I’m going to start by saying that that not everybody needs to have a Record That Changed Their Life.

After all, I’m being literal with this assignment, not hyperbolic. Certain works of art have the capacity to alter how we think, feel, behave towards others, choose a career or life path and maneuver the vagaries of existence.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I didn’t have a Record That Changed My Life. A love of music was always in me, and at a very young age I’d already absorbed much of the mystery of it. I understood the basics, even an array of abstractions. There were very few surprises, just myriad and unending small pleasures.

No single record formed the foundation of my formative tastes. It was a shifting mosaic. It would be inaccurate and ungrateful to single out any one example and exalt it as life-changing. For a list of merely great records, I could list many. I could also cite a bunch of sounds which I personally consider to represent seismic changes in pop culture—the low-key bass of David Essex’s “Rock On,” for instance, or the needle-pinning drum bombast of Gary Glitter’s hits of the same era, found studio sounds which shaped not just songs but whole genres. I can argue the importance of such records for hours, stopping only to luxuriate in the playing of them, but I would not consider them personally life-changing. That’s a higher order.

Nevertheless, now that you perceive the gravity of my making such a statement (who knew that this was going to start sounding like an Edgar Allen Poe story?), I do have a Record That Changed My Life. It was released when I was 15 years old, and I admit that this is a prime age to get swept up in and overrate things. But the record still exerts a massive hold on me three and half decades later. This is despite the fact that I’ve only ever really liked a small portion of it.

Live at the Rat was recorded at the club of that name (actually, a longer name–The Rathskeller) in Kenmore Square, Boston over a four-night span in late September, 1976.

I was not at the shows; as I say, I was 15. I was not aware of any of these bands, though given my prodigious tastes at the time, it was only a fluke that I hadn’t already discovered either Willie “Loco” Alexander and The Real Kids by that time.

But I hadn’t, and they were a revelation. Alexander didn’t just exhibit a fanboy literary streak I found highly appealing, bringing his idolatry of Jack Kerouac down to club-level directness, he also exhibited his own freeform creative genius, improvising the yelped lyrics for “Pup Tune” which included shout-outs to both Third Rail (also on the Live at the Rat bill) and international salsa superstar Celia Cruz.

At the time, Alexander’s rock career was a decade old—he’d been signed to Capitol Records as a harbinger of the ill-fated “Bosstown Sound,” had become a member of the last (Lou Reedless) line-up of the Velvet Underground. Boston Pops conductor Arthur Fiedler had been photographed dancing to one of Alexander’s bands. Rather than stand apart from the still-fragmented nascent Boston punk scene, Willie Alexander embraced it, and two of his three tracks on Live at the Rat directly reference the new breed.

Not every act on the album catches the same cultural shift. Thundertrain’s embarrassing “I’ve Got to Rock” was the kind of old-school headbanger many Rat bands were trying to get away from. That just makes Live at the Rat more profound as a historical document, to my ears. You hear DMZ doing a primitive version of the ‘60s-garage purity which Mono Mann’s later band The Lyres would be famous for. (One of the best live shows I’ve seen all my life was at the Rat for New Year’s in the mid-‘80s with The Lyres and The Nervous Eaters).

When I first heard the record, I didn’t know what half the local references were to. I misheard Willie Alexander’s spoken intro to “At the Rat” as “Boston rock and roll started right here… and there it remains” instead of “…with Barry and the Remains.” Elsewhere on the album, I didn’t get that Marc Thor’s whimsical “Circling L.A.” was meant to satirize Jonathan Richman until Oedipus (the first punk DJ in the area, and one of the first in the country) mentioned it on his WBCN show. Decoding this music, in a way, became my life’s work. I started looking at bands roots-and-all, needing to know where their names came from, who’d played with whom before, where they most preferred to play.

I found At the Rat equal parts inviting and intimidating—a club that seemed ridiculously easy to join, yet you may never know if you’d been accepted. I spent the rest of my youth observing that scene from booths near the back of the room, more like an ornithologist than the flying creature I wanted to be, swooping amid the grooves in search of tasty rodents.