Roger Williams - Christmas Time

I was searching for albums that I'd not heard of, and I found Christmas Time. The cover was wonderfully kitschy and the songs ranged from "Silent Night" to "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" which appealed to me. The back cover photo of Roger Williams looked sufficiently geeky to catch my interest. This was either going awesome or a train wreck.

The original version of the album came out in 1959, and this re-issue is undated, but I suspect it's from the early '60s. It was manufactured by MCA in Canada. Man, I don't know why it was such a problem to put a date on things.

I suppose there was a feeling this was timeless and as such didn't need a date. Perhaps in a way it is. I really didn't know what to expect the first time I dropped the needle. Not knowing anything about Roger Williams, I didn't know if this was a vocal or instrumental collection of songs. Turns out Mr. Williams was a pianist — and a really good one. There is certainly a nostalgic charm in hearing these old carols played on the piano backed by an orchestra. Most likely it all depends on what counts as nostalgia for you. For me, Christmas evokes old black and white movies, and the sound of an old car radio playing music on the AM dial. This for me, pushes a lot of buttons. It's also quite enjoyable, and with all the hustle and frenetic activity that accompanies the lead up to Christmas being able to relax a little is a treat.

Doing a little reading on Mr. Williams, it's interesting that in his heyday he was a big deal. Before Joe Satriani was hailed as the hero for getting instrumental songs on the radio, Roger Williams was the first to have an instrumental hit number 1 back in 1955 with his song "Autumn Leaves" and then again hit the top 10 with "Born Free" in 1966. I remember watching the movie as a kid, all I remember is Elsa the lion. He would release 22 hit singles and was considered one of the top instrumentalists of his day.

Time marches on, and music marches right along with it. It's funny how everything is always centred on what is current, and sales figures and popularity of artists are measured against their peers, or The Beatles. Anything before that was a black hole marked "Here be dragons." In that black morass is Roger Williams and a host of others who were once considered a big deal.

Morass or not, Christmas music is its own thing and doesn't seem to be in step with anything other than itself. Music for the holidays can be mushed together, and for me I'll listen to this alongside just about anything else in my collection. This is the kind of music that plays during dinner or time sitting around the tree reading a book or hanging out with family. There's a warmth that evokes a crackling fire and a glass of rum and eggnog. Maybe it's just me, I am a maudlin sucker for the holidays, and with Christmas Time Roger Williams provided a wonderful soundtrack that captures the holidays with arrangements of the sacred and contemporary.

Merry Christmas indeed.

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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