My Top 20 albums for 1979 No 1

Bop Till You Drop Ry Cooder
Genre:Rock
Style:Blues Rock, Rock & Roll
Year:1979
Tracklist
1 Little Sister 3:49
2 Go Home, Girl 5:10
3 The Very Thing That Makes Your Rich 5:32
4 I Think It's Going To Work Out Fine 4:43
5 Down In Hollywood 4:14
6 Look At Granny Run Run 3:09
7 Trouble You Can't Fool Me 4:55
8 Don't You Mess Me Up A Good Thing 4:08
9 I Can't Win 4:16

The first Ry Cooder cassette (that’s right, cassette) I ever owned was Bop Till You Drop and I didn’t care for it for a long time. A cassette back then meant mobility. You put it in a Walkman and you could move around the world with music. That was big and Sony was king. To walk along a beach with music in your ears was revolutionary at the time. Now we sit in our own worlds of music all the time. It’s no big thing anymore.

What to Carry?

Bop Till You Drop was one of those early mobile-media bits of my life but I had purchased it unheard and I didn't like it when I first listened to it. I valued money enough to try to make it work though, to give it a darn good chance in hopes I would grow to like it. It didn’t work for me for the longest time. Imagine walking around with something the size of your iPod for every album you want to carry. Two or three cassettes were the limit. This 1979 cassette was often left behind and when I did take it I couldn’t listen to it for very long, fast forwarding often. And then one day it struck me: this is okay...it’s okay.

Bop Till You Drop is okay in 2013 too. There are tunes on this album that should make Ry Cooder’s Greatest Hits album of 2017, but more will be forgotten than remembered. The strangest thing about listening to this album now-after a long absence-is that I can’t be objective about it at all. I really like it, but it’s difficult to tell a friend “You’ve really gotta’ hear this 1979 album by Ry Cooder.” I’m scared they’ll ask why and I’ll have to reply “because it’s a pretty good album and I grew to like it.” Not stellar reasons for recommending an album. There are some good reasons to recommend it though.

Any Album With Jim Keltner is a Good Album

There are great tunes on this album, all covers except for “Down in Hollywood”-which he performed with Chaka Khan. There are also some other excellent artists helping out, including Jim Keltner, Tim Drummond, Reverend Patrick Henderson, Milt Holland, Bobby King, and David Lindley, to name a few. I think Chaka khan is singing on A Good Thing not Down In Hollywood

Ya’ Gotta Hear It for History’s Sake, Though

But there is an overriding reason to listen to this album, regardless of the tunes and the musicians and my half-hearted backing. It’s the one. It’s the first pop album to be recorded digitally by a major label. And there’s great irony there too, as many of the tunes were old even in 1979! They shone, though, on the 3M Digital Audio Mastering System, a 32-track recording system. (Another album that benefited from this 1978 technology was Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly, reviewed on this site.)

It's an interesting part of recording history and another one of those albums that has been available on just about everything so far: vinyl, 8track, cassette, CD, and digital. Most importantly, if you give it a good chance, it really grows on you. It's not as good as his most recent work, Delta Time, though.