Dave's Side One

Today’s record is Kind of Blue by Miles Davis.

During the 2006 move from Texas to Utah a box of vintage jazz records disappeared, including an early Kind of Blue pressing.

The whereabouts remain unknown.

The album is the doorway; the memory is the subject.

What you miss is not just the object, but the listening life attached to it.

In this episode we revisit the story, question what makes a record important, and offer a listening test you can try with your own collection.

Side One Spin: What lost record would you want back, even if its market value were zero?

Today’s record is Alive! by KISS.

When Alive! was new, Dave worried about his parents’ reaction.

He listened at friends’ houses and still does not own a copy.

The album is the doorway; the memory is the subject.

A record can become important even when it never enters your collection.

In this episode we revisit the story, question what makes a record important, and offer a listening test you can try with your own collection.

Side One Spin: Which record did you have to hear somewhere other than home?

Today’s record is Moving Pictures by Rush.

1981 University of Utah Mayfest

Dave’s band tackled Tom Sawyer, believed they might have been first local cover; played it successfully; group split six months later.

The album is the doorway; the memory is the subject.

The record became a test of what the band could do together.

In this episode we revisit the story, question what makes a record important, and offer a listening test you can try with your own collection.

Side One Spin: What does it take for a band to earn one unforgettable night?

Dave’s favorite Triumph album is Just a Game, but it is not the record he would recommend first to a new listener. That job goes to Allied Forces.

This episode closes Week 15 by separating two questions music fans often treat as identical: “What is your favorite?” and “Where should I start?”

A personal favorite reflects years of relationship and context; a good recommendation considers the listener standing at the entrance.

Using two Triumph albums, Dave argues that recommendation is not ranking—it is choosing the right doorway.

Joe Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way” sounds direct because the record makes its choices feel inevitable. The recognizable riff is only one layer. Attack, space, groove, tone, dynamics and the rhythm section all shape what the part actually does. Even the famous talk-box passage works because the track has already established a musical world for that new texture to enter.

In this episode, Dave uses his current experience learning the song to ask what musicians really mean when they say they have learned a part. Is it enough to know the notes and changes? Or does learning the song require understanding how hard to hit, how long to ring, where to leave space, how to sit against the beat and how the part relates to everyone else?

This is not an argument that every listener needs to analyze a rock song to enjoy it. It is an argument that the details we call “feel” stop being small details the moment we try to reproduce the performance. The part tells us what to play. The record tells us what the part is supposed to do.

SIDE ONE SPIN: What song did you think you knew until you tried to play it? Give me the artist, song, your instrument, and the thing that turned out not to be written in the notes.

Before a vocalist sings a single word on Toto’s 1978 debut, “Child’s Anthem” has already established a recognizable musical identity.

This episode expands the idea of a band’s “voice” beyond the singer and into instrumental tone, arrangement, rhythm, production and sonic palette.

Dave uses Toto—and briefly the keyboard identity of Lyle Mays with the Pat Metheny Group—to ask what actually makes a band recognizable.

Sometimes the singer carries the song while the band’s deeper fingerprint is already present underneath.

Side One of Pat Benatar’s Crimes of Passion is undeniably powerful, but Dave rarely skips anything on the album.

In this episode, he argues that Side Two does not have to defeat Side One in order to succeed.

With deeper cuts, changing textures and Benatar’s cover of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights,” the second half broadens the record rather than simply repeating its opening attack.

The question is not which side wins. It is whether the second side gives you a reason to turn the record over—and what it contributes once you do.

Dave loves Styx’s Cornerstone—and regularly skips “Babe” and “First Time.”

In this episode Dave asks whether loving an album really requires unconditional loyalty to every song.

Vinyl listening can reward complete-side immersion and respect for sequencing, but a long relationship with a record can also become selective and personal.

The point is not that Dave’s skips are correct.

The point is that listening closely enough to know where your attention changes may be more meaningful than performing loyalty to the whole record.

“Sweet Virginia” changes the atmosphere of Exile on Main St., and that is exactly why Dave loves it.

Dave challenges the idea that album cohesion requires every song to share the same sonic uniform.

A stylistic outlier can interrupt an album—but it can also reveal how large the album’s identity really is.

Using the Rolling Stones’ country-blues detour as the test case, this episode asks listeners to distinguish between difference that feels random and difference that adds character, contrast and dimension.

After Rumours, Fleetwood Mac could have made the safest follow-up imaginable. Instead, Tusk challenged the very idea of what a successful band should do next.

Dave compares commercially successful follow-ups from Styx, Kansas and Boston with records that took a more artistically risky path, then asks a deceptively difficult question: what does a band owe its audience after a blockbuster?

This isn’t an argument that change is always better. It’s an argument that commercial continuity and artistic courage are different measures—and that a follow-up album deserves to be heard as a choice, not merely as a sales result.