More Albums, More Human.

Not long ago I read High Fidelity by Nick Hornsby. I've liked his books since I saw the John Cusack movie years ago. And my appreciation for his work increased when I got Netflix and they had the original film of Fevre Pitch with Colin Firth in it.. I didn't like the American remake with Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon. The film About a Boy was also one of the only movies I can stand Hugh Grant in. It's nothing against the man personally, I just think that any one who is dumb enough to cheat on Elizabeth Hurley with a skeevy prostitute dosen't really need any of my money. On to the meat of the subject as it were however.

I was struck in the book High Fidelity, and it is perhaps in the film as well. That the main character, who is to say the least, something of an obsess when it comes to music, and at one point makes an observation to the effect that if you don't own at least 500 albums then you aren't really human. It got me thinking about just how many songs that is, and how many Albums I do actually own. So many in fact I've never really wanted to count them.

The majority of my albums, probably in the neighborhood of about a thousand or so, came from my Grandfather. They were left to me in his will when he died. They are mostly extremely early Rock and Roll, people like Elvis and Jerry lee Lewis and Fats Domino are represented quite heavily. As time went on he moved more and more towards Country music.. so towards the end he has mainly stuff from that genre.. But even there he has quite a few from Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willy Nelson, and Hank Williams Sr. And a lot of Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline.

I've listened to some of these, where they cross over into areas I'm interested in, But my favorite period lines up more with my Mom and Dad's Record collection, which will inevitably become my record collection one day in the hopefully distant future. These are the albums which I grew up listening too, people like Cream and The Beatles, The Rolling stones and Led Zeppelin. My dad's interest veered towards the groups that would become Heavy metal.. Deep Purple and Uriah Heep.. while my moms drifted every so slightly into progressive Rock and eventually into the shallow end of Disco with a few BeeGees albums.. Between the two of them I probably have another thousand LP's..

I guess I've got about 200 or so CD's and LP's I've picked up myself since I was about 15 and had money to spend on that sort of thing.. I know the very first album I got was Led Zepplins "Greatest Hits" Early days and Later Days compilation.. with the band all wearing NASA EVA suits. It was the first and last best of album I ever bought on purpose.. but it cost 9.99$ on sale at the mall vs the 18.99 they wanted for the Brown Bomber..

So My eventual music collection will be pretty wide in its scope.. I have a Ton Loc CD that I picked up one year when I was on vacation in Florida but that's about as far into Hip Hop as I go.. Nothing against it I just don't care for it especially.

So I guess if you use Rob Flemming's criteria.. then I should qualify for being nearly 5 humans.. enough to fill out one of the characters notorious Top Five lists even.. so in that spirit I invite any of my readers who should want too, to leave their own top five, desert island, greatest hits list in the comments section.