Old Enough to Forget

This was an interesting score. A Canadian first pressing of the Zager and Evans classic 2525 (Exordium & Terminus) . Finding albums like this for a buck always seems like a surreal score. The vinyl was is passable shape with some expected wear, but nothing too visible. It did though clean up remarkably well, and then while I was putting it into the sleeve I dropped it on the floor.  Putting the record on there's something undeniably appealing about "In the Year 2525" that seemed to sum up all of trepidation people were feeling about the future and the headlong charge to oblivion through the wanton pursuit of technology. Or something, it's a lot to take in for my little brain. It's always been a weird and goofy song that managed to go number one all over the world. Heck, even the official science fiction nerds who ran the Hugo Awards nominated it for some type of special award - although it's not clear if they won or not but it's an interesting bit of t...

Sometimes you pick up an album just to satisfy the ear worm you can't get rid of. Now to be upfront, the first album I bought from Donnie Iris was his 1982 release The High and the Mighty - an album I found about a year ago, and I played it a few times and enjoyed myself - but as I sit here listening to Back on the Streets I can't recall any of the songs from it. This isn't really a shot, it's more reflective of my under developed sense of object permanence. I have the same problem trying to remember more than a couple of the songs off the three Tommy Tutone albums I have - and I like those albums. Other than "867-5309/Jenny" and the forgotten hit from their debut "Angel Say No" I couldn't name another song. All of their albums were decent, just not especially memorable. Unless a song gets buried deep into my subconscious there's a good chance I'll more often than not experience a wonderful groundhog day moment when I play an album I...

I first heard of T-Bone Burnett when he was with the Alpha Band with Steven Soles, and David Mansfield. I had a friend who had one of their albums, I can't remember which one as I only heard it once, but it was quirky and caught my interest. Then I bought a copy of his 1982 E.P. Trap Door and pretty much played it to death. I loved the fact that he was self effacing enough to make a joke about his passing resemblance to Eric Idle. The office where I worked used to have copies of People magazine I like to read - for the record reviews, and in one issue there was an article where Mariel Hemingway said her favourite album was T-Bone Burnett's Proof Through the Night . Well, I wasn't sold because of her endorsement, I was sold because I'd just realized there was new T-Bone Burnett album. I remember talking about this with my girlfriend at the time who absolutely loved The Who, and The Monkees (she had great taste in music) and she casually mentions that she saw T-Bone open ...

For number Four it's a mixed bag of five albums for your reading pleasure. Three out of five were new to me which is always an adventure. I think my favourite find in the bunch this time around was the Joe Walsh release. I do love me some Joe Walsh. Gotta say, four months in and holding steady. It's the last Sunday in May so without further ado ... Five for Fighting No.4 Joe South - Games People Play (1970?)  Moon Joyce - The Infinite Edge (1985)  Wang Chung - Points on the Curve (1983) Joe Walsh - The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get (1973) Nestor Pistor - Nestor Pistor for Prime Minister (1978) Joe South - Games People Play (1970?) I was intrigued by the cover and figured this could be an interesting discovery and at worst I'd be out a buck. This was a re-issue on Pickwick, which meant it was licensed from Capitol and the songs were cobbled together from different releases. Not quite a greatest hits, but it was a mixed bag of pretty interesting tunes. Trying t...

I love Billy Squier. I'm not a fanatical fan by any means and can't tell you what kind of sheets he was rolling around on in the video for "Rock Me Tonite" I only saw the video a couple of times. It was a goofy video but honestly no worse than the video for Steve Perry's "Oh Sherrie" or any of the other early videos by musicians who didn't know where to look when on camera. It should not have been a career killer. I kept the faith and I dutifully bought each album when they came out, and while some were better than others, they always had at least one killer track, and the rest were never just filler. Heck, his final album in 1998 was the stripped down, intimate and acoustic Happy Blue , It was really good and apparently sold only 10,000 copies and I bought it twice. I'm getting ahead of myself. My journey didn't start with The Tale of the Tape , I hopped on the bandwagon along with a lot of other people when he released Don't Say No in ...

