The Edgar Winter Group - They Only Come Out at Night

1972 was a good year for Mister Winter. In the spring he released Roadwork (which I really liked) and then that fall he'd release They Only Come out at Night with his new band The Edgar Winter Group. The group would feature a young Dan Hartman on vocals, bass, and guitar and a lot of other stuff (he was a wunderkind, his picture looks like it a yearbook photo), and Ronnie Montrose on guitar - a year later Ronnie would leave and start his own band - but it was here that Ronnie honed his rock chops.

I'll be honest I got this for two tracks "Free Ride" and "Frankenstein" and if the other eight tracks blow chunks I'd still feel like I got my monies worth. Then again, I found this in the dollar bin - it was a risk as who knows what condition this thing would turn out to be in. Turns out that with a little spit and polish the record looked pretty good.

The record leads off with "Hangin' Around" and it's a decent song, and as the first side played it became pretty evident that the band was running the gamut through various genres and doing what it wanted. "Alta Mira" is a very quirky pop song and as I listened to it I kept thinking about Larry Norman's "Fly Fly Fly" and I'm guessing as Edgar was first out that if there was an influence to be had it was over in Mr. Norman's direction - this is pure conjecture on my part. Of course the killer here was "Free Ride" which to me is as good a classic rock song as there ever was.

The second side opens with a country song, and dang it was nice. This to me is one of the great things about so much of the classic rock era, bands didn't necessarily have to be pigeonholed. Heck the transition between what I heard on his live album Roadwork, and the songs on They Only Come out at Night are complimentary but not just retreads of what Edgar had done before. Heck, Dan's ballad "Autumn" was foreshadowing what would be a wheelhouse of bands like Bread. It's a great song. The album closes out with probably the single greatest instrumental rock song ever cut into wax. "Frankenstein" had it all - and my goodness it still gets me.

The album was produced by Rick Derringer who contributed some guitar, pedal steel and other stuff. Bill Szymcyk was credited as technical director - I'm guessing he engineered this. I like reading credits.

I totally got more than my dollar's worth here - even if a few cuts on the second side were a little distorted in places there was nothing that skipped or crackled to the point of distraction. This will see a few more spins before I file it for another night.

Despite what the cover says, it came out during the day too. It was easier to play really loud when there was no one else home.

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and 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 that had a bonus track of " Get It On (Bang A Gong)" that when I bought the album 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. However, at the time all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the first cut "Baby Come Back" and proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another and closed out the album (sans any...

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, 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 , "Don...

Lighthouse - Sunny Days

Bin diving at my local record store where there were more than a few choices to make. After picking out a half dozen treasures, I figured I'd stop looking and leave before I caused myself trouble at home. Lighthouse was one of those ridiculously large bands in the early 70s I didn't understand. I mean really, BTO was just four guys, The James Gang was three, until they weren't, what in the world do you do with a dozen guys in a band? Of course I had a radio — it was the first significant purchase I made with my money from cutting lawns. I think at the time it cost about 35 bucks, and had FM and other high frequency things I never got to use living out in the suburbs away from the reach of the big city FM signal. "Sunny Days" was a great song. I remember thinking it was cool and didn't switch to the other AM station when it came on. A few years later, when I got my first record player, the obligatory K-Tel anthologies would feature a myriad of cut up and edited...

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