Toto - Toto (Yeah, they probably don't like you either)

Toto, the band people love to shit on. For me, I've been a fan since first hearing "Hold the Line," and I make no apologies for loving these guys. Heck, I remember when Hydra was released and I eagerly went to the record store to get it. The store used to copy reviews and place them with albums as a sales tool. I guess clipping out a scathing review and taping it to the record seemed like a good idea to someone.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.

I can't remember if this is the same "review" but it's pretty close in tone:

Max Bell, New Musical Express, 17 March 1979

WILL THESE people never learn? In the time-honoured Hollywood tradition of foisting ambitious super-sessioners upon that large portion of the American public bereft of a brain, taste or the ability to decide for itself comes Toto, a six piece composed of former Boz Scaggs and Steely Dan (you know the rest) side men.

Admittedly, I'm not a big Boz fan, but those Steely Dan dudes had some awesome stuff. I was hooked.

Their debut album dropped in the fall of 1978. I've probably purchased it at least four times, but the last time it was only a buck. The time before that, it was part of their 2019 box set where all of the Columbia releases were remastered and the CDs were packaged to look like mini records. Yeah, it was expensive, but so, so good. I mean, I really don't know why I wanted to get another pops-and-clicks LP when I have a sonically unbelievable copy in the other room that can melt faces.

Oh right ... I found it for a dollar. How can you say no to that?

I actually didn't get this one right away when it was released. I liked the songs on the radio, and I really liked the songs I'd heard from Hydra, but I was still a kid with limited resources. It was the summer of 1981, and I was playing baseball. From a nearby house someone had cranked up their stereo and was blaring "Georgy Porgy" (a song I never really liked), and then suddenly "Manuela Run" was echoing across the field. I don't know what it was about the song, but it got me in the feels.

Shortly after, I went out and bought the album. At the time, Toto was viewed as these studio musicians who wanted to be in a band, and the grief they got was unbelievable. You forget, looking at these guys, that they were just kids. Steve Lukather was in his early 20s, and some of the other guys weren't that much older. Good lord, the level of maturity in their arrangements and playing was, and remains, mind-boggling.

There was a brief moment where they got their due, and then almost right after that moment, here in North America, they were sort of swept to the back burner, eventually ending up off the stove altogether. However, a good chunk of the world never fell off the bandwagon.

I suppose I'll have to dig out Turn Back next... now THAT album really was something special.

Look at that, I went all the way to the end and didn't make any "we're not in Kansas" or toilet jokes, and didn't mention "Africa" - even in passing, unless you count this one, but really it shouldn't count. I'm kind of proud of myself.

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 , ...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continues to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner who had been with Gary from the beg...

Old Enough to Forget

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