The first time I heard "One Chance" I was blown away. There was something about the song that caught me right in the feels. It's strange, despite all of the music I've been exposed to over the years, the number of songs that have truly gotten under my skin is relatively small. Top of mind at the moment I'll list a few, because we all like lists. "Shooz" by Styx, yeah I played it to the point where I can't really hear it anymore. "Special Girl" by Eddie Schwartz "Why Should the Devil Have all the Good Music" by Larry Norman "Might as Well be on Mars" by The Pukka Orchestra "Roller" by April Wine Of course as I start writing things down my brain starts adding more and more, "What about this one?" So maybe the list is a little longer than I thought. Let's just say "One Chance" was in the right place at the right time. Objectively I can tell you that this is not the best song ever recorded, ...

1983 was a great year for music. Of course there were other great years - lots and lots of them, especially the ones during my formative years. The early '80s though was something special. Jackson Browne was someone who had quite a few songs I liked but it wasn't until he released Lawyers in Love that I decided to put some cash on the table (The Fast Tmes soundtrack doesn't count). There was something hilariously goofy and awesome about the title track and it didn't matter where I was (or am, as I discovered when the song came on) if the song came on I had to wait patiently for my cue to sing along. Last night I watched the news from Washington, the capitol (that would be me) The Russians escaped while we weren't watching them, like Russians will (still me, but with gusto) The Tarzan falsetto is still out of my range, but there are times I still give it a shot. The dog doesn't like it. Anyway, the song is still one of those guilty pleasures, but this album got...

1978 was a pivotal year for me as a kid. The sheer number of watershed albums that were released that year is actually kind of astounding. When I found London Town in the dollar bin, complete with the original poster, I couldn't actually remember when it came out, but I figured it would be a decent listen. After all, it had at least one memorable song on it, even if I thought it was cheese when it was on the radio. Then to be fair, an awful lot of what Paul released with Wings in the'70s was questionable, even if it was catchy. Yeah, you probably know this was released in 1978, but I didn't. You probably also know that the biggest omission here is "Mull of Kintyre" which was recorded during the same period London Town was being put together. I know bands released non album singles, but it was really irritating when you bought the current album and a big song was absent. The album really needed another good song. It boggles my mind that the folks in charge were si...

The Nature of the Beast was third album from the classic five man iteration of April Wine. The triple threat on guitar: Myles Goodwin who sang most of the songs, Brian Greenway, and Gary Moffet who were backed by the ever rock solid rhythm section of Steve Lang on bass and Jerry Mercer on drums. When I think of the band this is the line up that gets my motor running.  April Wine was by this point well established here in Canada, having eight studio albums and two live albums under their belts. You'd think they would have started to coast and rest on their laurels a little. Nope. The band hit height of their commercial and creative peak with their 1981 release The Nature of the Beast . It was quite a feat too - as I loved First Glance , especially "Roller" then the band dropped Harder...Faster and the one two gut punch of "I Like to Rock" and that three guitar medley at the end of the song just blew my mind and "Say Hello" were amazing. I mean could t...

Supertramp was one of those bands who could meld pop and with elements of progressive rock and make it seem like a marriage of equals. My love of their earlier songs "Crime of the Century" and "Fool's Overture" was only surpassed by my obsession with how to play "Give a Little Bit" on my 12 string. Like their previous releases, Breakfast in America featured Roger Hodgson and Rick Davies handling lead vocals and songwriting. The pair would alternate songs and often trade lead vocals within each others songs. It created a nifty tension and dynamic in their work. Roger has the sweat voice, and Rick the deeper growl - it was magic. The band released several albums, a couple of them were really successful in Canada, but their crowning achievement was the release of Breakfast in America in 1979. This album became part of the soundtrack that defined my youth. It stayed popular among my friends throughout my last couple of years in school. I'm still kin...

After Molly Hatchet's Flirtin' with Disaster Danny Joe Brown left the band and ventured out on his own and released his one and only solo effort as the Danny Joe Brown Band. The album was produced by the legendary Glyn Johns and was mastered by George Marino at Sterling sound. By all accounts it would seem that the folks at Epic put some budget behind the band and if it wasn't for the changing musical landscape I wonder if this wouldn't have been bigger. 1981 was the changing of the guard with a new decade underway and rock was becoming   more polished and the hair wouldn't get longer, but it was going to get bigger. New wave and techno were just on the horizon, and the three guitar attack of bands like April Wine, and Molly Hatchet - who would release their second album Take No Prisoners with Danny Joe Browns replacement Jimmy Farrar also in 1981, were on way out. Although April Wine's '81 release Nature of the Beast was huge, so there goes that the...