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, guitar, and a lot of other stuff (he was a wunderkind; his picture looks like it belongs in a yearbook), and Ronnie Montrose on guitar. A year later Ronnie would leave and start his own band, but it was here that he honed his rock chops.

I'll be honest, I got this for two tracks: "Free Ride" and "Frankenstein." If the other eight tracks blew chunks, I'd still feel like I got my money's 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, and sounded better.

The record leads off with "Hangin' Around," and it's a decent song. 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." 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. To me, this 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 complementary, but not just retreads of what Edgar had done before. Heck, Dan's ballad "Autumn" was foreshadowing what would be in the 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 Szymczyk 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 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...

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...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continues to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner who had been with Gary from the beg...

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