I’ve set myself up for certain challenges in making my list and publishing it in this manner. For what it’s worth, I scratched out an initial list of the 15 albums that shaped my life before writing a single word of any of this—just so I had a map of where this thing was going, and because I like lists—but it has already changed considerably, and as I write, I realize my initial list was inherently flawed. That’s OK, and to be expected—a lifetime of music is nearly impossible to condense into 15 individual albums, and anyone attempting to do so would naturally make numerous edits along the way—but because I have committed myself to a small, finite number, and writing about those albums in the chronological album in which I first heard them, I have to make some especially hard cuts early on. I want to properly pace myself here; I don’t want to use, say, Parts 1-10 of this list on albums I heard in high school, and then leave myself only five spots to cover the next 16 years of my life. However, once I write about something I first heard in, say, 1990, I can’t go back the following week, decide I left out something I first heard in 1989, and bend my own rules to include it.

Well, I could do that. They are my rules, after all. But I won’t. Because I have standards, ethics, a commitment to excellence. And it would aggravate my OCD to torturous extremes.

Point is, I’m doing this without a net. Once I write about an album here, I have both used up another of a limited number of bullets and I have pushed forward the clock that much further. That may not seem like much of anything to you, but to me, well, let me tell you, it’s…something.

(I would like to mention here that I have never actually been diagnosed with OCD, so I throw the term around in something of a loose, jocular manner, as a way of poking fun at myself—no disrespect or marginalization intended to anyone afflicted with or related to anyone afflicted with OCD—but I also have to imagine that I do have some sort of spectrum disorder that causes me to think this way, and this lack of diagnosis was merely the result of growing up in an era before pediatricians were properly versed in these disorders, their symptoms and definitions. Because while I might just be having a larf here, let’s face it, this is not how most people operate, is it? Is it?)

Aaaanyway, there are a number of albums here that I really really want to include—albums that fall between the dates of August 23, 1988 (the release date of my last entry on this list, Jane’s Addiction’s Nothing’s Shocking) and September 24, 1991 (the release date of an album that absolutely, positively, most definitely must be included on this list in the near-ish future; I won’t tell you what it is here, but you have enough clues and know me well enough to guess, do you not?). But I have to be ruthless here; I have to carefully calibrate each decision, so that I achieve a perfect balance and tell this long, ridiculous story in the most accurate manner possible.

So it is with a heavy heart that I exclude from this list such important personal classics as Ice Cube’s Death Certificate, Deicide’s Deicide, and Alice In Chains’ Facelift, although a strong case could be made for each of those albums to be included here. Alas, ’twas not to be—maybe on some other list, some other time.

3. Led Zeppelin – “Crop Circles” box set (original release date: September 7, 1990)

Donny’s parents had gone away for a few weeks to, I can’t remember now, St. Tropez or Cancun or Barbados or something, and they’d made the dubious decision to leave the house to Donny. I guess what choice did they have, right? He was 16 years old, which is old enough to be entrusted with such light responsibilities as walking and feeding the dogs, taking in the mail and not burning the place to the ground, all of which Donny did well enough.

But he was still a reprobate—as we all were, because, come on, we were 16—and as such, he was intent on using this window of opportunity to introduce me to the psychedelic, mind-bending possibilities of marijuana. To achieve this, Donny had constructed a makeshift bong out of an empty 1-liter seltzer bottle, the hollowed-out shaft of a Bic Stic, some duct tape and a small piece of aluminum foil. (Teenagers take note: This works just as well as a $75 Graffix and is easier to dispose of when things get ugly.) He also had an entire eighth of hydro, every last stem of which he had earmarked for this very occasion.

Anyway, shuffling and repeating in Donny’s rotating five-disc changer were the four discs of Led Zeppelin’s “Crop Circles” box set, which my parents had purchased for me the previous Christmas, and which I had listened to at some length up to that point (in the interest of accuracy, for the most part I had listened not to the box set itself, but to a mix-tape sampler I had made of songs from the set, consisting primarily of tracks from Discs 1 and 2, which comprised the first half of Zep’s career—the “Black Dog,” “Stairway” half, rather than the “Fool in the Rain,” Coda half).

Donny and I sat in his bedroom for what seemed like hours, taking countless hits off that homemade bong, all that plastic and duct tape slowly melting and giving off brutal toxic fumes. I think I was in the middle of saying “It’s not working,” when—boom—it was working. I do remember that “Dazed and Confused” was playing, which may have been a catalyst, too. And in that moment, my relationship to music (and reality) was forever changed.

Led Zeppelin was the first time I ever connected with music that belonged to an earlier generation; they made me better understand all rock ’n’ roll, where it came from, what it meant. They were the first band whose history mattered to me (later that same year, I read Stephen Davis’ classic Hammer of the Gods, and accepted every fabricated exaggeration and outright lie as cold hard truth). Even today, I listen to them all the time—more, probably, than I listen to almost any other artist who has appeared or will appear on this list—and I am still, always, blown away that music could ever have been so gigantic, so magnificent, so mysterious, so powerful.