Sweet Thirteen: Jennifer Herrema's Favourite Albums | Page 7 of 14 | The Quietus

Baker's Dozen

Artists discuss the 13 records that shaped their lives

I fell in love with the Rolling Stones at a very early ageā€¦ 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 dayā€¦ 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’ā€¦ 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 feelingā€¦

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.

Selected in other Baker’s Dozens: Mick Hucknall, Wilko Johnson, Dean Wareham, Greg Dulli
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