Old Enough to Forget

This is a new to me release, as the only album I really knew was his 1978 Double Live Gonzo , which was face meltingly awesome. I had always wanted to pick up his earlier albums, but never did. Time would march on, and invariably I'd move on as well, leaving Ted as a pleasant footnote in my musical development. Of course, nowadays Mister Nugent is a tad divisive. His personality, which was always huge and as bombastic as his music, seems to overshadow his music for a lot of people. Which is a shame, but then again the musical landscape is littered with artistic pariahs who have buried their art under their own personal baggage. While I don't agree with Mister Nugent on a lot of things, I also appreciate his love of nature, hunting, and his stance on drug and alcohol abuse. He's a strange fellow. However, in today's climate we don't celebrate different opinions or engage in any sort of discourse. Everything has devolved into name calling and attempts to cancel each o...

Look at that, six months in, and I'm keeping up with my once a month schedule of dropping five snapshots of albums I've found. This time around it's another mixed bag of goodies, and these are all new to my collection, which is generally a lot of fun. I finally picked up Stan Meissner's debut, and it was a nice score. I also found more Edgar Winter albums, and continue to go down the Rick Derringer rabbit hole - the man was a monster player and while not underrated, he was certainly underappreciated by the masses. Probably my favourite album this time out was finally connecting with Ian Thomas' debut album from 1973. What an incredible album. Yeah, full props to "Painted Ladies" and the alleged drama about the hit that never was, but there is so much more to this Canadian icon. I worry that he will be nothing more than a footnote as time passes, as the majority of his work remains out of print and can only be found by looking for old vinyl. Criminal, I say...

I can't say this was an album I'd heard when I was a kid. To be fair I was exposed to a lot of really cool music through my cousins Dean and Jeff and my Aunt Jeanne and Uncle Lloyd. Heck I remember Jeff having a Wayne Newton record and really liked "Daddy Don't You Walk So Fast" which I am not making fun of at all. I'm just using that to show that despite my penchant for B.T.O. and Brownsville Station's "Smokin' in the Boys Room" I was exposed to a pretty wide range of music. I mean my favourite record in my dad's collection was the clear red vinyl version of South Pacific (I have it now). Heck, I played my Aunt's 45 of "Hitchin a Ride" by Vanity Fair about a hundred times. Okay, I've forgotten what I was doing.  Right, Sergio Mendes. Yeah, as a kid, never heard of him. As an adult, well that's another thing. I went through a phase where I got a lot of Latin Jazz, and his 1966 album The Swinger from Rio is amazing, ...

Apparently Dwight Twilley had been around a while before I picked up Jungle back in '84. "Girls" was a song that got under my skin, not under my skin as in being irritating, I meant under my skin in a good way - yeah, I should have just deleted this and started again, but I feel like I should commit to it and just push through - hopefully this isn't getting under your skin. Having Tom Petty singing along certainly didn't hurt. It was an album chock full of pop goodness, what I would later come to associate with power pop. There was a certain rawness to the songs that hearkened back to the late '70s first wave of new wave. The album was pretty decent, and I always thought "Why You Wanna Break My Heart" should have been a hit. Instead we got to hear Tia Carrere butcher the shit out of it in the movie Wayne's World, and then again when they put it on Wayne's World: Music from the Motion Picture . Sigh, the same soundtrack Gary Wright figured th...

By the mid '80s David Foster was manifesting the Midas touch for just about everything he worked on (except for that Payolas album that was supposed to be gold - those guys couldn't catch a break. I mean really, if guys like Mick Ronson and David Foster can't push a band over the top, the cards are stacked against you). Much of the MOR, highly polished pop and the mushy synthesizer "strings" in the '80s could be laid at Mister Foster's feet. Don't get me wrong, I bought the St. Elmo's soundtrack when it came out, but I also eschewed a lot of what he produced. I mean, there was only so much insipid music I could stomach. I remember hearing "Who's Gonna Love You Tonight" on the radio - rock radio at that - and thought to myself, "Hey, that's a pretty good song. Who is that?" Don't forget, it was around this time a lot of really cool but somewhat faceless "rock" was huge. Mr. Mister was the poster band of cor...

Yeah, I got an album by The Partridge Family. They weren't the Monkees, that's for sure, but dang it, it was the early '70s and we didn't have cable - hardly anyone we knew had cable. It was for rich people. We got enough channels with an antenna to be able to keep up with the latest cartoons and the best shows on television. Like the Banana Splits, H.R. Pufnstuf and Star Trek ... when I could figure out when it was on. The world was full of variety shows, and music was everywhere. Then one day a new family moved into my living room - The Partridge Family. Good lord, it was enough having to watch The Osmonds with a prancing Donny, and the Jackson 5 with little Michael all the time. At least the Brady Bunch weren't doing a song and dance act ... oh wait, they did. It was horrible. Still, it was fun. The music was terrible. It was also catchy. It was also incredibly safe for family consumption. They also played Ovation guitars. This I remember distinctly, because my ...

Released early in 1983, I picked it up shortly after it came out. It was a weird looking album with a nerdy sweater wearing guy who was grinning like he'd taken the last Oreo off the plate of cookies in Sunday school. Whoever designed the cover was going for "current" because the cover had a computer generated looking background that seemed to be inspired by Tron , and that was current. The album opens with a cheesy synthesizer arrangement of "Sonata in D Major" before launching into "You Need a Savior," a song that pretty much stopped me in my tracks. "What was this strange music coming from the stereo? This is good - not just "Christian music good" but, good - good." I was buying a lot of really questionable Christian music in the early '80s that got a pass because it was Christian, and therefore inspired by God and therefore good for you. After all, like Larry said, "Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music," bu...

