Jo Jo Gunne - Bite Down Hard

Oh, what's this? I had no idea what to expect here, but it was on Asylum Records, a label that had a great track record of releasing solid artists. It was produced by Bill Szymczyk, who also produced the Eagles and Joe Walsh. Some of the names were familiar as well, so I figured it was worth a shot. Worst case, I'm out a buck.

The inner sleeve was missing (who knows what treasures were missing - more likely it was a plain plastic insert), but the jacket was okay and the vinyl was in better shape than I thought it would be. This was released in 1973 and is very much of its time, which isn't a bad thing. I love '70s rock and roll. It's enjoyable, and there were no clunkers that made me want to turn it down, but honestly, it wasn't particularly memorable after my first listen. But it did warrant more time on the turntable.

I'm on my third pass now, and it has a solid groove. Songs are starting to stand out. (According to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, it cracked the Top 100, peaking at #75.) But there was nothing I remembered hearing on the radio as a kid.

"Ready Freddy" kicks off the album with a guitar riff that brings to mind Alice Cooper's "School's Out" from a year earlier. But that's where any similarity ends, and the song drives along at a clip with some great piano. Side two closes with "Rhoda," which even has a wicked drum breakdown and some very tasty guitar work. One thing that stands out is a lot of the early synth sounds throughout the album. It's just par for the course now, but some of these sounds were pretty new back then. Today's musical cliches had to start somewhere.

Bite Down Hard was the band's second album, and they'd drop two more records before the end of 1974, all of them breaking through the Top 200, but that would be it.

With the benefit of hindsight, we know what happened to Jo Jo Gunne, but hearing this with fresh ears, you can get a sense of why they were the second act to be signed to the label. Considering who their future stablemates were going to be, this was kind of a big deal. If things had fallen into place, who knows what might have been.

Overall, this was a great new-to-me surprise. If I stumble upon more of their stuff, I'll snap it up.

Comments

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...

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 , ...

Lighthouse - Sunny Days

Bin diving at my local record store where there were more than a few choices to make. After picking out a half dozen treasures, I figured I'd stop looking and leave before I caused myself trouble at home. Lighthouse was one of those ridiculously large bands in the early 70s I didn't understand. I mean really, BTO was just four guys, The James Gang was three, until they weren't, what in the world do you do with a dozen guys in a band? Of course I had a radio — it was the first significant purchase I made with my money from cutting lawns. I think at the time it cost about 35 bucks, and had FM and other high frequency things I never got to use living out in the suburbs away from the reach of the big city FM signal. "Sunny Days" was a great song. I remember thinking it was cool and didn't switch to the other AM station when it came on. A few years later, when I got my first record player, the obligatory K-Tel anthologies would feature a myriad of cut up and edited...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog