Dolenz, Jones, Boyce & Hart - No Monkee Business Here

"In the year 2076 radio and rock & roll will be around and some nostalgia freak will be munching on a kelp-burger and playing these songs as golden oldies." This was taken from the back of the album jacket, and they were only out by half a century. This was an album my buddy Andy had, and I didn't get much more than a cursory shrug when I asked him if it was any good.

I should probably let you know that as a kid there was no band more important to me than The Monkees. Those early TV shows, particularly when the band performed, made me want to play guitar. I didn't want to wear a toque (or as it was known with Michael Nesmith, "Wool Hat"), but I wanted to play guitar. Those big Gretschs were beautiful. The fly in the ointment was Davy. Even back then I could tell he was there for the little girls, and I found his songs to be mostly annoying.

Here we are back in 1976, and the combination of Dolenz and Jones with the songwriting and production chops of Boyce & Hart must have seemed like a good idea. To some, this was a reunion of sorts, but even back then I'm guessing it was a bit of a hard sell to see the commercial potential in putting out an album by two former television actors who pretended to be musicians (I'm just being argumentative, but really that was the perception) who were now trying to be real musicians. Why not? Pinocchio ended up being a real boy ... was it really such a stretch? Still, someone must have bought into the idea, as this came out on Capitol, not some small label with limited resources.

I have to admit the first side more or less played through without really generating much of a reaction. The songs were sort of okay. Nothing special, but really not bad either. Opening the album with Davy singing didn't really help set the tone for me, but thankfully it was really his only lead vocal.

Things actually picked up with the second side. "Moonfire" was the best song so far (the best song on the album). "You Didn't Feel That Way Last Night (Don't You Remember)" opens with Votrax, an early computer-simulated voice. Apparently this was a first in recorded music. The song itself is a facsimile of other earlier Boyce / Hart Monkee compositions. It's so familiar it's almost distracting. It's also a lot of fun.

For an album that was trying to incorporate the future with aspects of technology, the album just couldn't break free from the weight of the past. This was not breaking new ground, it was riding the last of the late '60s ripples. It didn't help that the band thought it was a good idea to include the novelty song "Along Came Jones" that incorporated part of the "Yakety Sax" solo ... yeah, all I could think about was Benny Hill. The "Dolphin Joke of the Day" was pretty funny, but seemed out of place. It's like the guys were trying to work in the more absurd elements of their old show before busting out a rock tune. The album closes with Votrax thanking the listener on behalf of the band.

Speaking of technology, the album cover is now tacky and dated, but in 1976 when this came out, this was an example of cutting-edge computer graphics. Of course, to those of us who grew up in the '70s, we were doing shit like this with our Spirograph sets years before they took the time to have someone program a computer to do it. I guess not having the pinholes in the paper was worth the effort.

So after all this, you may be wondering, "How was it?"

Shrug.

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 , ...

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...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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