Yes, yes, I know, Baby-Boomers, Sgt. Pepper's changed everything.  Best album ever, shot heard 'round the world, etc, etc, because you're Teh Me Generation and all of your experiences were seminal, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Well, I remember going to Turtle's Records (a now-defunct Atlanta based retail chain) on the Friday after my 14th birthday.  I had a ten dollar gift certificate (which was a metal medallion in the shape of a record) that I'd gotten as a gift.  It was Friday evening on the last day of school for the summer.

I asked the guy behind the counter for New Wave summer music.

"Have you heard Duran Duran?" he asked me.

"The guy from 'Barbarella'?" said my brother, who had walked to the mall with me. He, at 13, had already stayed up late to watch "Barbarella", oh, ten or eleven times on HBO.  Little pervert.

"No, the band," he said, and took off the god-awful Eagles record that was playing on the store's sound system and put on Duran Duran's eponymous debut album, "They sound like Japan and Roxy Music playing Chic songs." 

Now, I'm not saying Duran Duran were the greatest band in the world.  I'm certainly not going to hold them up as being equal to the Beatles, for god's sake, no.

However, I do feel safe in saying that it was a straight line from my purchase of that record on that first day of summer in 1982 to my brother and I forming our first (awful) band ("The Shreds", aheh) less than 100 days later.  So, I guess the message here is that you can find transformative experiences in the most unlikely places, even albums by heavily made up British hairspray bands.