For me this was around 1990/1991-ish.
I hated the pop/r&b/pseudo-rap stuff that was popular at this time and grunge hadn’t quite emerged in my area yet.
Guns and Roses – Appetite for Destruction ENDLESSLY… I couldn’t imagine music being any better than that at that time.
AC/DC – Back in Black
Billy Joel – Storm Front
Anything Aerosmith
Thanks for clarifying this issue. I couldn’t remember for sure which record shop it was. Eddie’s made me think it might have been Ernie’s and I knew that didn’t sound right either.
Remember Artra Skin Tone Cream and Silky Straight?
Whenever there are references to Pirate Radio, Wolfman Jack and the like, I always try to get into the mood by comparing to the thrill of being out at the gravel pit late at night swigging hot beer and listening to WLAC at full volume. Oh, to be a kid again…
I ordered records through the mail from Randy’s for several years. Kinda’ made it easy to remember!
Oh yeah! And ads for wallets made from “Genuine imitation alligator hide”.
I’m with ya’ all the way on that scene.
I read in some book about DJ’s that Wolfman Jack grew up in New York. Somehow, he started receiving the WLAC signal and became fascinated, so, at age 16, he stole a car, drove it to Nashville, and spent a week hanging out with the WLAC DJ’s to learn how they were doing their shows.
True or not, I don’t know, but it’s a cool story anyway…
There’s a similar legend regarding Garrison Keillor visiting the Opry in the days before he started what became A Prairie Home Companion complete with the car that (in his case) was just a bunch of his buddies in one of their rides as opposed to a stolen one. Even if it’s apocrypha, it’s not too far from the way so many of the Music City types made it to the city.
Do you remember if Buckley’s had spots on one of those clear channels (the other being WSM)? I bought lots of great jazz albums from them back in the 60’s. That gravel pit action was in Montgomery.
Of course, he doesn’t mention riding the schoolbus home and SINGING apostrophe’ out loud with his best friend from the back seat …
Oh, Saint Alfonzo would be proud of me!
I don’t remember Buckley’s, but I never got into jazz much, except for Brubeck’s “Take Five”. Maybe even that was due to association with a particularly rewarding evening.
There was a place outside Miami we called the “Steel Levy”, where you could swim and play water tag in daylight hours and pursue other activities after dark.
I didn’t move to Alabama until I started school at Auburn in '66. (Did my military time between HS and college.)
Cool! That has us right about the same age, which I think I had put together from other posts. I graduated HS in 1959 and went straight into college that year. In retrospect I should have attended Auburn, but if I had I wouldn’t have met and married my kids’ mother. Hard to go back and fix things without breaking others.
Butterfly effect?
Psst! You forgot the *Footloose * Soundtrack and Prince - 1999!
Woo Hooo! Let’s hear it for the mid-80s!
Music wasn’t a big deal to me and my friends. I guess what I listened to most was…
Jim Croce
Cat Stevens
Seals and Crofts
Loggins and Messina
Elton John
Plain, white bread, top 40…
Wait! Listened to Bread too.
That was in 1985 / 86 …
I was listening to New Order, Depeche Mode, U2 … my friends thought I was weird - they listened to Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Poison … plus all the pop crap - Rick Astley, Tiffany, Debbie Gibson.
Ahhh the 80’s …
REM - Document (and everything before it – Life’s Rich Pageant, Fables, Reckoning, Murmur . . . ). I wanted to be Michael Stipe.
Jane’s Addiciton - Nothing’s Shocking
The Smiths - Louder than Bombs (ok, it’s a compilation, but it’s one of the cds/tapes we were listening to)
David Allen Coe - Best of
Tom Petty - Full Moon Fever
1970(ish). Thems were the days:
The Beatles
Jethro Tull
Traffic
John Mayall
The Moody Blues
The Grateful Dead
Joni Mitchell
Fairport Convention
Crosby, Stills & Nash
Pentangle
Judy Collins
Phil Ochs
Leonard Cohen
Mothers of Invention
Canned Heat
Blind Faith
It’s a Beautiful Day
Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks
and The Incredible String Band, of course.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to call bullshit on this. We’re the same age, so I know damn well what you listened to.
Sure, you had your Grand Illusions and Fat Bottomed Girls and 2112s. But I know that late at night, when your parents were asleep, in the lonely recesses of your bedroom…
Frampton Came Alive.
Hey! If the locals can evangelize Southern Baptism, I can evangelize Frank Zappa!!! :rolleyes: 
1992-93
Aerosmith - Get a Grip
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Blood Sex Sugar Magic; What Hits
Nirvana - Nevermind (the next year we’d be all over Unplugged in NY)
Seal - Self-titled
Ace of Base - The Sign
Snow - Informer shut up
En Vogue - Funky Divas
TLC - Ooooooohhh…On the TLC Tip
PM Dawn… but I forget which cds
All pretty mainstream, but I’d only begun liking music enough to buy it (or to listen to the radio, to be honest) the year before, so my tastes were still developing
My friends were mostly listening to Prince, Madonna, Duran Duran, mebbe Run DMC. Everyone was into pop and rap/way early hip hop (what is now, sadly, known as “old school”)
I, on the other hand, was a complete David Bowie freak. I also loved The Doors, Moody Blues, and Yes. And metal. There was a balance of big hair/arena bands and old artsy/hippy stuff.
And then I got a summer scholarship to college when I was 16, the summer between my junior and senior years. And I discovered New Order, Depeche Mode and Yaz. The following summer I discovered R.E.M and Elvis Costello.
Yeah, I’m a little weird.
Whatever Scoot in the Morning (WRNO) played.
1979-80
Grateful Dead all their studio albums, plus whatever bad bootlegs we could get on cassette
Blue Oyster Cult Agents of Fortune, On your Feet or On Your Knees, and some of their older albums
Lynyrd Skynyrd damn near every album
The Outlaws
Allman Brothers
Rush 2112, Moving Pictures, et al
Genesis Trick of the Tail, Selling England by the Pound, Seconds Out
Zappa Joe’s Garage, Apostrophe, Overnite sensation, Lumpy Gravy
Like a few others here, I was that age in the early 90s. So, 15-16 would be the late 1992 to late 1994 time frame:
So:
Soundgarden - Superunknown - probably my favorite album of the 90s. I absolutely loved Soundgarden.
Pearl Jam - Ten
Nine Inch Nails - Downward Sprial, though I had a particularl fondness for Head Like a Hole for the non-DS songs.
Nirvana - Pretty much everything.
Alice In Chains - Jar of Flies
Fifteen/sixteen would have been 1999/2000 for me. My friends and I had wildly different music tastes. They overlapped sometimes, but mostly out of politeness. (‘Oh, Ray of Light. Um, thanks.’) Looking back, it wasn’t a terribly exciting musical time for me, although it was around then that there was a rennasance of NZ rock, and so Tadpole, Fur Patrol, Stellar* and the feelers got a huge amount of airplay. I was going through a soundtrack phase, funnily enough I don’t buy them so much anymore. But I played the soundtracks to Run Lola Run, Cruel Intentions, Spawn and Empire Records over and over again. I also collected the Triple J Hottest 100 albums, which declined steadily in quality over the years (or maybe my taste improved), so for a while I was big on Australian rock - Powderfinger, Spiderbait, Living End, the Whitlams.
Also a lot of shitty dance music. Some stuff I still clean house to - the Nick Skitz or Anabolic Frolic mixes are still good. The Vengaboys, however, are not.