Old Enough to Forget

I found this one still in the original shrinkwrap and the cover looked interesting. It was on Capitol Records and it didn't hurt that I recognized producer Marshall Crenshaw's name on the back cover. I always love a good hype sticker, and the implication here was that this was full of hits. Three of them. Score! When I dropped the needle I was stoked to hear the opening notes to see what this was going to be ... I had cranked it a little louder than normal and I stood there looking down at the needle waiting ... then it hit. This is my favourite part of a new record. The anticipation. The opening guitar riff hit me in my happy place (the best feeling ever), and after a few licks of guitar tastiness, Gwil's voice came in and he's got his own thing going on. Part Americana Roots Rock, mixed with good old fashioned Southern Rock. I actually thought he sounded a bit like Pat MacDonald from Timbuk 3 mixed with Dan Baird from Georgia Satellites, and a dash of Steve Earle when...

For a dollar I'll buy pretty much anything if it strikes my fancy. Olivia Newton-John had a remarkable career, first with her country era, then her silver screen turns. She played Sandy Black Tights in Grease which was a hit, although I hated it on principal at the time. But dagnabbit, those pants. Then there was the movie no one saw, Xanadu but everyone heard songs from the soundtrack on the radio. Then came the sweaty headband and the song radio would ... not ... stop ... playing. "Physical" I mean it was everywhere, and it was everywhere for what seemed like FOREVER. I'm sure this was the evil origin story of The Leg Warmer Invasion. Jane Fonda entered the fray, and then suddenly we were glued to the TV watching The 20 Minute Workout,  where the women were all able to place their palms on the floor and look directly at you while they had their backsides facing the camera. Yeah, the '80s. Raise your glass, they were the best of times ... they were the best of ti...

Tim Finn, founding father of Split Enz, occasional member of Crowded House and half of The Finn Brothers with little brother Neil and a fairly odd but incredibly cool album by ALT (with Andy White and Liam O Maonlai) back in '95. It's weird, not a bad weird, just weird that I came to Tim Finn's solo work backassward through his association with little brother Neil. Of course I knew of Split Enz, and dang it I loved "Shark Attack" and thought "Six Months in a Leaky Boat" were awesome, but on balance I liked Neil's songs better. Those first two Crowded House records only cemented that opinion for me. When Neil and Tim turned what was to be a Finn Brothers record into Woodface I was still drawn to Neil, but I had to admit Tim was pretty cool ... maybe I was missing out. Me being me, which is to say a borderline compulsive, I started looking for Tim's solo work. I found his debut from '83 which was okay, and I kept going and going. Of his solo wo...

Okay, this one might be a little more pissy than usual. Mainly because I think enough water has passed under the bridge now, and frankly no one reading this will think, "Oh my, thank you. I can save myself the time and skip the album, I'll just stream 'It's in the Way that You Use It.'" Look this is going to be a meanderamble and likely veer wildly of course before it eventually ends. I can save you some time. Here's the score: 4 killers, 6 fillers. Although I only mention three songs in a positive light. Two of them are memorable, the others are good in the moment. Let's call it 4 good songs for the sake of brevity. That's not necessarily bad, if Mister Clapton was a baseball player he'd be the goat.*  August followed a year after Behind the Sun reintroduced Mr. Clapton to the world as a commercially viable artist. The album went platinum primarily on the strength of "Forever Man" a song Phil Collins did not play drums on. Th...

Tommy Shaw. Man, back in the day Tommy Shaw was my favourite part of Styx. Like most kids my age it was The Grand Illusion and Pieces of Eight that put the band on the map. Not to shit on Dennis, this is about Tommy so it's Tommy's songs that'll get top billing here. I remember hearing "Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)" on the radio sporadically, mainly because radio in a small town sucked. Although sometimes at night I could pull in a Vancouver AM station. Then came the big guns "Blue Collar Man (Long Nights)" and "Renegade" and if that was all he ever wrote that would have been enough. But like they say on TV, "BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!" There was so much more, Cornerstone had the awesome "Boat on a River" Paradise Theatre contained "Too Much Time on My Hands" and um, he played guitar on Kilroy Was Here . I am not sleeping on his debut with the band, Crystal Ball , where as a newbie he was gifted the ti...

This was a watershed album for me. For a couple of years from '81 through '83 I listened to a lot of Christian music. Some good, some really good and a lot of really ... really questionable stuff that was truly awful. At the time I played Colours a lot ... I mean, A LOT. Even at the time despite my desire to like everything on it, the album was felt wildly uneven but I ... did ... not ... care. I loved this record. I'd first heard Resurrection Band in the spring of 1981 (sometimes memories do have a time stamp) when a friend played the opening track to their 1978 album Awaiting Your Reply. "Waves" sounded like Led Zeppelin, which at the time wasn't actually a selling feature for me. People may not remember but there was a time not that long ago when music like this was controversial. Many of the televangelist talking heads proclaimed this was THE DEVIL'S MUSIC. What Resurrection Band and their contemporaries were doing was truly out of the ordinary for Ch...