Old Enough to Forget

Time gets a little blurry the farther back I try to go. Events get mixed up, and the placement of where the actual memories go is a little like playing with one of those puzzle balls where you try and fit weirdly shaped blocks through matching holes ... they are always a few blocks you can squeeze through whatever opening you want with a little effort. As a kid I remember watching Sonny and Cher, and I'm not sure this was where I first saw the Hudson Brothers, but I do remember their TV show, and later their Saturday morning variety show. Heck, kids today will never know or appreciate the excitement the new season would bring when a new crop of cartoons would debut. Dang who'd a thunk that Speed Buggy would be cool? I still had my Gumby and Pokey bendable toys and by Billy Blastoff set so I was pretty content. Then through the magic of K-Tel, I got to have "So You Are a Star" and it was magic. To say I loved and still love that song is an understatement. The brothers ...

I was feeling adventurous the other day, and when I found a still sealed copy of Duo-Glide I figured, "Why not, it could be good." Looking closer the top right corner of the cellophane had been removed. Flipping the cover over I saw a small inscription on the back top corner of the jacket. Apparently this was a gift for Denis from his friends Bruce and Sally back in December of '82. Apparently Denis must not have been impressed as it was never opened. The cover sported a goofy duo flying (I resisted saying gliding , you're welcome) through the air on a touring bike with a sidecar. The guys looked like they had a sense of humour. This didn't scream rock and roll, especially given the somewhat matching Hawaiian shirts. This could be disco (please, don't be disco) or more likely a pop album in the vein of Player, Little River Band, or Hall & Oates.  Well, it wasn't disco. Thank goodness. This era of mid '70s soft rock wasn't my forte, but I will ...

Idles Eyes released their debut in 1985, and there were two songs that got a fair bit of airplay back in the day. "Tokyo Rose" was pure '80s awesomeness, and "All Day" a song that at the time I didn't really think was all that special. However, those songs helped earn the band a Most Promising Group Juno Award in 1985, beating out Rational Youth and The Arrows among others. The award is a bit of a curse as much as anything, as generally it was like getting a kiss from Judas. I bought the album for "Tokyo Rose" and gave the album a couple of cursory spins then filed it. My general recollection when thinking about this album was that it was one killer and the rest filler. Yeah, I was pretty merciless back in the day. I used to have a pretty long commute and I often tapes entire albums for the car ride, but most of the time it was mix tapes. I don't think I ever taped the album - once I passed judgment I moved on pretty quickly to the next shiny t...

I found a sealed copy and figured why not? It could be really good ... or it could be truly horrific. Staring at me from the cover picture was a dapper looking young man sporting a few days of scruffy stubble looking like a young Rick Springfield (I do not mock Mr. Springfield). As far as I knew, and I knew nothing about this album. It could be anything, as it wasn't opened - kind of like Schrodinger's cat, except it was vinyl. I'm not really a cat person. I had my fingers crossed and hoped for good. What I got was actually pretty good. It was a pop record with a bit of crunch, at times a lot of crunch which was pretty great. This is an album that wouldn't have existed without Michael Jackson's Bad , an album I actually bought. Don't ask, since I staunchly avoided getting Thriller ... even though I secretly liked some of the songs. Come on, "Beat It" was worth the ticket price. The other artists this brought to mind first though and actually had more...

Michael Sembello is probably best known as the dude who performed "Maniac" and absolutely nailed the guitar solo. It's a near perfect pop song and a song I always really liked. A lot. I always wanted to get the song, but I didn't want to get the Flashdance soundtrack, because I didn't want to. It was too much like having to listen to the kids from Fame all over again, and I know Irene Cara was a fine vocalist and all that but I never really liked her stuff, and I'm sure the passage of time has softened the edges off my opinion, but I'm sticking to my guns. I do remember almost getting this album. The cover had two oiled up dudes levitating off the ground while the guy in the white diaper cupped the other little dude's junk. It was a weird cover and Michael Sembello with his half black, half white face looked like a reject from the Star Trek episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was sitting reading an old Godzilla comic. It was a little ...

Here we are, five months in and holding steady. I'm not sure this is worth continuing, but for me these little snack size tidbits are perfect when I don't have a lot to say, but there was something worth jotting down. Whether it was worth your time or not is a separate issue, and I make no guarantees this will be a worthwhile. For all you know, this is a cheese shop, or I could just be deliberately wasting your time, and I don't have any cheese. Five for Fighting No.5 Dave Loggins - Apprentice (In a Musical Workshop) (1974) Rick Derringer - Sweet Evil (1977)  Cliff Richard - I'm Nearly Famous (1976) Little River Band - First Under the Wire (1979) Harlequin - Harlequin (1984) Dave Loggins - Apprentice (In a Musical Workshop) (1974) I still find it strange looking at cover pictures from the early '70s, everyone looked so wise and world weary - and old. Looking at the stylized photo of Dave Loggins on the cover you'd think you were looking at an elder statesman...

I know this is likely sacrilege to hard core fans, but this is where I started with the band. "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky" was the song that hooked me. It hooked me good. I think I got the album in late 1981, I know it was about a year before Rick Cua released his first solo album and that was in '82. The same year Outlaws would release Los Hombres Malo - the last album I'd get by the band for decades. I did hear "Green Grass & High Tides" on the radio - once back in the early '80s when they one of the local radio stations dedicated a weekend to the 100 best guitar solos of all time. I remember it being a pretty cool song but honestly it just felt like a retread of "Free Bird" and frankly, that song never did much for me, so any kissing cousins by default didn't do much for me by extension. That was then. But back to my first blush with Outlaws, and frankly it as a good one, even if I wasn't sure what to make of the weird balance be...

