Old Enough to Forget

"Last Song" is really the only tune I can name off the top of my head by Edward Bear. It's one of those little AM radio nuggets that still holds up. When I found the album I was in one of those moods where I wanted to take a chance on something, and this one looked interesting, and the bear on the cover looked slightly menacing. This pressing had the hype sticker embossed onto the cover, "includes LAST SONG, FLY ACROSS THE SEA, MASQUERADE" of the three songs I was only familiar with the aforementioned "Last Song" so I was curious to hear them. But first, some trivia. Who doesn't love trivia? Hands up? The band is literally named after Winnie the Pooh. I was this many years old when I learned that Edward Bear and Winnie-the-Pooh are one and the same. Nifty. It makes the ominous looking pissed off bear on the cover that much cooler. Now back to the previously meandering entry. The album opens with "Last Song" and the song is pure pop cheese...

Eye in the Sky was about as good as it got for The Alan Parsons Project. The band had been building up to something and the band got close with their previous albums, Eve and Turn of a Friendly Card . "Games People Play" remains one of my favourite songs, and Ian Bairnson's guitar solo is right up there with the best of the best. Eye in the Sky went double platinum here in Canada. The band was never a band, it was aptly titled a project and it was centred on Eric Woolfson, and Alan Parsons. The two wrote the songs, and Parsons engineered and produced and would bring in vocalists as required. Of course over the span of their career the singers would be consistent, names like Chris Rainbow, Lenny Zakatek (who should have had a solo career) and Elmer Gantry. There were others of course, but I run the risk of having to pull out a bunch of records and start reading credits. As to credits, the vinyl copy I found was missing the insert which sucked. The vinyl cleaned up okay w...

Released in '85 this was an album that marked the end of Nick's initial run. Between 1977 and 1981 he dropped an album a year and was signed with Chrysalis and then Casablanca Records before taking a four year break and resurfacing with this self titled effort on RCA. Gone was his longtime writing partner and guitarist James McCulloch. All that remained was his bass player Eric Nelson who was still holding down the bottom end. Nick did pull together some stellar musicians, from Mr. Mister's Pat Mastelotto on drums, to Mitchell Fromm on keyboards. The two guitar players, Jeff Silverman and Steve (Psycho) Sykes are pretty solid and there are some tasty licks to be heard. I remember CFOX playing a track from this album ... once, and my memory is really fuzzy on this. I keep confusing a memory of them playing Giuffria's "Call To The Heart" with whatever song they played by Nick Gilder. The common thread is both songs sounded like they were sung by Steve Perry. I a...

My introduction to Dwight Twilley came back in '84 when I first heard the single "Girls" on the radio. It was one of those albums that I remember still remember fondly. There was no internet and finding anything out about people was hit and miss depending on what you could suss from RollingStone, and later on Spin Magazine was cool. Really the only way to figure shit out for the average Luddite like me was to just go to the record store and look. At the time I had no idea what the difference was between Dwight Twilley the band, and Dwight Twilley the solo artist. I just figured it was a phase. I did manage to pick up Scuba Divers , and honestly sitting here I can't remember anything about it. Over the last year I'd picked up the two Phil Seymour albums, and I'd actually spent a fair bit of time listening to those, and I'd written up a slightly longer than usual bloggerity thing only to have a connection issue at some point where I save a blank page, and li...

Man, the '60s were cool. I mean it seemed like you could package an album for just about anyone or anything. Case in point, take this 1969 release, Season's Greetings & Joyeux Noel To Canada From Barbra Streisand . At first blush this looks like a Christmas album by Barbra Streisand ... until you turn it over and see the ... and Friends. Those friends were Doris Day, Jim Nabors and Andre Kostelanetz. I doubt they met up to discuss the album. What made this so interesting, was that it was a Columbia Records special products release produced exclusively for Canada Dry. Yeah, Canada Dry . I wonder how you got the album? Did you have to send in bottle caps? Before Celine Dion, it was Barbra Streisand who had the pipes. While I was never really a fan, I will admit that as a little kid I did like some of her songs from the movies. It's interesting that of all the holiday standards I never even knew Babs recorded Christmas songs. Well of course she did. The songs included on t...

Here we have a Nana Mouskouri album ... finally. I mean this is a sort of big deal. She was always that singer who wore the big black glasses. I had no idea what she sounded like, but it's funny that we all knew who she was. I mentioned in another post I thought that she and Roger Whittaker were two sides of the same coin. I managed to find Roger Whittaker's Christmas album, and recently I was rummaging in the dollar bin for Christmas records and scored a really nice copy of Nana Mouskouri's 1972 album "Christmas With Nana Mouskouri."  Musically the songs hold up really well. I'm never quite sure what to expect with some of the stuff from the early '70s. The arrangements lean to the traditional, although there are a number of songs where there's a folky flavour. This was before adult contemporary was a thing, but I suppose it was always a thing just not a genre. So many things get shoehorned into a box after the fact, and I'm trying to see where th...