Playlist: 1986, When I Was 16

Transitions

It's 2016, and I'm just about a week away from my 46th birthday. 30 years ago, in 1986, I experienced a musical epiphany. Up to that point, my days and nights were filled with the voices of Scott Muni, Dennis Elsas, Mark Ingram, and more on 102.7 WNEW FM. The Who, The Kinks, Springsteen, The Police, and way too much time spent with Pink Floyd pretty much made up most of my listening.

Then, something happened. I'm not sure how, but I think it was when I was working at the snack bars in Sea Girt and Spring Lake. Two of the guys that worked for us -- whose names I don't remember now -- would toss jelly donuts back and forth with lacrosse sticks and go on about how cool The Smiths and R.E.M. were. I somehow ended up bringing Lifes Rich Pageant home from Jack's Music Shoppe one day on cassette, and a whole new world opened up for me.

Here's a playlist of some of that stuff. Some of it, like "Open Your Heart," is more just background music from the time for me (though I bought The Immaculate Collection when I was in college and still have it). Other stuff -- "Bizarre Love Triangle," "Rise" -- are songs that weren't favorites of mine at the time but that I've grown to love over the years. Other stuff, though, holds some real meaning for me. The Queen Is Dead, Talking With the Taxman About Poetry, King of America, Blood & Chocolate, and -- yes -- Lifes Rich Pageant are some of my favorite albums of all time. CoolMom still owns an Especially for You picture disc, and she just about died when Pat Dinizio performed at the Asbury Music Awards. She's also got a German-manufactured version of Candy Apple Grey that she bought when her dad whisked the whole family to Geneva for his sabbatical during her senior year of high school.

I left off a lot of the really big pop stuff. Duran Duran never did it for me, and Huey Lewis and The News... ...well. I also left off anything from the releases by Bad Brains, The Cramps, The Damned, or any of the other bands that may give me a little punk street cred. That wasn't my thing back in the 1980s.

Anyway, here it is: When I Was 16. The usual caveats apply. This is limited to the stuff I could locate on Spotify, and I could update it at any time. Happy 2016.