On my first shot at putting essential listening to cover the rock life cycle I chose a group of collections from seminal artists. For this addition to the original post, and for the remaining future installments, I am selecting only individual albums to round out my Desert Island Disc collection.

The reason for all this reflection is the continued bad news from the music industry at large. The business is not getting better with this drive to computerize and bit-size music. What is happening today is the total destruction of the album concept and the long form song. We are witnessing the birth of the micro-minute hits only business, driven solely by the commercials these few various songs appear in. Even the one-minute intro into television shows with musical driven theme songs is now disappearing from our scene. Every artist is now begging to get on Radio Toyota TV for any chance at exposure. Digital rights management issues continue to strangle music at every turn. The days of turning people on to interesting new acts and becoming advocates of a particular sound seem as far removed as the horse and buggy. File sharing, which on the surface seemed like such a great idea ten years ago, simply killed album oriented music.

There were other factors that contributed to the death of rock and album oriented music, and the downsizing of the package containing the sounds was certainly a big one. Rock was more than the songs, it was just as much about the art that housed the discs. Price increases that spiraled out of control by major record companies was also a disease the patient could not endure for long, particularly when singles to promote album sales were being sold at five bucks a pop.

But all that is ancient history, just like my next ten picks for island living.

Many years ago I had a good friend. We'll call him Nert. We would argue late at night and into the early mornings about music and culture. He always had natural gift of finding the next big movement. He believed in the power of cities. Culture had always, and would always, emanate from the city to the rest of the world. He was a city watcher, and London was a key city.

At the time of the first British Invasion that included notables like the Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who, The Yardbirds, The Animals and lesser luminaries like Gerry and the Pacemakers, Manfred Mann, Billy J. Kramer & the Dakotas and so forth, the blues scene in the London underground was beginning to erupt. The Yardbirds lost a guitar player and the Alexis Korner Group lost a rhythm section. The result was Cream by June of 1966.

Cream's first album, Fresh Cream, set the tone but their second album Disraeli Gears was absolutely mind boggling for the time. In every word this was a revolutionary album for the time and a record whose biggest hit, Sunshine of Your Love, would be covered by everyone in the music business for years to come. This was the first "supergroup" with a line up of Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. They would tour extensively in Europe and America over the next two years with bold improvisations and jams around the individual songs. Clapton abruptly called it a day and found Blind Faith for a brief moment at the end of the decade. Cream was over for nearly four decades, but Disraeli Gears goes in my Desert Island Disc collection and their reunion concerts showed that these old geezers still have amazing punch after all these years. The band was one of a kind.

Another city another time.

I had another music compadre in the Bay Area in the early 1980s who loved all things Austin. "E" was a big fan of Joe Ely, The Fabulous Thunderbirds and many lesser-knowns that plugged away in obscurity. The Thunderbirds had a guitarist, Jimmie, whose younger brother played guitar on David Bowie's last big hit, Let's Dance. At the time, Bowie was gearing up for a big tour to promote said hit, but his new guitarist had the audacity to refuse the $500 per show offer to accompany the great chameleon. The kid brother had other plans to showcase his skills and figured Bowie was simply trying to take advantage of him. Also, if you have the right agent things generally work out. The kid brother guitarist, Stevie Ray Vaughan, had legendary music man John Hammond working out the details for a CBS record deal. Hammond had a pretty decent track record with CBS having brought them Bessie Smith, Billy Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Not bad for an old geezer with ears to pluck a little guitarist from the bowels of Texas bar stools and present to an eager audience Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble's Texas Flood. For audacity of borrowed influences and virtuoso command that made his sound so unique and distinctive, and for really putting on Austin on the big music map I've got Texas Flood en route to my getaway.

Before David Bowie started going through guitar players more frequently than soap stars go through sweethearts he had a monster player, Mick Ronson, with him to lead the Spiders From Mars. The two had made three albums that showed progress and a wild androgynous look to foster the hype of a big breakout. Not many folks in 1972 were prepared for Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. The album redefined the concept album. It was a spellbinding mixture of aural depth and panning telling the quasi science fiction fable of rock stardom and death. Every track is a gem from start to finish. Bowie's album persona spawned a host of imitation and reworking from the New York Dolls and Mott The Hoople to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Even Mick Jagger and Keith Richards affected Bowie's look. The album was a revelation and gets a front row seat next to a palm tree on my sandy beach.

