Old Enough to Forget

Author's note: Written from a Canadian perspective where the band never really caught on after their one big hit. Unbeknownst to be I'd been aware of Madness for a long time ... one of the nerdy kids in high school who was very much into those bands who were part of the first round of  English new wave acts. He had a very large ghetto blaster and he'd always be by his locker blaring out music. Whereas most of us were into Prism, or Trooper or The Cars this guy loved The Buzzcocks, The Clash and Madness. I remember hearing "One Step Beyond" (and liking it) but had no idea who it was. When "Our House" broke over here, it was infectious. Most people in North America, of which I was one, had no idea the band had been around for years. They may have looked like a bunch of fresh faced kids but they'd been around for years by 1983. I find it strange that "Our House" managed to crack the top 10 in the US without an album behind. The Rise & Fall...

My friend Wes has a deceivingly sinister sense of humour. A couple of Christmases ago he'd come over for a rehearsal and instead of bringing beer he brought me a record saying it was an early Christmas present. It was wonderfully shiny, and there was a sticker on the cover saying this a factory sealed direct import from Germany. I thanked him and put the album in a place of prominence ... until he left, and then it went into the processing pile. It stayed there for a couple of years. I'd see it now and again and then shuffle it back into the pile. It's not like I had anything against James Last. As a kid there always seemed to be an advertisement on the T.V. pushing his latest Non Stop Dancing album. He always seemed to me to be the used car salesman equivalent of Lawrence Welk without the bubbles. This was party music for old people who wanted to be in with the kids. He was older than my parents, and my parents were out of step with music and it never occurred to me they ...

This is one of the albums I saved from a box of rather suspect records my mother in law found in the crawl space. It seems that no one was entirely sure of the origins of the box, but it was an eclectic mess of audible bric-a-brac. Mixed in with a very beat up Supremes double album (that couldn't be salvaged) were a few things that looked like fun. None more so than this Freddy Fender record. "Wasted Days & Wasted Nights" was a song I remembered, but the version on this collection likely dates back to the original 1959 recording. It's hard to tell as the credits are sketchy - well, non-existent. There's a certain charm to this one and it's rough and spotty in places but the bones of the song that he re-recorded to greater fanfare in 1975, the same year this collection was released by Pickwick, the king of budget opportunistic hits packages. I should have known it would sound like dogshit, especially with the little blurb on the top left on the back cover: ...

Equinox is by far the best album Styx released - by the original line up that is. It was the final record to feature John Curulewski before his departure ushered in the band's next phase with Tommy Shaw. When I started working my way backward through Styx’s catalogue, I always wondered what happened to John. On those early albums, I really enjoyed the guitar interplay between James Young and John (note, I know the drummer was John too, but when I say John I mean John the guitar guy). In fact, I found myself liking a few songs—especially the ones John sang—on the band’s second 1973 release, The Serpent Is Rising . If I’m being honest, my favourite was actually the hidden track, “Don’t Sit Down on the Plexiglas Toilet,” which Curulewski wrote. Apparently, the band hated The Serpent Is Rising , calling it one of the worst albums ever made. Ouch. I guess they forgot to listen to Man of Miracles . Anyway, back to Equinox and why it was such a great album. After four records on the sma...

Mashmakhan was one of those mysterious bands who was often referenced in articles related to April Wine. Drummer Jerry Mercer came from the band, and later incarnations would spit out guitarist Steve Lang and Brian Greenway (not at the same time) all of whom would land in April Wine and be part of the classic line up. This just added to the mystery. What was Mashmakhan?  I found a slightly beat up copy a while ago and I'd finally get my answer. The first clue should have been the hippy dippy trippy cover. The kaleidoscope image of the floating heads was a give away, but then again it was the '70s. I have friends who had family portraits that had superimposed images that looked similar so it was actually more normal than it seemed. The second clue, and one I was not aware of until I started reading up on the band was that a drug dealer in Montreal sold a variety of hash called mashmakhan. Yeah I'm sure the kids thought that was far out man. From the first track, this was ver...

Running on Empty is an album I associate with the early '80s, even though it came out in December of 1977. "Running on Empty" was the big song, and boy oh boy it had legs. Reading up on this one it was up for a couple of Grammy Awards in 1979. One for album of the year , and another for male vocal performance for "Running on Empty" which was pretty cool. As a record, Running on Empty was a bit of odd duck when it comes to live albums. Rather than the usual best of approach with crowd noise, Jackson Browne took a hard left at Albuquerque and road tested and recorded new songs. There were live songs, rehearsal songs, songs on a bus (which is really good, you can hear the bus), songs in a hotel room, and songs recorded backstage. He recorded it all over, everything recorded was part of the touring experience. Jackson Browne assembled a band featuring the best of the best. Russ Kunkel on drums, Leland Sklar on bass, Danny Kortchmar on guitar, and the incredible D...

