Starcastle - Citadel

A while back on a SAGA page, someone posted a picture of a ticket stub with the name Starcastle crossed out, and SAGA written in pen. I don't know why this stuck in my memory, but it did.

One day I was looking through the clearance section at an old video store that had recently added a record section, and I found a couple of cool-looking albums. Among them was this Starcastle album featuring a great cover. With the Hildebrandt signature, I'm going to assume this was done by the brothers. I'll look it up later.*

Right off the bat, there was Roy Thomas Baker's name in the production credits, so if nothing else there was some muscle behind it and someone at Epic believed in the band.

The back cover shows six rather dashing and very serious-looking fellows, two of whom had fine moustaches, and the guy in the back row far left could have been the inspiration for Michael Sadler's (lead singer from SAGA) epic 'stache from the '70s.

I was pretty stoked, to be honest, as this was a band I'd never heard of, and I'd be coming in fresh. I figured this would be a prog rock album, and dropping the needle the first song confirmed that I was going to be in for a rather grand over-the-top display of mid-'70s musical pomp and excess.

The first thing I should point out is I am not a progressive rock aficionado, but I have over the years picked up quite a bit of stuff that would qualify as prog. The second thing is that while I may not have a deep knowledge of prog, I know what I like, and so far I'm liking this.

Musically, this was pretty interesting stuff and very much what I was expecting for mid-'70s prog. Meaning it's got all the great prog ingredients: spacey keyboards and finger dexterity wizardry (oh, there were cheesy sounds too, but this wasn't something limited to Starcastle), a lead bass player who used all four strings, two guitar players, and a drummer who thankfully avoided overplaying but serviced the songs - which meant he was plenty busy but wasn't stuck doing a four-on-the-floor beat or a shuffle.

What I wasn't expecting were the Crosby, Stills & Nash supercharged harmonies. I guess if you wanted, you could say there are hints of Jon Anderson as well, but I wouldn't draw a comparison to Yes. I suppose they're there if you want to use them as a reference point.

Sure, this is prog, but not having to be stuck listening to a whole side dedicated to a single track is a positive for me. Of the eight songs here, half are under five minutes, and "Can't Think Twice" is actually under four—and may have been their shot at radio.

It's a decent song and may have seen FM play for all I know. Regardless, I guess this caught me in a good mood, as having played this through a couple of times I've really enjoyed the album.

Looking up the band, it was a surprise to see they were from Champaign, Illinois, and I'd actually seen Terry Luttrell's name before as he produced Screams' debut album in 1979. I had no idea Illinois was such a hotbed for rock. I just figured Styx and Cheap Trick was it.

Now I find out that even REO Speedwagon was from Illinois, and Terry was their original singer. When he left for Starcastle, he was replaced by Kevin Cronin.

Goodness, there's a lot of stuff on the internet.

Back in a moment, I'm just going to flip it over and play it again.

Oh man, the keyboard part to "Evening Wind" just came on and I thought for a second, "Hey, that sounds like something by Head East."

Goodness me, weren't they from Illinois too?

Dang, maybe there was something in the water.

*Yes, one and the same.

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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