Sanford & Townsend

Sanford & Townsend - Duo-Glide

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 admit this was more akin to the blue eyed soul and pop rock that would eventually morph into yacht rock (ack phooey what a horrible term). In short, it was pretty darned enjoyable. The duo of John Townsend and Ed Sanford wrote all of the songs and were credited as vocalists on all of them, except for the ballad "Sometimes the Wind Blows," which was credited to John Townsend. It's a pretty stock song, but he does have a really good voice, and it is a good song. It's just that over the years this type of song has become more or less generic. Maybe it wasn't in '77 and I'm just looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

Most of the songs featured keyboards by Ed Sanford, and a host of crack studio musicians. Jeff Porcaro and David Hungate appeared on most of the tracks, and even David Paich shows up on the Fender Rhodes. Those guys were still a year out from the first Toto album. Otis Hale played guitar on most of the tracks on the album, and from what I can see out there, he was a member of the band when they would waffle between Sanford & Townsend and Sanford Townsend Band. He was also a hell of a woodwind player. His sax solos were pretty awesome.

While there weren't any obvious killer tracks that jumped out at me ... yeah, here I am pretending that I'm a retrospective genius who can magically pick out singles from an album that came out forty-five years ago. Having said that, this was actually pretty enjoyable, and there weren't any songs where I wanted to get up and move the needle. I don't know how often this will get pulled down and played, but it was pretty good for all that. I can't help but wonder why Denis never opened his present. His loss, my gain. I may not play it a lot, but I got to play it first.

They don't have the deepest discography, and Duo-Glide was coming on the heels of their only charting single, "Smoke From a Distant Fire," which cracked the top ten in the US and helped them earn a spot opening for some pretty big acts, notably Fleetwood Mac on their Rumours tour. Duo-Glide would crack the top 100 and peak at 92 in 1978, while their final album, Nail Me to the Wall, in 1979 didn't make any ripples as it sank to the bottom of the sea ... this is why you don't trust yachts, kids.

My copy is stamped 1977 on the jacket and the vinyl, but when you look up the album on Discogs or the band's Wiki they say it was released in 1978. AllMusic says 1977. I'm going with '77 ... not that it matters.

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...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog