Hey look at this, it's the last Sunday in April and I'm three months in and so far so good. If I stop now I have a trilogy. However, I am really going for a decalogy, mainly to help wash the taste of L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth dekalogy (should have been spelled drek-alogy) that I actually read. ALL TEN BOOKS.
This time around I've got four treasures I found for a buck, and a Toto album I've bought three times now. I'd never heard of Patrick Juvet before, and I'd not heard the Grand Fund Railroad album so it was fun being able to expose myself to new things. Yeah, I just wanted to say expose myself in a sentence. Sorry. Look, I'm not proud of myself, but I also accept the things I cannot change. Although the ability to proof read and edit are things I should work on.
Five for Fighting No.3
- ZZ Top - Afterburner (1985)
- Patrick Juvet - Got a Feeling (1978)
- Grand Funk Railroad - Survival (1971)
- Chilliwack - Segue (1983)
- Toto - Isolation (1984)
ZZ Top - Afterburner (1983) This was always a weird one for me. Oh make no mistake I bought it when it came out, and I absolutely loved it. "Sleeping Bag" was a lot of fun, and heck their ballad "Rough Boy" was an interesting change of pace, and for me it worked. Other songs like "Velcro Fly" and "Planet or Women" were just awful. Okay maybe not awful, but they weren't great. Maybe they were supposed to be tongue in cheek offerings.
Listening to this now for the first time in a long, long time, the album suffered more than a little from self cannibalism. I know that staying in the blues lane often has a sameness to certain riffs, but there are songs here that just felt lifted and repainted from Eliminator and Billy himself often seemed to repeat himself, and this surprised me as the man is a gifted player and knows his way around the guitar. I suppose if you just came off your most successful album ever, you'd try and capture lightning in a bottle twice. They didn't, but the album still sold 5,000,000 copies in the states and frankly for a failure that's a hell of a lot of albums. Still, this was good fun, and the little old band from Texas would keep on keeping on. But this was more or less the end of their commercial heyday.
Patrick Juvet - Got a Feeling (1978) You find things sometimes you just have to take a chance on. I had no idea what to expect here. Honestly I was hoping for cheesy hard rock, kind of like Thor and Keep the Dogs Away kind of stuff. I was pretty sure Patrick wasn't going to be blowing up any hot water bottles, but I certainly didn't think it would be falsetto disco. Yup, this poster boy for perfect hair, and the hairy chest that would make Gino Vannelli want to put on a shirt was not going to deliver me a stunning rock opus, he was going to make me wanna dance. Yeah, the leather jacket and ice skate threw me off. The bedazzled shirt on the back cover should have given it away. That and a closer inspection of the credits would have helped. Now in my defence I am not an expert on disco, but seeing Jacques Morali listed as producer, and a special thank you to Victor Willis are now pretty obvious giveaways as to the late '70s disco I was about to subject myself to.
Lyrically this is pretty shallow even for disco. I mean the songwriting consists of taking the title of the song and repeating it over a disco track. The entire album is comprised of 4 sounds, one of them being the entire second side titled "I Love America" which apparently was a disco hit - I'm guessing they made a radio edit or not. Why not just play a fourteen minute dance number? It's danceable enough.Still this isn't an album I'll likely play more than once. However if kitschy disco is your thing, you'd probably like this.
Grand Fund Railroad - Survival (1971) Found this for a buck, just a jacket and the album - no insert or pictures. Still it cleaned up pretty well, but it had a pretty pronounced wobble that looked like it would bounce the needle - but it didn't. This was Grand Funk's fourth album since 1969 and was produced by Terry Knight who was also managing the band at this time.
I have a couple of their earlier albums, and there are always some enjoyable moments but much of this early '70s type of jam rock didn't do much for me. Having said that their cover of "Feelin' Alright" was decent enough, but couldn't really hold a candle to Traffic's original version. The second side only had three songs one of which was a cover, this time the Stone's "Gimme Shelter" which again, while okay seems an odd choice, and not something I'm in a hurry to hear again. Maybe the guys were short of songs, and rather than wait for new material the band just needed to find something to record. They cranked out albums like sausages in the early '70s and if they needed filler they'd find filler. Oddly from what I've read the album released two singles and those were the covers. The song I really liked here was the seven minute opus "I Can Feel Him in the Morning" which was written by Brewer and Farner and is something I'm surprised I've not heard on classic rock radio.
Chilliwack - Segue (1983) Bill Henderson is the one constant within Chilliwack, a band who all through my formative years would release one song after another that would quietly sink into my consciousness. While never a huge fan, I did like the songs on the radio and for a couple of years when the trio of Henderson, Brian "Too Loud" MacLeod and Ab Bryant were at the top of their game they scored their biggest hits, "I Believe" the earworm "My Girl" and "Whatcha GonnaDo" and then Ab and Brian would leave the band and work full time with Headpins. Bill would release one more album Look In Look Out and that would be the end of line as far as recording new material. Seque was one of the first retrospectives I had that worked the band's best songs chronologically from newest to oldest. I remember thinking as the album went on and closed out with "Raino" that this was an really great album. To the casual fan there are likely omissions, but to me it had it all. The hard rocking MacLeod era songs, to the iconic "Fly at Night" and "Arms of Mary" a song that took on a second life when I recently discovered the Sutherland Brothers. Still from 1969 to 1984 the band was a integral part of the Canadian music landscape. At the time I gad assumed that the segue would be a new chapter that was hinted at with the two songs from Look In Look Out, rather it was pointing to the end of the story. After all is there's no audience, there ain't no show. This album would be released again as Chilliwack's Greatest Hits.
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