Los Angeles has always been a mercurial city, fast and fleeting in pace without a basic core to pin it down. The early days of Hollywood dictated a bevy of musicians would be needed for orchestra pits in the grand theaters springing up everywhere to showcase the silent movies. When sound arrived musicians were needed for all those musicals and background music to sustain the ambiance of the silver screen. Movies reflected lifestyle and by the late 1950s surfing on the west coast was an exploding teen life event. Novelty records like Itsy Witsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dotted Bikini happened first, but a core of local musicians formed a new echo sound of guitar driven music as the soundtrack to this lifestyle. Dick Dale & The Deltones, The Ventures, The Surfaris and The Beach Boys all caught the wave and laid down borrowed tunes with mixtures of Latin and Chuck Berry tempos laced with double-picked strings. Most of these surf sound pioneers were one gear hot-rods, and flamed out on a too heavy mixture of their own exhaust, but not the Beach Boys. These guys owned pop music during the early 1960s along with Frankie & Annette films at the beach. When the Beatles knocked them off their perch, Brian Wilson dug as deep as he could go to produce one of the most astounding albums ever made, Pet Sounds. This record was so non-Beach Boy and so layered with harmonies on top of sound textures it defied categorization. It didn't sell to the record company's expectations as well. It traumatized the band and its leader. It is an awesome achievement and comes along with me in order to always hear the Wilson brothers with Al and Mike harmonize Caroline No.

At the end of the 1960s rock was taking on a much denser quality in sound and attack. Two Londoners and former members of the Yardbirds not named Clapton pushed the envelope of this aural thunder to distinctly different conclusions. Jeff Beck had followed Eric Clapton as the obligatory guitar hero in the Yardbirds, but grew tired of the the band and left by the end of 1967. He formed the Jeff Beck Group with Ron Wood and Rod Stewart, who would join Ronnie Lane in the Faces within in a couple of years. Beck released two exceptional records, Truth and Beckola , with this line-up before changing directions and forming a new Jeff Beck Group that began experimenting with R&B and Jazz influences. Apparently, still not satisfied with the results after two albums, Rough & Ready and Jeff Beck Group, he got in touch with the rhythm section from Vanilla Fudge to make a really forgettable record. Fed up with all the lineup changes and declining sales results he opted for an instrumental record that defined a new music genre, Fusion. Blow By Blow was a groundbreaking album release that blended jazz and rock into a completely alternative universe. After years of various experimentation in the 1960s by such dignitaries as Miles Davis and John McLaughlin who tried for the same results it was Jeff Beck mastering the art. I can't blame him for all the pretentious copycat product he spawned in the wake of his success. Blow By Blow makes the trip.

The other guitarist from the Yardbirds was, of course, Jimmy Page. After every original member of the Yardbirds had left the band to form their own brainchildren (Cream, Jeff Beck Group, Renaissance and 10cc) Page was left holding the name. He decided to ditch it and adopt a phrase Keith Moon is said to have made over how well this last incarnation of the Yardbirds would go over, "like a lead zeppelin." They dropped the "a" and stormed the world. The first Led Zeppelin record was sonically brilliant with high headroom and range. It mixed blues, rock and folk elements in a way not previously heard. This album, like Jeff Beck's first two projects created the term and the initial definition of heavy metal. Led Zeppelin 1 gets storage and turntable time on my Desert Island.

One big city that needs to be mentioned at this juncture is New York City. In the 1950s and 1960s most pop songs came out of a hit factory at the Brill Building in New York City. Don Kirshner was there with Neil Sedaka, Al Kooper, Gerry Goffin and Carole King turning out big pop fluff hit after hit. By the end of the 1960s most of these talented individuals were off developing their own projects. Al Kooper began a lucrative career playing sessions with Bob Dylan and hooking up with Mike Bloomfield and Stephen Stills on a Super Session project that had stunning results and spawned an era of big star rock jams that hearkened back to the old Verve At The Philharmonic Jam days on records pioneered by Norman Granz in the 1940s. Don Kirshner went into band management and concert promotion. He made oodles of money. Carole King divorced her co-writer hubby Gerry Goffin and moved to Los Angeles. She had tried a couple of times to launch a singing career without much success. In 1971 she struck gold, then platinum and then mega-platinum with her release of Tapestry. Every woman I knew, or was casually acquainted with, or saw driving in the state owned this record. It was mix of old original songs that were completely retooled, and new songs that spoke to the gentle gender in a way very few records had spoken to them in the past, certainly not of that particular generation. I Feel The Earth Move, It's Too Late, You've Got A Friend and (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman captured the liberated spirit of the times for young women. Tapestry gets the ride in the hopes that I won't be by myself on the island.

I mentioned earlier that the West Coast in the late 1950s and early 1960s catered to the beach crowd with sun, sand and hot-rods as the backdrop to pop film and music projects. On the East Coast, folk music and civil rights were the order of the day. Devotees of Woody Guthrie's and Pete Seeger's brand of communal conscience built around the construct of social protest songs spoke to a fierce and attached young audience. Dave Van Ronk, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Phil Ochs, John Phillips, Peter Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan mined folk gold and brought old and new material to the world's sound stage. Bob, though, was in a class all by himself. Everyone can argue until the end of the world which records Dylan released had the most effect during his stunning first five year period between 1962 and 1966. For this Island project I choose three albums, The Free Wheelin' Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde.

That's ten for this segment. I promise this will not be simply an homage to a particular decade of material. However, the life cycle of rock mirrors the life span of a few generations of people, and much of the the radical formulations occurring on record, as well as in life, occur in adolescence and young adulthood. I hope you to see your comments continue on the desert island musical excursion.