When I was in high school a friend of mine had Spanish Train And Other Stories , and I remember being enthralled by the title track. I don't recall anything else. When videos were a thing in '83 I remember seeing "Don't Pay The Ferryman" and I was hooked. The album would be a big deal here in Canada where it sold over 100,000 copies. Chris De Burgh was likeable. I'll be the first to admit that I never really thought much of the rest of the album at the time. It was decent but I was really hoping for an album full of rockers. Of course I should have known better, but hey I was still a teenager. It didn't matter though - that one song was a killer, and the rest of the album was pleasant enough and I'd play it once in a while. After all, I was a fan of Al Stewart so it wasn't like I didn't listen to what could be loosely categorized as "adult contemporary" music. Rupert Hine produced this one, and he'd been working with SAGA around t...

My parents, particularly my mum loved strings. Lush and syrupy and shrill. That's how she liked it. I bought a Frank Chacksfield record just so she could hear her favourite song of all time, "Ebb Tide" when she visits. When she was moving out of her house she had to downsize just about everything and I went through the remaining records in the cabinet. I found quite a few that came home with me. Some I was genuinely curious to hear, and some were for her to listen to when she comes over. Hits of the 70's was released in 1972 and the essay on the back cover says the album contains the main themes to three of the most successful motion pictures of the decade. Yup, two years in and they're calling it. Then whoever wrote the back piece went even further by stating, "70's music is the most feeling popular music in the history of man."  I gotta say I was hooked even before dropping the needle, and boy the album delivered the goods. In fact I'd go so f...

As a kid I remember liking "The Gambler" ... and then it became a song I couldn't stand. It didn't help that he came back with "Coward of the County" that pushed the same story shtick and that cemented him in my mind as a one trick pony and it was tiring. With that settled I moved on and hardly ever thought about Kenny Rogers, and I'm sure good old Mister Rogers (not that one, the other one) never thought of me either. It didn't help that his hits were cringe infused sappy ballads or duets. Everything seemed to further cement the judgment of a fifteen year old kid. Not that long ago I inherited a box of records that contained a whole lot of stuff that I'd be reluctant to donate to charity. However there were a couple of Christmas albums, some K-tel records (one was broken) and other odds and sods that I thought would be worth cleaning up. Among them was The Gambler , complete with the colour poster that was promised on the cover. Over the last li...

When I was a kid for a long time (kid time) my record collection was one album - Dynamite . Then it doubled when I bought Canadian Mint . Of course my memory is a tad flawed, but it wasn't until '75 I bought Four Wheel Drive as my first real album and I had those K-tel records for what seemed like forever. Dynamite and Canadian Mint were indelible records. For a generation who grew up on these weirdly edited hits and oddly sequenced collections we owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Philip Kives who managed to make Winnipeg Manitoba the centre of the musical universe ... for a little while.  I was feeling a tad nostalgic the other day and decided to see if I could find my musical Rosetta Stone records. Apparently there are others like me, and when I asked about them Bob pointed me to a section that was set aside for K-tel compilations.  Oooh. While it wasn't a huge section it did yield not one, but two very nice copies of Dynamite at two very different price points ... and I ...

You had to be living under a rock in '85 to not have heard "Tarzan Boy" on the radio, or seen the video. There was something goofy and infectious about the song, and it was certified 100% CHEESE. I'll admit is was one of those guilty pleasures I'd listen to in the car but I wouldn't have been caught dead with this in my collection. Of course when I found the record I had to have it. I didn't realize it was a borderline EP as the album hardly crests thirty minutes and only contains six songs. However it doesn't feel truncated or rushed. All but one song is over five minutes. "Tarzan Boy" and "Living in the Background" clock in at over six minutes and they aren't extended dance mixes, they're just longer ... but not stretched out and watered down. The album opens with the big hit, and frankly I was expecting the album to then sink like stone after the first track, and was pleasantly surprised when the follow-up "Pull the ...

There are good albums, and then there's Toto IV. A near perfect rock album that had it all. Big guitars, the pounding drums, great vocals, and most importantly amazing songs. The band always had all of the ingredients at their disposal but the perfect combination had eluded the band when it came to pulling off an album's worth of unparalleled excellence. Over the years I've purchased this album four times. First when it came out, and then on CD, and then when they released the All In Box set a few years ago (so good), and then again just recently when I found the record and felt it should come home with me. I bought this album before I'd heard any of the songs on the radio. Apparently "Rosanna" came out as a teaser a month or so before the album dropped and I may have heard it, but honestly I don't remember. What I do remember is hearing "Afraid of Love" blaring on the stereo at one of the record stores in the mall, and it was around the break...

When Styx imploded after the band's 1983 tour that gave the world the live album Caught in the Act it was the end of an era. Styx had dropped their debut album in 1972, and while those first few albums on Wooden Nickel were inconsistent there was something undeniable going on, and by the time they released Equinox on A&M the band was starting to make a name for themselves. With the addition of Tommy Shaw in 1976 the band would enter it's classic run. With Kilroy Way Here the band started to come apart at the seams. The album would go platinum, but it wasn't the triple platinum their past few albums had delivered. Freed from the constraints of being in a band Dennis would drop Desert Moon in the fall of '83 and not long after Tommy Shaw's Girls with Guns was released. For me this was all gravy - I was, and continue be a sucker for all things related to Styx. Dennis got airplay with the title track, and the same with Tommy. However neither album exactly set the...