Ringo Starr - Beaucoups of Blues

This was a record I was pretty excited to find. It was the UK pressing, and the gatefold was laminated and looked absolutely pristine. This was also an album I'd never heard. I knew it existed, but honestly I always thought it was a throwaway album kind of like Sentimental Journey that had come out in the spring of 1970. I think one of the reasons I was so casually dismissive was it would be three years before Ringo would regroup and release his self-titled album in 1973, which more or less coincidentally aligned with when I really started paying attention to music. Honestly for a long time I had assumed Ringo was his debut.

The album is extraordinary. I mean, this is a love letter to classic country, and Ringo seems so at home it's disarming. There's always been something special about Ringo's voice. It's an odd thing in many ways, but his ability to convey so much emotion and warmth is disarming. His confidence and charm are absolutely infectious. For those who love to shit on Ringo as a talentless hack who was the luckiest guy in The Beatles, this album is his "hold my beer" moment.

Reading up on how the album came to be only makes it more charming and appealing. Pete Drake, who would end up producing Beaucoups of Blues, had been flown to London to play pedal steel guitar on George Harrison's All Things Must Pass album and it was Ringo who picked him up at the airport. Apparently Ringo had a bunch of country albums in the car, and the two struck up a conversation with Ringo saying that they should work together. Pete casually mentioned he could get an album's worth of songs written in a week, which Ringo thought was impossible. Turns out it wasn't, and Ringo went to Nashville and over the course of three days in June 1970 all of the recording was done for the album, with the sessions being engineered by the legendary Scotty Moore (who oddly never played guitar on the record) and the album was released in September.

In many ways this is a classic album that even in 1970 was an album from another time. Well, probably not entirely true, what I know about country is pretty limited. I'll just settle on "classic" country without the shrill strings. The number of musicians who contributed to this is pretty astounding and among the assembled talent were the likes of The Jordanaires, Charlie Daniels before the beard, and Jerry Reed. Heck, I'm going to guess that for the folks who actually know about such things the cast of studio aces are among the who's who of Nashville's finest at the time.

The album was fitted for Ringo and he doesn't come across as a fish out of water, or an artist who is out of his depth. The songs are played straight, and there's no sense Ringo is taking the piss or giving the listener a sly wink and a nod as he plays at being a country star (Starr, ar ar ar). I'd actually expected this to be a little more silly, and self-effacing but there's a reverence to the material, and it's far more charming and engaging than I thought it would be.

Of course at the time people had no idea what to do with this, and the album was likely dismissed as a cruel vanity project that was released to an unsuspecting audience. Oddly it was fairly well received in Canada where the album went as high as 34 on the RPM Albums Chart.

If you're not a fan of traditional country this will not be your cup of tea, but if you think of it as early Americana you're in for an unexpected treat.

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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