Wishbone Ash - There's the Rub

Well, for a dollar I'm not going to get too bent out of shape over some idiot with the initials "BB" who thought adorning the album with their initials was a good idea. I thought since I'd managed to get an entire name printed in block letters off a Nick Lowe record, I'd have no problem with two little initials.

There's the rub... as you can see, I managed to fade it a little, but I quickly realized I was also rubbing off the album art too. So I stopped rubbing before I wouldn't be able to see.

Enough of that, as much fun as it is to write out thinly veiled juvenile masturbation jokes, I think I'm edging close to losing it, so I'll stop.

Okay, now I'll stop.

Sorry.

But they started it.

Do they have mulligans in blog writing? Or am I supposed to do the honourable thing and delete stuff?

Let's just start again, but as a compromise I'm leaving the other stuff as a reminder to myself to show what happens when I write without really thinking.

Wishbone Ash, what a great name. A number of years ago I worked with a guy from England who absolutely loved them. I hadn't really heard much, but I did look up "The King Will Come," and that was a really cool song, and I always sort of kept an eye out for their stuff.

So lo and behold, I found There's the Rub in the dollar bin thanks to "BB" and their permanent marker. The record itself was in fantastic shape, and the album was still inside the original MCA liner. Considering I really had no expectations, I was blown away.

This doesn't sound thin and anemic. Producer Bill Szymczyk did a masterful job, and this sounds awesome and does not sound like it was recorded in 1974.

The four-piece was comprised of guitarists Andy Powell and Laurie Wisefield, drummer Steve Upton, and Martin Turner on bass and lead vocals. The guys wrote long, but not overly long, songs, and on this album the closest they got to something like "The King Will Come" was "Lady Jay," which was based on a Dartmoor folk legend, but that doesn't mean the band didn't take the time to stretch out when they felt like it.

With only six songs, the album feels short mainly because I wanted more, but it's running close to the standard forty minutes, and they really couldn't have fit much more on the album.

The first side is solid, and I went and played it again before turning it over. "Don't Come Home" is especially good, with the guitar interplay. It actually reminded me a little of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Saturday Night Special," but it was more a feel and groove than anything.

The first side closes out with the opus "Persephone," a mid-tempo lament I really liked that kept building until they faded it out instead of going for the big ending. If there was a scourge in '70s music, it was the fade out.

The second side presents the other three songs on the album. "Lady Jay" being the most dated of the songs here, but it was probably what their fans were hoping to hear. Whereas for me, I like the more straight-ahead rock elements that took up the first side.

The album closes out with "F.U.B.B." over nine minutes of sonic mayhem. I'm guessing they were wanting to live up to the song's title. I know I said "Lady Jay" was dated, and it was, but "F.U.B.B." is something else. In a good way. It was 1974 after all, and if you were a rock band worth anything you were expected to show off once in a while.

I'd mentioned Skynyrd earlier, and I wonder if the guys in Wishbone Ash heard "Freebird" and asked themselves, "Hey, what if we just cut out the singing and just got right to the fun parts with lots of guitars and stuff?"

Maybe it was Bill Szymczyk who replied, "That would be F'd up beyond belief."

...and so it was, and the results weren't, although I'm not sure if it's a lion growling or a fart at the end of the song.

I'm not sure it matters.

There's the rub, and I think I just finished.

I'll see myself 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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