to include on this list (Hunky Dory, Alladin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Low, Lodger, Scary Monsters, and even Blackstar), but Ziggy seems to be the most accessible starting point for Bowie novices.

The best songs are the first four songs on the album, and the last six. The only song to skip on the album is It Ain’t Easy. I have to think Bowie had other songs to put on this album that he dismissed in favor of It Ain’t Easy. [Special Mention:] The best non-Ziggy Bowie songs that every Bowie fan needs to hear again and again, Alternate Candidate (This is a tough song to find, but I found it on YouTube) and Lady Grinning Soul.

4) Mother Love Bone—Apple—If I were a musician, this is the album that I would’ve created. I loved playing around with words, and I loved describing the normal in hippy, trippy ways. Apple is thirty-years-old now, and it doesn’t have the appeal to me it did back then, but the music and the lyrics that Ament, Gossard, Wood, and the rest created captured me in a time and place manner that no music had before and few have afterward. To say I was blown away is an understatement. I listened to this album in a way others listened to The Beatles, Elvis, and The Rolling Stones.

Some critics, musicians, and others who know far more about music than I do, say Pearl Jam was better in every possible way. (A number of the members of Mother Love Bone gathered together and found a new lead singer after Wood died to form Pearl Jam.) I disagreed, and I still disagree, but when you’re a member of the screaming minority, you eventually buckle to those who know more than you. They didn’t change my mind, of course, but I recognize the limits of my musical knowledge, or my taste. I loved Pearl Jam, but Apple absolutely blew my mind.

The story of Mother Love Bone is a sad “could’ve been, should’ve been” tale that could’ve and should’ve rewritten the narrative of the whole Seattle, movement in the early 90’s. Andrew Wood, the lead singer, died of a heroin overdose at 24, a month before the record company released this album. If this album received the promotion record companies normally put into an album in which they outbid five other record companies, coupled with radio airplay, touring, and all that, this album would’ve been the first multi-platinum disc coming out of Seattle in the 90’s. This album, this group, would’ve been bigger than the later incarnation Pearl Jam in my humble opinion.

I think Apple would’ve been so big that it would’ve divided Seattle into two camps, those who loved the silly, rock star side versus the serious, sad, and angst-ridden Nirvana side. It would’ve been Mother Love Bone versus Nirvana, and Nirvana probably would’ve hated Mother Love Bone the way they came to hate Pearl Jam. (They may have hated them more, due to the contrasting styles of the two, as Pearl Jam wasn’t such an exaggeration of differences.)

The tracks on this album might all have a certain familiarity to them, as glam rock, arena rock fans will recognize some Queen, with a dash of Zeppelin, a little Elton John mixed in, and a big morsel of Aerosmith mixed in the stew, but Mother Love Bone combined these influences with a heavy dose of individual interpretation mixed in. I’ve read commenters on Allmusic.com say that the Apple has not aged well. As I wrote, thirty years has dulled the magnitude of this album for me, but I still do not have such perspective on this album, for I am an adoring fan boy who cannot view Stargazer, Captain Hi-Top, Gentle Groove, Crown of Thorns, or Lady Godiva Blues from an objective perspective. When people talk about how they still love the music from their late teens/early twenties, this album is one of the primary ones that formed that inner core of my favorite music.

[Writer’s Note:] Some suggest that the Seattle music from the early to mid-90’s killed rock and roll. If we look at the timeline of rock and roll, we could easily make that leap with them, but I would suggest that the Seattle music, that some call grunge, might have been the last gasp from a dying beast. Seattle music was retro. It was Black Sabbath, KISS, T. Rex, and various other artists from the 70’s. It was a return to the music before the glam, heavy metal 80’s redefined everything. If we could go back through the timeline and remove grunge, rock and roll would’ve died earlier after the damage the music of the 80’s did to it. Grunge was the chemotherapy that kept a stage 4 cancer victim alive for a little longer beyond its life expectancy, and I suspect that if Andrew Wood hadn’t needed one more heroin fix, rock and roll might have remained on a life support a little longer.

3) Pavement—Wowee Zowee— This album might form the basis of my album oriented preferences, for I find it difficult to pick just one track to note. This album should be listened to top to bottom. Rattled by the Rush might be one of the few songs on the album that follow a traditionally accepted song structure, but I find it hard to hold one song out for individual praise. This album is a collage album, a collection of songs that didn’t quite fit on their previous albums. Some call them pastiche albums. Whatever the case is, I loved this album so much that I honestly don’t care that some might consider it inferior to their two prior albums, and I loved (and I mean LOVED) their two previous albums. This album achieved something so different that it achieved the hallowed status all artists strive for with their fans of being “my music”. The previous two albums might have been better on the scale critics use to rate such albums, but I love Wowee Zowee more for the intangible qualities that leads us all to prefer some albums more than others. I won’t write that every track is perfect on this album, but that’s its appeal. Wowee Zowee is a raw, flawed album in serious need of better production, but seeking perfection with more production would also ruin whatever raw intensity the fellas in Pavement captured here.

