Ten Years After - Cricklewood Green

Ten Years After is one of those bands a lot of people know about, but don't really know much about. At least that was the case for me. Alvin Lee is a name I knew of, but much like the band, I couldn't really name more than a song ... which I'll name later, likely a couple of times. They were kind of like Status Quo in that regard. Yeah, I know I'm a Luddite, but cut me some slack, this stuff was just a tad before my time. I may be getting old, but I'm not that old ... yet.

Still, I do like a lot of the late '60s and early to mid-'70s jam bands. As it happened, I was out and about looking around a record store I'd not been to very often. They had a back wall lined with dollar records (I'm cheap). This wall didn't have that much going for it, as it was chock full of showtunes and a lot of questionable stuff (maybe one day I'll buy an Al Jolson album, but I'm kind of on the fence), but in the midst of all this nonsense I managed to score a couple of albums I was pretty stoked to take home and clean up.

The first was Ian Thomas' debut - the one with "Painted Ladies" - and the other one was this one, the one I'm playing at the moment, a well-loved copy of Cricklewood Green that had seen better days. There wasn't as much snap and crackle as I'd feared, but more than I had hoped.

I've gone through it a couple of times now, and it's a decent listen, but nothing has really gotten under my skin that just screams classic. I suppose I was expecting songs like "I'd Love to Change the World." Instead, Cricklewood Green is steeped in blues rock. Although "Year 3,000 Blues" is a country song that features a strangely out-of-place guitar part that was sped up ... if it wasn't, I'll apologize to Mr. Lee - but that's not a natural sound. Other than that, it reminded me of "Act Naturally." All that was missing was Ringo.

There's also what appears to be a strange glitch about a minute in on the second track, "Working on the Road," where there's either a bum note or a weird tape issue on the master, but it quickly passed. But man, it was goofy. I went to YouTube and listened to a couple of versions, including the remaster, and it's there on all of them. Maybe it was Andy Johns taking the piss to see who'd notice. For all that, it's a really decent song, but not a classic.

I am partial to "50,000 Miles Beneath My Brain" from side one, which pushes eight minutes. As the song went on, the band seemed to morph into The Rolling Stones, then it started to sound a bit like "Sympathy for the Devil," which isn't entirely accurate, but I can't shake the vibe. The song fades out, and then fades in again, only to fade out. Nice little fakeout. Again, really decent, but just not mind-blowing.

The second side is more of the same, and features another seven-minute jam in "Love Like a Man" that's good fun. Then there's the song "Circles," which was probably the closest to sounding like the band who a couple of years later would drop "I'd Love to Change the World." Decent and all, but the song isn't in the same league. The album closes out with a psychedelic blues trip, "As the Sun Still Burns Away," that put a little cherry on top of the album.

The band was Alvin Lee on guitar and vocals, Ric Lee (not related) on drums, Leo Lyons on bass, and Chick Churchill on keyboards. For Cricklewood Green, the band recorded the album at Olympic Studios, and Andy Johns engineered the album, except for the first track on side two, "Me and My Baby," which was handled by George Chkiantz.

There's a reason Alvin Lee is held in high esteem as a player. He's a monster, and he, along with the rest of the band, were right in the pocket throughout the album. I am partial to the first side, but really, at under forty minutes, it's not a chore to get up and turn the album over.

While this may not get a lot of heavy play, it was definitely a good score. Even if the songs don't seem to level up, this is a better-than-average blues jam.

Next time I have a hankering for early '70s blues rock, this will certainly scratch that itch.

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...

Old Enough to Forget

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