Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and 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 that had a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)" that when I bought the album 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. However, at the time all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the first cut "Baby Come Back" and proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another and closed out the album (sans any bonus material) with "Burning Down" a song Meat Loaf would one day cover, smother, and butcher. The album is a time piece, and in places is smothered in the cheese you'd expect for an early 80s release. It's really good cheese.

Then I waited for a follow up ...

... and I waited, and nothing ever came.

A few months ago I bought a pristine copy (more than a dollar) and brought it home. To say I love this album is an understatement, I played it constantly for days. Sitting on the couch, reading comics and reliving my youth. Then I found his web-page billyrankin.com and it is probably one of the greatest rock and roll archives ever. Billy essentially lays it all out there, from the heady days with A&M to his management fiascoes, his admittedly bad business decisions, his time in Nazareth all of it. It makes for great reading.

On top of it all, he has his music there too. Not for sale. Just there to be heard. His unreleased follow up, live tracks. It's a feast.

Through it all you just get the sense that here's a guy who loved music. Loved playing and loves his family and has no regrets.

I do miss the naivete of my youth, where I thought if you released an album you were a rock star and resided in the upper pantheon of rock gods. The reality was more mundane, and the realization your heroes are human and have regular lives is just the by product of growin' up ... even if you're slower to do it.

Slàinte mhath Mister Rankin. Thank you.