Hudson Brothers - Hollywood Situation

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 ... there 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 a 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 my Billy Blastoff set, so I was pretty content.

back cover - the brothers looking like a band

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 had attained a degree of teenybopper success, but I didn't care. It didn't relegate them to the Donny Osmond pile. To me they were goofballs who played rock and roll and given my love of The Monkees, and even the Banana Splits (yeah, that was always a hard one to reconcile, but they were a band) that was enough for me.

Hollywood Situation starts out incredibly strong, and the first side is vintage pop magic and is actually much stronger than I expected it to be. So how come no one remembers them? The question would answer itself after the first song on side two when the brothers took a hard turn when "The Adventures of Chucky Margolis" brought the album to a screeching halt. It was a live sketch, the kind that was funny on TV, but not in the middle of what was turning into a pretty excellent record. It's not like this was sequenced to be at the end of the record. Nope, right there in the middle of the second side.

The album cover didn't help either, the brothers all clad in white three piece suits with their cravats, looking like an act Lawrence Welk would introduce to great fanfare while the old ladies in the cat eyed glasses would politely clap and make clucking sounds of approval.

The guys were pretty funny, make no mistake, but by the same token they were good musicians too, and they crafted solid power pop infused with Beatlesque harmonies and an added dash of glam that was really evident in the album's closer "Razzle Dazzle," a song that sounded like something off Gary Glitter's Glitter from a couple years earlier. Yeah, let's not get started on Gary Glitter ... and that was such a great album ... and now it just feels wrong to listen to anything by him.

While I am still really drawn to "So You Are a Star," there is no shortage of great material on the record. The first side in particular is all killer. The second side too would have been really enjoyable had the band sequenced the comedy sketch to come at the end, rather than derail the album.

I'm really glad I found this, and the band really did deserve better. They're mostly remembered now, if at all, as a variety show band who wore silly outfits and were as vanilla as vanilla could be and for a little while were teen heart throbs.

Too bad. They were the real deal, they just couldn't figure out what they wanted to be and in the process they were left behind and forgotten. I guess that in a nutshell is a Hollywood situation.

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 band, 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 , ...

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...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

Old Enough to Forget

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