Name a few albums which helped determine your musical tastes


How about a short list of albums that shaped your listening from early on in your life?

Not just albums that became favorites (though they could be now). Let's call them historical turning points for you that shaped you as a listener, now.

Me:
  • Quadrophenia or Who's Next
  • Sgt Peppers Beatles
  • Floyd, Wish you were here
  • Jethro Tull, Thick as a Brick
  • Metheny, Offramp
  • Glenn Gould, Goldberg variations
  • Joni Mitchell, Court and Spark
GO!
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Gordon Lightfoot - Sundown
Floyd - DSOTM
CSNY - Deja Vu
Peter, Paul and Mary - Self-Titled First LP
Karla Bonoff - Self-Titled First LP
Jackson Browne - For Everyman
Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run
Simon and Garfunkel - Bookends
Van Morrison - St. Dominic's Preview
Beatles - SPLHCB
Little Feat - Waiting for Columbus
Skynyrd - One More From the Road
Linda Ronstadt - Hasten Down the Wind
Dead - Workingman's Dead


Beatles - Meet the Beatles
Led Zeppelin I
Led Zeppelin II
Led Zeppelin IV
Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers
Moody Blues - DOFP
King Crimson - In the Court of..
The Who - Who's Next
Linda Ronstadt - Heart Like A Wheel
Buddy Rich - Various LP's


Many things on your lists gets big hurrahs from me! Many I didn’t discover until college (e.g. Steely Dan, a favoriteband of mine to this day). BUT, if I stick to my early "pivotal" requirement, I have to +1 this:

Simon and Garfunkel - Bookends (and Wed. Morning 3 am)

My parents had ever Simon and Garfunkel album (not that many) and a relatively small range of other records (lots of Telemann and Bach). They got played over and over. My only other source of music was good FM radio from SUNY Stony Brook and WPKN Bridgeport.
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Shaped me? Never cared for Porters until I tasted Winthrop's Bull's Tooth Porter. Something in it said, "THIS is what they're tying to do!" From then on I was able to appreciate porters, or at least some of them at any rate. In that sense I guess you could say Winthrop's Bull's Tooth Porter shaped me. 

With music its hard to think of a single record that has done that for me. Nothing in Smells Like Teen Spirit turned me on to anything else on that album, let alone any of the other junk of that genre. Couldn't stand Kansas, which was a cheap knockoff of Foreigner. Or maybe it was the other way around. Same difference. They were all just trying to be the next Journey, or Boston, anyway. 

In fact its almost exactly the opposite. There's any number of albums that I was luke warm to when they were new and then over time my appreciation has only grown. A standout in that category, Bellafonte at Carnegie Hall. Just a superb record, and recording, and performance, with all kinds of deeply human archetypal themes (that would be impossible to perform today!) and my appreciation has only grown over the years. But it hasn't shaped me. Hasn't made me want to buy more music like that. Not even more Bellafonte! The others I have just don't do it for me.  

Good music is for me very much like a good book or a good movie. When its good like Fido I enjoy it. Doesn't shape me into chasing zombie movies. Once again it seems I stand alone. Oh well. 

But if instead of shaped me you mean albums I really liked a whole lot, which seems to be the way people are taking it, well then we can talk.