Mystery-trained

My source of mystery was not so much the NME, apart from the odd article by Nick Kent and CSM, but I had a three-volume Encyclopaedia of Rock, which went up to about 1975. So there was really nothing in it that was very current when I was just getting into music. While my peers were getting into Punk, I was exploring some back alleys.

EofR it was written in that rock journalese style that made things - in print - seem so exciting and mysterious. The best (or worst) example of this (outside of the EofR) was Greil Marcus, writing on just about anything. Whether it was "Mystery Train" or "The Basement Tapes" he made you think you were really, really missing out on something.

Most of the records I bought between 1977 and 1980 I had to special order. I had to do this for the Who Live at Leeds, the Doors first album, Velvet Underground records, even some Beatles records.

Sometimes things were as good as they were cracked up to be, but most of the time, not.

Even Born To Run, when I first heard it, was filtered through all the myth-making articles I'd read on it. Even now, I can't rate Born to Run higher than, say, Human Touch or Lucky Town. Whereas those albums really spoke to me at a particular stage in my life, BTR was just another box to tick on the Great List of Rock Legends.

While I still know more about 60s and 70s music than is probably healthy, there is a long list of records that I felt, as Roy would say, had been listened to for me, and I just can't unfilter my first - usually slightly disappointed - reaction from their actual quality.