Roger Daltrey - Roger Daltrey

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 my card.

Anyway, what I know about Roger's solo career I could fit into a thimble. When I'd see his records, I always figured those early albums must be terrible. If they were any good, surely I'd have heard of them.

Of course, when this came out I was ten and had all the musical sophistication of a ten-year-old. I could sing along to "Top of the World" by the Carpenters and knew all the words to "Smokin' in the Boys Room" by Brownsville Station, so yeah, by those standards I was a right genius.

After giving Roger a bath (I have a vacuum, but I wasn't sure I should say suck, so I opted to not say it at all), I put the album on and started reading the limited notes on the gatefold.

The album starts off with "One Man Band," and this isn't a loud cacophony of drums and guitars. It's primarily acoustic, and Roger bookends the second side by reprising the song. Most of the songs stay within a sort of rock-but-not-rock lane, and there are strings on many of the tracks.

Roger, while in fine voice throughout, wisely seemed to use the opportunity with a solo album to not try to make a Who record.

I have to say I was hoping I'd be able to have some fun at the expense of a young Mister Daltrey by taking the piss almost fifty years after the fact - yeah, that's me wanting to kick a dead horse.

I won't get the chance.

I really liked this.

Sure, it has that early '70s sound, but what else was it supposed to have? The whole album was unexpected. There is some stellar guitar work on "Thinking" and "Reasons," featuring great work from Russ Ballard (I don't think he gets the props he deserves), who at the time was a member of Argent. Speaking of Argent, drummer Bob Henrit plays on the album as well.

I think part of the reason this feels so intimate is that Roger recorded the basic tracks at his own studio, Daltrey's, and then added the strings and overdubs at Apple Studios in London.

What I wasn't expecting to see was Leo Sayer's name on almost all of the tracks as co-writer with Dave Courtney, who also played piano on the album and co-produced the album with Adam Faith.

Come on, seriously?

The "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing" guy wrote most of the songs on the album?

Damn, now I have to reevaluate some long-held opinions. There are a lot of Leo Sayer albums in the bin. I may have to drop a couple of bucks.

Reading up on the album, it would appear that critics were rather unkind, calling it a dumb concept album. I must be dumb, as I didn't really pick up on the theme the first couple times through. It's subtle.

It would appear that with the passage of time, this has aged really well. If there's a last laugh to be laughed here, it'll be Roger doing the laughing, and I hope he belts it out.

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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