The Monkees - Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.

The Monkees. These guys were my musical heroes. Accept no substitutes. As a kid I had no idea they were a manufactured band, and that the TV show ran for only 2 years between 1966 and 1968 and broadcast 58 episodes. I grew up on reruns in the early '70s and while I loved the show, it was the concert and performance parts of the show that I really loved.

The songs were so good, but even back then I found Davy Jones to be a little (ha, because he was short) irritating, and his contributions were limited to the cute songs and playing maracas. Even if he could play four of them at a time ... which admittedly is harder than it looks - so is playing the tambourine but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

By 1967 The Monkees were a pretty big deal, and by golly they were busy. Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. was their third album that year, and the second one where the boys were in charge of their musical direction. Often dismissed as inconsequential artists, they had enough sense to bring in good songwriters and studio musicians, but by all accounts the boys were playing and singing the songs on this album. Heck, Micky had one of the first Moog synthesizers, and it was featured on Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. Too bad the pictures on the back, especially the ones of Peter and Davy, make them look like they've never seen a guitar before. Davy I get, as I'd almost expect him to hold it by the neck and shake it like a maraca. Peter though, that was just a bad picture ... it was supposed to look contemplative I guess. All I see is him thinking, "What shape is a D chord?"

Of course, the songs I'm partial to are the ones I remember from the show and even the Harry Nilsson penned "Cuddly Toy" is more fun than I remembered. Mike Nesmith killed it on "What Am I Doing Hangin' 'Round?" and his voice on "Don't Call on Me" was quite surprising, in a good way. It was "Pleasant Valley Sunday" by Goffin and King that is still the centrepiece of the album. The album is short, just over half an hour with most of the songs clocking in under three minutes.

It's an odd album in many ways. It was a little silly at times but mostly it was really quite good. 1967 was the year The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper and frankly if you do an A / B against the serious acts of the day it wasn't hard to tell which band was going to be taken seriously. No doubt this didn't sit well with Michael and Peter.

Of course, impact and influence are tricky things over time. It's hard to describe the influence these guys had and how many people picked up guitars and started a band because they were fans of The Monkees. They may have started out as the brainchild of Don Kirshner but soon the little wooden puppets figured they wanted to be real boys, and for a while they were. However, they're dismissed as being prefabricated and soulless. It's weird that when Malcolm McLaren helped shape The Sex Pistols, they were viewed as the real deal, and even made it to the Hall of Fame in 2006, an honour they shit on staying true to form.

Who knows, one day after the dust settles The Monkees will get their due based on the music and the influence they had on a generation of musicians who took them at face value. I suspect they'll wait until they're all gone and do it posthumously ...

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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