1978 it was a fantastic year for music. I mean well and truly. Nugent, Styx, PRISM, and Toto, it's a long list ... Then there was disco, and it was the universe's way of saying you can't have everything. If you're wondering I never considered "Heart of Glass" by Blondie, or "Driver's Seat" by Sniff 'n' the Tears to be disco songs. It's times like these a really good quote is in order, and Dickens being Dickens wrote a dickens that's perfect for a piece like this: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, ...

I found a seal copy of Pretty Green , and was intrigued. It was on Nettwerk the one time indie darling label out of Vancouver who helped bring Grapes of Wrath, Sarah McLachlan and Barenaked Ladies to the rest of the world. Okay two out of three, but those early Grapes of Wrath records were pretty awesome. So here was an album that was essentially new, but likely poorly stored who knows where as the jacket is nicely wobbled even if in immaculate shape (it's a conundrum) but the record itself was in pristine shape. I had no idea what to expect, and I was kind of surprised at the lack of information out there on this one. Which was pretty much nothing. Even Nettwork doesn't list this anywhere on their site. It's like it never happened. But it did. I'm om my second pass now, and this is really something. Especially as this was 1987 and here was a band doing alternative folk rock where the banjo and dobro were front and centre. Ed Blocki the band's vocalist and multi-in...

As a kid "Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo" was everything a rock and roll song needed to be. It was big, it was infectious and it was awesome, it had a lot of guitar. For many years this was all I needed to know about Rick Derringer. Then in the '80s I started seeing his name show up in weird places. Most notably "Weird" Al records. Of course being a wrestling fan back in the day when the curtain hadn't been pulled back to reveal the true nature of the business, I watched in awe as Hulk Hogan entered the ring to Rick Derringer's "Real American" and I knew this was Rick Derringer because they were schilling Rocking Wrestling , or The Wrestling Album , I don't know what it was called, and looking it up mid sentence just seems like a lot of effort. I did know that Rick was involved and I found that weird, and cool at the same time. Recently as I've been diving into a lot of records Rick's name kept popping up all over the place, from Bonnie ...

I remember driving home during rush hour when all of a sudden this song comes on the radio, and it just blew my mind. Thankfully the disc jockey had the good manners to identify the band and the song. "That was "Dancing with Tears in my Eyes" by Ultravox." Thank you I said to myself, and filed it away as something I needed to remember. Good lord that was a good song. I particularly loved the guitar work with the dive bombs and string growls interwoven with the very prominent keyboards. As enamoured as I was I never did get the record. In the mid '90s I picked up their best of collection The Voice: The Best of Ultravox and boy howdy that had the bits and pieces I had heard over the years. Of course as fate would have it I'd start consuming vinyl again, admittedly at a rather shocking rate. I'm still adhering, for the most part, to my don't buy what you already have, rule. Rules are meant to be broken and there are exceptions of course, but the reve...

Back in 1988 my old roommate Otto came home one day with a CD by Hothouse Flowers. I don't know where he heard or read about them, but he said it was supposed to be pretty good.  The first two songs were absolutely killer tracks. "I'm Sorry" and "Don't Go." Truly killer tracks. For 1988 this was quite different than most of what I was listening to. The '80s wave had crested and it was full on big hair, tight pants and gang vocal choruses ... this was organic. I also cannot remember anything aside from the first two songs. I hesitate to say they were filler, but I have zero recollection of anything else. Then for father's day the kid's allowed me to spend a $100 bucks on records, and I found this one - and was pretty stoked. I got a nice pile of stuff that ran the gamut from Linda Ronstadt to Sandford and Townsend (never heard of them but it was sealed and looked like fun.). This was the album I was most excited to hear again ... I was very te...

This was mostly written and in my queue to post when I found out that Tina Turner passed away May 24, 2023. She was 83. Hard to imagine that almost forty years had passed since Private Dancer was released. It's always fun to revisit albums that you thought you disliked. I suppose the backlash was inevitable as "What's Love Got to Do With It" was pretty ubiquitous on MuchMusic and the radio for what seemed to be forever. I managed to keep up my dismissive airs for a long time, and even though I really liked "Better Be Good to Me" featuring the stellar guitar work of The Fixx's Jamie West-Orem and backing vocals of Cy Curnin. I stubbornly held my ground.  It didn't help that everyone was trying to make a then ancient in pop years Tina Turner who was all of forty five or six when this came out a sex symbol. "Look at those legs!"  This was right up there with trying to ogle the church organist. I'm looking through the album jacket and lin...

I was casually browsing through the regular used section the other day, and I was aimlessly wandering and found myself checking in the "T" section to see if anything affordable was to be found by Trio, or Triumph, or Talking Heads, or The Tubes ... I stumbled upon Triumvirat and the cover was oddly appealing. Reading the back cover I assumed this was more than likely some early '70s German prog rock, probably really heavy on keyboards. I'd never heard of them. There weren't any liner notes but that was okay, I wasn't going to be picking this up. Later ... yeah I picked it up.  The album is comprised of two sides (don't roll your eyes at me, there's more) each with a theme. Side A is Illusions on a Double Dimple , and has six associated songs. The first side features former member and lead vocalist Hans-Georg Pape on bass guitar. Side B is Mister Ten Percent and is another half dozen songs. I'm guessing they were pissed at their former manager. Thi...