David Baerwald and David Ricketts released Boomtown back in 1986. I remember when I first heard this on the radio. I was enthralled. Who were these guys? I've only experienced this feeling a few times, one memorable time when I was driving my little sister home after a New Year's Eve party and I heard for the first and only time "Last Plane Out" by Toy Matinee. Thankfully the DJ mentioned the band as I committed that to memory. Hearing "Boomtown" was like that. Who were these guys? They would show up on MuchMusic and they'd talk about their tour, and how much they liked their opening act Robert Cray, who was riding a wave with the success of his Strong Persuader album. I don't know why that stuck with me - trivia is a wonderful thing and my accumulation of useless knowledge will certainly come in handy when the zombie apocalypse hits. Of course I bought the album right away - and the lead off track was the money shot, but then it was followed up by ...

The Marshall Tucker Band is one of those odd bands out of the '70s that shouldn't have worked on so many levels. I mean, really - the band sported a flautist who was also a pretty decent saxophonist. A flautist . I know, people will throw out Jethro Tull as the other rock flute player, but they were miles apart stylistically. What I know about The Marshall Tucker Band would fit on the back of a stamp, but I have heard some of their stuff over the years. Classic rock radio will play "Take the Highway" and "Can't You See," both from the band's debut. Those are pretty cool songs, and an interesting blend of country and southern rock that I always liked. Let's just address the elephant in the room right off ... there was no one named Marshall Tucker in the band. Apparently the band was named after a sign the guys saw in a rehearsal space ... I think that's right. Regardless, turns out Marshall Tucker was a real guy, and tuned pianos. Good thing I...

I still recall hearing "Had a Dream (Sleeping with the Enemy)" on the radio a lot back in the fall of '84. This wasn't the radio edit, it was the full song and thankfully FM radio was still a thing of wonder back in the day. Considering much of 1983 was spent with Supertramp on their farewell tour, I wonder where Roger found the time to write and record the album. It's a strange thing going back now and realizing the guys in Supertramp were still young men when they were saying their goodbyes. Roger was in his early thirties and was still pretty much in his prime. The notching of decades in music is a weird phenomenon. You can't really feel it in real time, although you get the sense changes are often afoot. The transition out of the '70s was pretty pronounced, but there was still that fuzzy time where things were the same but they weren't. Supertramp were at their biggest until suddenly they weren't anymore. You knew the writing was on the wall wh...

There were a couple of years where I was predominantly buying "Christian" albums from a little bookstore that had a small feature wall where they'd display the new music that just came out. There were some amazing records that I still look back fondly on. There were also more than a few spectacular duds that I tried hard to like, but never quite got there. I knew who Randy Matthews was as I had been "gifted" a number of albums and in the small pile of records was a double live album called Now Do You Understand , from 1975 that was just Randy and a guitar. It was pretty cool, and he was a great storyteller. It wasn't my favourite album but it was classic early Jesus Music, and when I saw his new album on the wall, it looked like a rock record. Randy no longer looked like a wild hippie. His hair was cut, and his beard was gone, although I'm not sure how comfortable it was standing there plugged into a socket. Conveniently there was a turntable and a bunch...

Part Three was the band's fourth album, and after dropping two albums just months apart in 1975 (although to be fair their third album The Sound of Sunshine was an instrumental album, so maybe it didn't count) the band was building up a pretty solid list of hits, and honestly I will admit some of them were pretty dang catchy. Although I was kind of embarrassed to admit to liking anything disco. KC and the Sunshine Band (or K.C. & The Sunshine Band) were basically a funky pop band who managed to become synonymous with disco, and why not? It was music that made your feet happy, and for a couple of years these guys were almost as unassailable as the Bee Gees. Then they weren't, but for a time they were. When this came out they were, and they were at the top of their game. Over the last year I have found myself picking up albums by artists I never, ever ... EVER thought I'd listen to, let alone buy. Yes, buying - as a dollar is still a dollar. When I broke down the fi...

This is an album I have never heard. Oh, I know a few songs from Teaser and the Firecat , I didn't just fall off the turnip truck. I wasn't even a tween when this dropped, but I remember being moved by "Morning Has Broken" and I found it weird the first time we sang it in church. I had no point of reference to associate a song I liked on the radio with a song a bunch of old people were singing in unison at church. So I just did what kids do, I accepted it and moved on. Then a couple years later Sister Janet Mead scored big with "The Lord's Prayer," bringing into vogue for about ten minutes the singing nun armed with a classical guitar. It was a thing. Just watch the movie Airplane , it was still reverberating a few years later. It was perplexing but I just took it in stride. I wasn't phased when Jesus Christ Superstar made Jesus mainstream. Like a young Larry Norman sang, "This time last year, people didn't wanna hear. They looked at Jesus f...

If memory serves, I heard "Wide World" on the radio once or twice ... but when I saw the video for "Slow Train" on MuchMusic, that was it. The video wasn't really that good, but the song was. Who were these guys? What was it about this song with the strange riff and the moody vibe that was so infectious? The album was produced by Tom Treumuth, who was also A&R for RCA and was instrumental in signing The Breit Brothers, and by all accounts Bob Buziak, the president of RCA, was behind the band as well. I know that's an assumption on my part, but he is given a special thank you on the back cover. To top it off, the album was mastered by Bob Ludwig, which usually gives an album a little extra shine. The band was composed of three brothers: vocalist and keyboard player Gary, whose name I knew from Corey Hart; Kevin on guitar; Garth on drums; and Ian de Souza on bass. The album was full of finely crafted pop songs, and it's still a bit of a mystery wrapped...