Old Enough to Forget

At the risk of seeming like a Luddite, I was never a big fan of The Who. Sure, there are a lot of songs I like ... I mean a lot, but for whatever reason I just never think of them when I think of my favourite bands. I'd seen Roger's solo albums in the racks as a kid, and he had some cool covers, and I did own a couple of his solo efforts on CD. I really liked Under a Raging Moon , and to a lesser extent Rocks in the Head . The other day, in between a couple of old Leo Sayer albums and a badly beat-up Rick Wakeman record (that looks really cool, but is unplayable), there staring at me with his piercing blue eyes was a rather young (still under 30) Roger Daltrey looking sultry with his wondrous curly mane haloed from behind. "Buy me," he said. "I'm only a dollar, buy me." So I put down my loonie and went to walk out, but was told I was short the tax. Dang, and we don't have pennies anymore either, so I ended up looking for more stuff to justify using m...

I am going to try and mostly write this one in real time. "Mostly" because I think the songs will go by faster than my brain can process the music, but I'll try to see what my gut says as I spin the album. First, a preamble of sorts, because every good story (even the bad ones) starts with an introduction. I'm hoping this is more like how The Hobbit fit with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and not how the prequel Star Wars movies were fitted into the franchise. Dang, I can see this has already gone off ... I can fix this, hang on. Let's start at the beginning. I'm at the other record store I like to go to the other day, and entering the shop often makes me feel a little bit like King Arthur trying to cross the bridge by answering a series of questions. After a preamble that thankfully didn't involve coconuts and wind speed, I'm in, and it turned out to be a banner day. I had been listening to T-Bone Burnett and got a hankering to see if I could find any...

My wife grew up with her parents' copy of Simple Dreams (which is now part of my collection), so why choose Mad Love for my rambling thoughts? Simple. I wanted to, and it seemed like a good idea. Besides, over the past year I've managed to find an astonishing number of her albums in the dollar bin, and it's been an absolute joy listening to them for the first time and discovering an artist I knew only from the killer guitar solo on "You're No Good." From there it led me to albums by Andrew Gold and Karla Bonoff. It's weird looking back now and realizing that in 1980 Linda was still only in her early 30s and had already been releasing albums for over a decade. A decade in kid years, from a developmental perspective, is kind of like measuring things in dog years. In other words, when she released Mad Love she had been around FOR-EVVVVVER. Of course, looking at it now, it was a blink of an eye. When I spotted this one in the bin, I scanned the back cover,...

I went through a weird phase where I pretty much only bought Christian "rock" music. Kids in our youth group would recount as fact how bands like Rush had altar calls for Satan, and KISS stood for "Kids, or Knights in Satan's Service" or something equally ridiculous, and we ate it up (sometimes I had seconds), gleefully repeating this and other tales of pure bullshit amongst ourselves. Yeah, there's a name for this: bearing false witness - but as kids we were kind of stupid. While I have a lot of CCM (contemporary Christian music) that I am still very fond of, there are a lot of bands that I'd never have given the time of day to if it hadn't been for the inevitable comparisons to their "secular" counterparts. There were even guide books to help. Sort of like substituting meat to make a vegetarian dish. There were some notable exceptions where artists stood out, and their recordings actually had some production value and didn't sound lik...

Pablo Cruise as a band name always confused me. Like Pink Floyd, and to a lesser extent (way, way more lesser) Daniel Amos, they suffered from having fans ask, "Which one is Pink?" Somewhere in my early teenage brain I figured Pablo Cruise was a guy who looked like a cross between Sergio Aragones and "Gold Hat" from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , exclaiming he didn't need no stinkin' badges. He would be wearing a black charro outfit, singing "Guantanamera," and between sets would be passing out drinks with little umbrellas. So you can imagine where I was trying to fit them musically. Of course, with the passage of time I've heard a couple of their bigger hits like "Whatcha Gonna Do?" and "Love Will Find a Way," and given my penchant for '70s cheese, I was always kind of curious about the band. As fate would have it, I managed to find A Place in the Sun and Worlds Away in the unloved section of one of my favourite r...

Many years ago I recall hearing a guy on the radio describe the song "Worlds Away" as Vancouver's unofficial anthem. A bit of a stretch, but my goodness, it is an awesome song. Back in 1982 the trio of Drew Arnott, Darryl Kromm and Paul Iverson (an amazing guitar tech and luthier, by the way) released their debut album Worlds Away. I remember hearing "She Controls Me" and thinking that was a really cool song. At the time I didn't get the album, but with a name like Strange Advance they were pretty memorable, and I would buy everything they ever released in real time - except that first album. Unlike Pokemon, you really can't catch 'em all - but I did catch 'em all, including a long play for "Love Games" that I have since lost to the ravages of time and poor drainage in the crawlspace. In 1985, when Strange Advance released 2WO , where once there were three, it was now just Drew and Darryl (they did add a whole band, including a real l...

Over the last year I've been on a Linda Ronstadt kick. I managed to find several of her albums in the dollar bin that were in fantastic shape, and from there it led to a couple of albums by Andrew Gold. Today the bins coughed up Karla Bonoff's 1977 debut. Karla contributed to Linda's release Hasten Down the Wind the year before, as a songwriter and providing backing vocals on two of the three tracks she'd written for the album. The album itself was in decent shape. The jacket was okay, but sadly there was no insert, so who knows what may or may not have been on the liner. The back cover had a lot of information, though, which I always appreciate. This was an album I was looking forward to hearing, as I'd never heard the album or anything by Karla that I can remember. I wasn't sure what to expect (I had some idea, but you never know. There are a lot of great writers that need good singers. Jennifer Warnes comes to mind, who was great with Leonard Cohen songs. An...

When I was ten years old I remember hearing "Roll Over Beethoven" and it melted my little brain. This wasn't like anything I'd heard. 1973 was an awesome year for formative rock and roll, and I'd file away names like BTO, Rick Derringer, Ian Thomas, and Alice Cooper for the day when I got older and could buy their albums. So where was ELO on this future list of must-have bands? Not near the top, and as time passed my interest waned. Heck, it was a close thing when "Don't Bring Me Down" and "My Sharona" were vying for the world's most overplayed song, but I managed to NOT get either album. Then in 1980 the band tried to do their own version of The Wiz by releasing the soundtrack to Xanadu and I wrote them off - this was not rock and roll. Then the year I graduated the band dropped Time , and for whatever reason this weird, electronic, cheesy release resonated with me and I played the album until I was pretty sure I could hear bleed-ove...

Back in 1984, I knew this band from the video for "Tenderness" that seemed to be on whenever I turned on the television to watch MuchMusic. Admittedly, it was a catchy song, but that was as far as it went. I mean, really, that year Van Halen crushed it with 1984 , and Toto dropped Isolation -  an album that was met with silence but was, to me, amazing and in heavy rotation most of the year. There were so many great albums that my taking a foray into English new-wave-laced with ska wasn't really on my radar. Still, I never forgot that one song. So last week I was diving in the bins, and there between a couple of Neil Diamond albums was All the Rage. Well, for a buck I was at least going to get one good song. The album was in iffy shape, but the jacket was okay, and the liner notes were gone. Now, having recently spent time with Haircut One Hundred, I was pretty much in the same neighbourhood as General Public. Curious, I looked the band up and there were a number of littl...