Bachman Turner Overdrive - Four Wheel Drive

Growing up a good Canadian kid, there was no band bigger or more influential than Bachman-Turner Overdrive. I mean, when you're a kid, anything that seems to last more than a week is a long time. Heck, if you can like something for more than a school year, it's an eternity.

Seriously, as I got older I started confusing events that happened last year with things that happened a decade ago. But kid years? Yeah, they're like dog years.

Here I was listening to the radio as a kid, rocking out to "Let It Ride," and a year later sitting on the floor listening to a special program on the radio playing Not Fragile and loving "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet." Then in 1975 they dropped Four Wheel Drive, which would be the first record I bought with my own money.

It was a dilemma too. My older cousins were playing Led Zeppelin, KISS, Nazareth, and Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies. When I told them I wanted to get Four Wheel Drive, they weren't as enthusiastic. Oh, they liked them, but it wasn't top of their list like it was for me.

Now, as a kid, my mum and dad bought me a very cool record player. I can't recall if it was a birthday or Christmas gift - probably birthday ... but really, does it matter? It was an Electrohome Sound in the Round, and it went loud enough to irritate my parents, and I was over the moon. I had it forever (probably four years).

I found this picture on the web, and yes, it looked that cool. Yes, it was green. It was awesome.

Along with my record player, my dad bought me An Evening With John Denver, a double live album. Despite me wanting to get Billion Dollar Babies, this was more aligned with his tastes. I'd buy the Alice Cooper record myself.

Finally I got my copy of Four Wheel Drive, and I played it, and I played it, and I played it some more. It was only eight songs, but I didn't care. Heck, I even liked "Lowland Fling," and when I started playing guitar I was over the moon when I could play the opening lick to that song.

Looking back, you can see the band had already peaked, but to me this album and the follow-up Head On were my jam. Over the years I'd get everything I could get my hands on (B.T.O. Japan Tour still escapes me - my buddy Gord had a copy, but apparently his daughter got his vinyl, so I'm still looking), and then again on CD.

But when I started sussing out lost treasures on vinyl, Four Wheel Drive was one of the first ones I picked up.

When I turned 50, my buddy Randy (the other one), who played with BTO for many years, got me a care package from Blair Thornton with some old t-shirts, guitar picks, and a couple of tour lanyards. My inner 12-year-old is still freaking out.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can unequivocally say that Four Wheel Drive was the right call when it came to buying my first album.

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 , ...

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...

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...

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