Loggins And Messina – Loggins And Messina

As a kid I remember "Your Mamma Don't Dance" as a really cool song, and I always got a kick (and still do) when the song gets to "Outta the car longhair." As for the Poison remake, that goes in the trash alongside the Motley Crue version of "Smokin' in the Boy's Room." Neither band had any idea what to do with the source material other than try and rock it up and suck the life out of the song. Anyway ... it was the original that rings true, and it was the reason I picked up the album when I found a pretty decent copy in the dollar bin a while back.

I always knew they were a successful band, but I really didn't know anything other than the one song. Kenny Loggins to me was always just the guy who managed to carve out a niche as king of the soundtrack singles, starting with "I'm Alright" from Caddyshack, and then again with "Footloose" and "Danger Zone." I mean to say those were huge is an understatement.

As for Jim Messina, he had pedigree, but I mean, aside from being a member of Buffalo Springfield and being in Poco, I didn't know what his contributions were to their sound. As far as Loggins and Messina, the duo was an accident of sorts, as Jim was mentoring a young Ken Loggins and producing what was to be his debut solo album. Over the course of recording the album, it became Sittin' In, which was a nod to Jim Messina's involvement during the sessions.

Regardless of how it started, between 1971 and 1976 they would release six studio albums and one live record and garner four platinum and two gold records.

Pretty cool.

As for their 1972 release, in many ways this was really their debut as a duo, and while the majority of the songs were written individually, they did write a couple together, most notably "Your Mamma Don't Dance" and the album's closer "Angry Eyes." "Angry Eyes" is a killer song, and honestly, to me, is the best song on the album, with both Jim and Ken taking turns singing and countering each other. It's also the longest song on the album at just over six minutes that goes by too fast.

The whole album is really solid. The songs were cohesive, and I attribute this to the musical arrangements and the musicians who played on the record.

I was actually a little surprised at how well Jim and Ken played off each other. Their voices were different, but remarkably similar in tone. It made for a really nice combination. I found myself checking the back of the jackets to see who had written what and assumed who wrote it sang it.

Musically, this was still on that country rock vein, but it was definitely more rock (okay, soft rock) oriented, and the record sounds thick and full. Yeah, one could argue this is dated, but then again, the album is over fifty years old ... so, yeah, duh, it's going to sound dated, but man, it sounds so good.

I honestly just got this because it had one song I recognized, and while it's a killer song, it's the odd duck here. Not out of place, it's just different than the others, and not in a bad way. I don't know what I was expecting, but as I listened to this a couple of times, I found I got a lot more than I expected.

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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