Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66

Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66 - Look Around

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, and that era of Brazilian Fusion (I'm not great with genres, I'm just going to call it that) is a lot of fun, and it makes for especially good listening if you're having a dinner party. Then a number of years ago my wife brought home Encanto that had a new version of "The Look of Love" featuring Fergie on vocals. It's a great album. She still plays it quite a bit.

So when I came across Look Around in the dollar bin, and the copy looked decent and it also featured "The Look of Love," I couldn't pass this up. Reading the essay on the back cover is pure hype, and actually fittingly describes how I feel when I listen to his stuff, so hats off to Marilyn and Alan Bergman for capturing the essence of a Sergio Mendes session.

It's interesting to note that in the early days of A&M, Mister Alpert and Mister Moss were pretty hands-on, and produced Look Around. There aren't any credits to speak of with respect to the performers other than John Pisano on guitar.

The record has been cleaned and I'm ready to take a trip back in time. Let's see where this goes. Well, the record is showing its age a little, but right off this is what I was hoping for. The lead-off track is a jazz-infused reworking of the Lennon/McCartney-penned "With a Little Help from My Friends," which had been released only a few months earlier, so it's an interesting choice as far as covers go. The songs are all decent here and just have a laid-back sense of cool. They knew they were cool too, you can feel the confidence in the performances.

The showstopper here is Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "The Look of Love." I know Dusty Springfield had her version, but to me this is the definitive version. Dusty has her share of classics, so I'm pretty sure she won't begrudge me on this one.

This album is one of those feel good releases that has held up remarkably well. Okay.maybe it hasn't, but all I know is when I put this one on I want to put on my suit and lounge around outside under a parasol drinking wine.

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 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 , ...

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...

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