Skip to main content

April Wine - LIVE!

The first time I bought this, I found it at a second-hand store. Over the years, I'd end up buying it a few times in different formats. It was the same place I got my comics and Robert A. Heinlein paperbacks. It was an awesome place.

LIVE! is an overlooked gem from April Wine's early albums, just before the band really broke wide open in Canada. They were already a pretty big deal, about to become even bigger. I think I got this just before First Glance came out (which is another story for another day) and I played it pretty much to death, or at least to the irritation of my parents.

There are so many killer songs here, and these versions were my introduction to the band. Of course, being the '70s, there's a blistery (yes, I chose that word on purpose) guitar solo to start off "The Band Has Just Begun" that my best friend thought was me with my fingers stuck in the strings. I thought that was a little harsh, but listening to it now, I can't say I don't hear it. At the time, though, I wanted to be able to play like that.

Then there's a drum solo that drones on for over four minutes before a referee's whistle calls a time out and the band kicks into "Just Like That," which is a great song. The album closes out with a wicked version of "Could've Been a Lady," which was probably their big hit up to that point.

For a time, Myles Goodwin and Jim Clench were like a Canadian version of Lennon / McCartney ... except Myles wrote most of the songs, and after a while Jim left the band. Decades later, here I am sitting in my basement, listening to yet another "new to me" copy of LIVE!, and I'm just as enthralled as I was back then. The difference being that now, when I play it loud, I irritate my kids.

This was just the start of my love affair with one of Canada's greatest rock bands.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...
Post a Comment
Read more

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...
5 comments
Read more