2) King’s X—Gretchen Goes to Nebraska—Some grunge artists say this was the first grunge album. Some suggest that Alice in Chains took the sonic formula of this album and applied it to their album Dirt. Listen to the two albums back to back, and you’ll hear a surprising number of similarities. One of the members of Alice in Chains joked about it with a member of King’s X, saying, “We need you to come out with another album. We need a new sound.” (The author loves Alice in Chains, and the album Dirt, and he does not intend to diminish the band or their best album.)

The Burning Down and The Difference are the only two songs on GGN that I skip. Other than those two songs, I’ve gone through phases with just about every other track on this album. The uninitiated should start with the hit, Over My Head, move onto Summerland, Everybody Knows a Little Bit of Something, and then work their way through the rest of the album song by song. By the time the intrigued listener is done, I don’t know how anyone could say these guys didn’t write beautiful, transcendent, and timeless music.

Normally, I couldn’t care less if an artist makes it or not. Mainstream music is just that, and as this list indicates, I am not a huge fan of mainstream music. The idea that King’s X didn’t achieve mainstream success, and others did with their formula pained the members of the band and their producer Sam Taylor. I doubt that any of the others on this list, save for Bowie who achieved worldwide success, experienced depression as a result of the lack of sales. They had to know, somewhere in the production of their album that it would not appeal to the masses. King’s X wanted it, expected it, and they experienced some depression as a result. The idea that very few regard King’s X as one of the top bands of its era, however, seems like an historic injustice to me that it needs to be rectified.

Other artists, and some critics, adored King’s X. A compendium of quotes from them suggest that on talent alone, coupled with the producer Sam Taylor, and the combined and consistent efforts found in the first five albums that King’s X created should’ve led them to the hallowed Beatles status. Upon discovering King’s X, reports state that Sam Taylor said he thought he found the next Beatles. King’s X were a combination of progressive metal, funk and soul, combined with vocals that remind one of gospel, blues, and the various groups in the British Invasion.

It confounded critics, and other artists, why this band never broke through to the mainstream. In my experience, King’s X had two strikes against them, their looks and the “God thing”. Anytime I introduced my friends to Gretchen Goes to Nebraska, it blew them away. “Who are these guys?” they would ask. When they investigated them on their own, and they saw them on MTV, they soured on them to the point that they didn’t buy their album. The lead singer (Doug Pinnick) had a funky look. He had a high mohawk, and he was black, and there was something different about him. (He was/is gay.) Coupled with that, King’s X lyrics were uplifting and spiritual, and some critics labeled them “God music”. Sam Taylor and King’s X had gorgeous musical arrangements, Beatle-like harmonies, top-notch production, and the record company supported them, but Doug Pinnick looked funky, and their lyrics suggested they had a “God thing”.

King’s X might have been one of the few bands who were hurt by the video age of MTV, for when people saw them they thought they were weird, and not in a good way. To further this thesis, Alice in Chains took the King’s X formula, and they fit the mold better than King’s X did. As much as we hate to admit it, the idea that the lead singer (Layne Staley) was a junkie and on the verge of overdosing had/has enormous appeal to some, their look was more socially acceptable, and the idea that they were obsessed with the dark elements of death had far more appeal than King’s X spiritual and uplifting lyrics. I consider that opinion so based in fact that I don’t consider it debatable.

Alice in Chains was also cool in all the tangible and intangible definitions of the term, and King’s X were the antithesis of cool. What’s interesting, on this note, is that most of those who bought AiC’s albums, considered themselves the opposite of superficial. They considered themselves deep, thoughtful people who wouldn’t buy an album based on the band’s look. They loved the music on Dirt, but they didn’t buy music equal to, if not superior, to that on Dirt, and it all boiled down to looks and a packaged commodity that they considered nonconformist.

more consumable, and the idea that the latter was “God music”.

1) Mr. Bungle—California—This album, particularly the songs None of Them Knew They were Robots, Retrovertigo, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Goodbye Sober Day, and Ars Morendi, are timeless classics. As opposed to most of the albums I’ve listened to on this list that I’ve played so often that I have to remember how much they affected my life when I first heard them, California sounds as fresh and vibrant to me as the first day I listened to it. Pink Cigarette and Sweet Charity were, of course, my first loves on the album, but to my mind there’s something wrong with people who fail to recognize the greatness of those five songs.