Old Enough to Forget

When Burton Cummings left The Guess Who and embarked on a solo career, he caught his second wind. Through the mid '70s to the end of the decade, he was huge at home. He went on a double-platinum run starting with his self-titled album in ’76 and hit triple platinum with Dream of a Child in ’78. I always assumed he was Canada’s unofficial troubadour. He also seemed to have more specials on CBC than Wayne and Shuster (just kidding - no one had more specials than those guys), and he hosted the Juno Awards in 1979 and 1980 when he was at the height of his popularity. Me? I could take him or leave him. He was a hell of a singer and all that, but he was also really cheesy at times. Though I really liked “My Own Way to Rock,” mainly because the guitar solo was so good. Considering my limited budget as a teenager, I never felt the urge to spend my money on his stuff. The one album I found a while back that is pretty much essential listening was his 1980 two-record collection, The Best of ...

I found a copy of Trooper’s debut from 1975, and this was my first time hearing the album in its entirety. Even though it contains two of the band’s best-known songs, “General Hand Grenade” and “Baby Woncha Please Come Home,” I was surprised the record didn’t go gold here in Canada. The band’s next four albums would all go platinum, with the latter two even going double platinum. What a run. The debut was produced by Randy Bachman and released on Randy’s Legend Records, although it was distributed by MCA Records  - the label Trooper would eventually move to and stay with during their commercial peak. I have always liked Trooper, and like just about every Canadian kid of a certain vintage, Hot Shots was part of the soundtrack of our formative years. I’ve had a lot of fun digging into some of their earlier albums and hearing deeper tracks I’d never encountered before. For whatever reason, the debut seems to be the forgotten Trooper record. I can sort of see why. Aside from those two...

Goodness me, look what the bins coughed up. Black Market's Changing of the Guard . The album came out back in '81 on the small El Mocambo imprint. As far as covers go, this is about as cheesy as they come. Except, I don't think it was meant to be cheese, as there is a special salute to the Royal Regiment of Canada on the bottom right corner on the back cover. There was something familiar about the guy with the stache and glasses holding a machine gun pulling off a beret. Sure enough a quick scan of the back cover reveals a cigar chompin' Dominic Troiano. The two shadowy figures are wearing face coverings so it's hard to know if they're props or if drummer Paul DeLong and bassist Bob Wilson didn't want to show their faces. It's interesting to me that this was released as a Dominic Troiano solo album. I suspect that after almost a half dozen records that Dominic wanted to try something different - hence the new band. I suppose it makes sense. Black Market ...

Joe Hall and the Continental Drift. Trying to categorize Joe Hall is a bit of a conundrum, wrapped in an enigma coated in Panko and fried in bacon grease and served with a sprig of parsley. I can't say I ever really understood Mister Hall, or really got his music, but for whatever reason I still kind of consider myself a fan. He's sort of a musical WTF with a question mark. Is he taking the piss or is he serious? During the waning days of poor Krazy Bob's I would go in more often than not to scour his discount bins that were more often than not seeded with some really cool stuff. On the day where I found this 1977 CBC Transcription, I also found replacement copies for a couple of his albums that I had back in the mid '80s: On the Avenue (1978)  and Rancho Banano (1980). I looked and looked hoping to find Drinking with the Continental Drift (1979) an album I never had, that would have filled in a missing piece. But it was either hiding or whoever dumped their records w...

My goodness how time flies. Corey Hart may be best known for his breakthrough hit “Sunglasses at Night,” but up here in Canada this young man went on a tear, releasing one great album after another. As the ‘80s came to a close his commercial momentum started to wane, someone forgot to tell me - I kept picking up his stuff right through to Jade in 1998. I can’t believe this record came out in 1983. That makes it over forty friggin’ years old. I've written about a couple of his other albums but it was fun going back to the beginning, there was something about this album that just worked. Here was a guy who was all of 21 when it came out, writing all the words and music himself. And somehow he even managed to get Eric Clapton to play dobro on “Jenny Fey.” Goodness, how bloody cool is that? Cool. It was just cool. I don’t think the folks at Aquarius Records had any idea what they had when they first released First Offense . The album started to break, and even a non-album single, “Lamp...

Book of Dreams from 1977 was essentially the second half of The Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits 1974–78 . Steve Miller released one of rock’s great one-two punch combinations: Fly Like an Eagle in 1976 and Book of Dreams in 1977, records that cemented him as one of the defining artists of the ’70s. The bed tracks for these watershed albums were essentially recorded at the same time, which is part of what makes them feel so cohesive. I remember a friend once calling Book of Dreams the best collection of leftover material ever recorded. I’m not sure how much water that comment holds, and I suspect Mister Miller was more concerned with pulling together the songs that best fit together stylistically. Besides, the answer to the question, “What if all the great songs were released as one album?” was already answered in 1978 with Greatest Hits 1974–78 . Does one really need to hear Book of Dreams ? Kind of depends. Here’s my conundrum: I don’t have the greatest hits collection, so ye...