Old Enough to Forget

I was very late to the party with The 77s, and over the years I would work my way backward through the band's discography. The band's first three albums were on a wicked little CD box set, 123 that I spent entirely too much money on, but it was worth it. The downside was it was too much all at once and honestly I never spent enough time with the individual albums. It just ended up being an overwhelming experience and a check in the box for my completest tendencies. Don't get me wrong, I listened and I marvelled at the high points and pushed through the songs that didn't immediately resonate. I was taking in a band more than I was an album.  Whereas now, I'm sitting here four decades after the fact trying to process and catalogue an album that in a perfect world should have been in my collection from the get go. Did I mention I was late to the party? Live and learn right? In my defence 1984 was right in the heart of those dark years where I was disillusioned with so ...

The Northern Pikes were never one of my go to bands. They skirted the periphery for me, although they had a couple of killer tunes: “Things I Do For Money” was a nearly perfect ‘80s songs with a wonderfully syncopated delay on the guitar and a head bopping groove. The other was “Hopes Go Astray” which was (still is) a captivating song from  Secrets of the Alibi but don’t remember much else. The only thing I remember was being a bit disappointed. I was probably mix tape hunting, and aside from that one great song ("Hopes Go Astray") I didn’t pull anything else off and I suppose that was enough for me to bury it. Who knows. I was pretty quick to pass judgment and often it was brutal, and as I've found out in hindsight my loss. The band would keep dropping albums I more or less ignored ... okay it was more but I'm trying to soften my ambivalence. When they dropped "She Ain't Pretty" I had to admit it was catchy, but the little hairs on my neck didn't s...

As a kid I'd belt out "All By Myself" whenever I heard Eric Carmen's song come on the radio. It was a huge song ... at least to me. For a long time that was all I knew about him. I was a product of AM radio and unless my older cousins or my cool Aunt and Uncle had it I was stuck in that tiny bubble.  The first time I saw a Raspberries record I was at my buddy Andy's apartment in the mid '80s and was sitting on the floor looking through his voluminous collection. Andy was a couple of years older than I was and back then he was on the local co-op radio doing his thing. The station didn't have a lot of bandwidth and I couldn't get it out in the suburbs, so I never got to hear him and his dulcet tones. Andy was cool, had a cool voice, and a cool record collection. He loved The Grateful Dead, Michael Nesmith, and thought commercial music was a cancer. His girlfriend, and one of my closest friends Lori and I happened to think Starship's "We Built Th...

Down ’n’ Outz were initially formed as a creative outlet for Joe Elliott to explore his love of 1970s-influenced glam rock. Particularly, but not limited to, those who fell out of the Mott the Hoople family tree. I'd never heard of the band before, and This is How We Roll is the band's third effort and the first to contain original songs, which were written by Mister Elliot.  While I am at best a casual fan of all things Mott and the various Hooples they jumped through I do like a lot of that I've heard over the years. Joe wrote all but one of the songs on the album, and he is absolutely not doing anything that hasn't been done before, but his love for the era and is palpable and the songs here are all really good. Heck even the band's name smacks of the same spelling deficiency the lads in Slade suffered from.  When I first saw the album in the clearance bin ... by now you must know I am notoriously cheap, for 75% off I was curious. The cover photo reminded me o...

Good old Sammy. I knew of Sammy at least a year or two before I ever heard the opening riff to "Heavy Metal" from the sountrack album. It was a song I should have loved, but it always sort of stuck in my craw like a spoonful of cinnamon. It should have been tasty ...  I'd seen Sammy's name in the credits of a couple albums I had back in the day: I think the first time I saw his name was in the credits on a Servant record. Servant had incorrectly attributed "Rich Man" to Sammy on their debut album Shallow Water ... I was this many days old when I learned Dan Hartman wrote the song, not Sammy. His name also popped up on Working Class Dog.  Rick Springfield covered "I've Done Everything For You" and absolutely made it his own. A few years later when Sammy replaced Dave in Van Halen  everyone knew who the Red Rocker was. Sammy is cool. Absolutely and unequivocally cool. For whatever reason I never really clicked with Sammy's stuff. I had all of...

The first time I heard "Owner of a Lonely Heart" on the radio, I was smitten. "What in the heck was that?" It was one of those HOLY SHIT songs that seemed to come out of nowhere. KISM from Bellingham had a strong enough signal to reach over into the suburbs where I lived. The song quickly worked it's way into heavy rotation, but I don't remember hearing it on the two big stations in Vancouver. It took me a while to find the record after first hearing the song. There was a record store across the street from where I worked and I looked for this new Yes album, and all I found where the old Yes records, nothing new. Of course this only happened once, and I'm sure this was all compressed into the span of a couple of weeks, if that. Soon the song along with the bleeding edge orchestral blasts that were unlike anything I'd heard before was everywhere. This was Yes? Yes. Of course there was no internet back in the day, just word of mouth and the burgeon...