Old Enough to Forget

I had never heard of SUUNS before finding Felt in the discount bin. The clearance bin that once seemed to be teeming with possibilities had been getting thinner and thinner over the last few months. The once rich field that had yielded a crop of  Marco Polo Platters  had just about been picked clean. It was the same stock, different day, and albums I'd seen and rejected were now getting a closer look. After months of flipping and skipping, I found myself looking closely at the album, trying to see if there were any hints on the jacket that would give away the contents. Admittedly, I didn't want to just lay down my money and have this be a complete waste of my time, so I checked to see what genre the band was classified under. I didn't read too far. I got as far as them being considered a rock band and figured, "Good enough." The album cover was not a wealth of information, merely listing the songs in an embossed font against a lime green background that was only ...

Fingerprintz was released in 1979, and it was mining the raw energy of punk but was infused with the emerging new wave elements and a ska beat. The album was released everywhere except North America as The Very Dab . Back in '79 I'd have had no idea what that meant, and I guess the folks at Virgin / PolyGram didn't either, so they just blacked it out and voila, a self-titled record. Although I suspect the version we got in Canada wasn't the same. For those who don't know, like me, The Very Dab , according to Google, is a traditional Scots dialect phrase meaning "the exact thing required" or "absolutely perfect." I picked this up because of Jimme O'Neill and Cha Burns, who I knew from The Silencers. Cha Burns is one of the greatest guitar players you've likely never heard of. There was something about how he played and the way he added texture and feel to the songs he played on. It's hard to describe. It's sort of like trying to de...

Freeways marked the end of Bachman-Turner Overdrive in 1977, and the next year Randy Bachman emerged with Survivor . I remember seeing this in the bins and thinking the cover was really cool. There was Randy in partial silhouette, his bellbottom jeans disappearing into the fog on the stage. His classic white Strat was partially visible, and the simple title Survivor said all that needed to be said. He was the last man standing. In the early '80s I picked up a copy and was looking forward to finally hearing what I had missed. It was profoundly disappointing. Undeterred, I had still managed to pick up a lot of things Bachman. I had a copy of Union with Fred Turner, and aside from a couple of songs it was forgettable. I also had the two Iron Horse records ... one decent, the other not so much. Heck, I even had Axe , Randy's first solo album (I still pull it down once in a while). So it's not like Survivor stopped me from being a fan ... Survivor is an odd record. It's...

You may not be able to judge a book by its cover ... but you can often get an idea of what's going to be inside. I mean, a shirtless pirate with huge pectoral muscles and an eye patch sweeping a scantily clad damsel in a dress? You know you're going to read about penis euphemisms for a hundred and fifty pages. Just because the internet is full of pointless jibber-jabber, here are a few of my favourites: Man-Root Thorn of Lust Engorged Wand Pillar of Marble Scepter of Desire Monstrous Invader Wedding Tackle What does all of this bodice-removing slang have to do with Steel Breeze? I'm working on it. Like a book, the first thing to catch one's eye is the album cover. For a new band in particular, this is a do-or-die first impression. Once you have a bit of cachet, you can release a cover with nothing on it. Ask The Beatles, or AC/DC, or Spinal Tap, but for everyone else, covers matter. The cover to Steel Breeze's debut was about as eye-catching as the cover of The Yell...

City to City was a giant killer. Saturday Night Fever had been number 1 for 22 weeks in the States, and for one glorious week in July 1978, Gerry, the antithesis of disco, was number 1. Of course, what goes up comes down, and a week later the Rolling Stones would claim top spot. However, in Canada we weren't so lucky. Here, it was Andy Gibb who knocked him out of the top spot. A week later, The Rolling Stones' Some Girls claimed top spot in Canada. What this has to do with anything is ... not much. I just think it's cool that Gerry was once the flavour of the day for a week. "Baker Street," arguably his most famous song, was huge, and it pulled the album along with it. It would go platinum in the States and double platinum in Canada. City to City marked Gerry's triumphant return after the dissolution of Stealers Wheel and his forced exile. The musical climate in '78 was a hodgepodge of great rock and roll that served as a safe place for those trying to...

Aldo Nova seemed to come out of nowhere in the spring of '82. "Fantasy" didn't sound like anything else at the time - it was rock, wrapped in new wave structure, with searing guitars and layers of synths. If this was the future of rock, count me in. Throughout the album, Aldo's frenetic guitar playing was paired with a singing voice that at times seemed too thin to pull off the songs, but Aldo didn't seem to care and he went for it ... all in, baby. The album went double platinum on both sides of the border, and suddenly there was a new kid in town (suck it, Glenn Frey). To the uninitiated, Aldo Nova is remembered as a one-hit wonder - if he's remembered at all. Not everyone fell off the bandwagon after his debut, as his next record, Subject , would go platinum in Canada and gold in the US. However, by his third album, Twitch , an album that still went gold in Canada, there were a lot more empty seats on the wagon. His career trajectory may have gone in th...