6. The Rolling Stones Frank ZappaSticky Fingers

I fell in love with the Rolling Stones at a very early age… There were of course my parents’ records and radio, but what sealed the deal was my dad taking me to their Tattoo You concert when I was a little kid. I remember Bobby Womack opened and I thought that was super cool and very "adult", but the Stones blew my mind. I had never felt so strongly about anything in my life. I cried because we couldn’t go back the next night and I dreamed about it for months.

Flash forward to living in a tiny room at the YMCA in NYC just out of high school. I was very young and living in a constant state of melancholy. My first real boyfriend had died of a heroin overdose a few years before I moved to NYC and my "new" boyfriend, Neil, and I did a lot of acid and drinking and thinking. I lived alone at the YMCA and he lived with his Pussy Galore bandmates in the Lower East Side area.

I had had a Fender Jaguar Bass that was stolen back in DC and had replaced it with a $50 six-pickup lime-green and black Kimberly guitar, which I used to sit and play along to Sticky Fingers in my tiny YMCA room, day after day after day… It was the only record I listened to besides Al Green’s The Belle Album and John Cale’s Paris 1919. Sticky Fingers felt like such a sad melancholy album to me and defined the way I was feeling. I would sit and sing ‘Sway’ over and over again trying to learn the guitar parts, but mostly sinking into the blues of it all. ‘Dead Flowers’, ‘Moonlight Mile’, ‘Sister Morphine’… the Al Green song ‘Belle’ and the John Cale song ‘Andalucia’ were all part of that "soundtrack". Lots of death and loss, but at least I was feeling…

Pussy Galore’s Exile On Main Street cover album was definitely dominated by Neil’s guitar playing, so that would’ve been a Trux release if Trux had existed then and Neil didn’t bring the idea to them.