Phil Keaggy - Town to Town

Town to Town was the first Phil Keaggy album I bought brand new when it came out. My first introduction to Phil was on the triple live album How the West Was One with 2nd Chapter of Acts. It was a gift along with a few other Christian records I got from a girl at a youth conference. Apparently she had been gifted them and she didn't want them. Her loss, my gain. Although there were some clunkers in the pile I've since forgotten about and lost, it was that live album that blew my mind. "What a Day" and the casual chord progression Phil pulls off still bends my brain. Phil was (is) a jaw dropping player, and I still find it odd that he resonated so much with me, as he wasn't really a rock and roll guy - he was a mostly soft rock guy who played a mean guitar.

When Town to Town dropped, it featured a lot of truly jaw dropping guitar work, accompanied by his sweet, almost McCartney like vocals. The songs were at times deeply spiritual, but there was something about his delivery that didn't seem overly heavy handed. I still get goosebumps when I hear him sing "Let Everything Else Go," and his rocked up version of "Rise Up O Men of God" is awesome.

It's the songs though that are so good. The early '80s was still a sort of free for all in terms of quality in the Christian music realm. You got the good, the ugly and the horrifyingly bad that wasn't just brutal to listen to, the theology was often questionable, but was unassailable because the artists in question weren't artists, they were using music as ministry. Therefore much like the golden tablets Joseph Smith received with the words all nicely written out, these songs were as equally divinely inspired, and to question the message was to question god (little g there baby). As you can tell I'm veering wildly off topic, but the age old question of art versus ministry and where is the intersecting line for Christian artists remains a hard question to answer for a lot of people.

For me it's always been a little simpler - mainly because I'm not a deep thinker, and simple is more betterer. It's music by Christians, expressing their faith as it pertains to them and their journey. In short, an artist who happens to be Christian. Of course it's not always so black and white. For me though, it's about the music and the song. Shit is shit whether it comes from a saint or a sinner.

Getting back on topic, Town to Town was a fantastic sounding album and the players were all top shelf, and this was about the artistry required to service the song and the message. It was a beautifully balanced album, and remains one I love to listen to.

The album's opener "Wished You Were There" was one of those songs that took a while to grow on me when I first got the album. It was, and is still a sort of odd duck on the album, but it's a wonderful song that documents The Glass Harp reunion concerts in Cleveland in the spring of 1981.

The other song that I really like that's more autobiographical is the title track "Town to Town" that speaks to a life on the road and the accompanying loneliness. It's one of my favourite songs on the album along with the aforementioned "Let Everything Else Go," that seems to channel elements of Christopher Cross' "Sailing" without becoming maudlin.

I would continue to buy Phil's records as they came out for many years and he would be consistently good, although the albums would resonate with me a little less each time. It doesn't diminish the love I have for Town to Town, and when I found the record again after over forty years it was like catching up with a long lost friend.

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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