James Last - Non Stop Dancing '66 II

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 was 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 weren't the target audience for the musical machinations of the James Last Band. My dad would listen to the jazz station on the radio and my mum loved the syrupy strings.

Over the last couple of weeks I've been tidying up my records and coming to terms with the space issues I have in the basement. I've not thrown anything out, I've just been strategically moving piles around. Sort of like a kid who hates peas and is pushing the last couple around the plate hoping that it'll look like they got eaten despite still being on the plate.

I'd recently listened to Stu Phillips & The Hollyridge Strings and a rather borderline horrid collection of '70s musical renditions and it got me thinking about James Last, a guy who has, on the conservative side, sold over 200 million records worldwide with 200 gold and 14 platinum records in Germany. He couldn't be all that bad.

He struck a chord somewhere.

Dropping the needle on Non Stop Dancing '66 II (yes two ... there was one before this) I was surprised at the sound quality. It felt like a live album with audience noise, but no clapping to speak of - it sounded oddly thin and a bit lifeless to be honest. However it did sound like I expected it to sound. Instead of singing, it was a collection of humming and la la las. The band, and it was a band, was part orchestra with drums and some guitar and a lot of horns, particularly trombone. I really do love a good trombone solo.

As the name implies, that was Non Stop Dancing '66 II and the songs were current. The album opens with "Paint it Black" and runs through an eclectic array of songs. There are some German songs I wasn't familiar with, but he did cover a lot of ground. Seriously, he crammed in 28 songs over two sides. Heck the schmaltzy "Sloop John B" was really cool (or at least interesting because I didn't expect it). The band would veer into oom-pah-pah territory. While the songs sounded enough like their popular counterparts, it often seemed like they were leading a cadre of polyester wearing older white dudes who were enthusiastically clapping on the 1 and 3. I still don't know if this was a live or studio recording. I suspect it was a studio recording and the band and singers were just having fun and making it seem like it was a party and non stop dancing.

This was kitschy and silly fun, but to millions of people through the '60s and '70s James Last was their conduit to feeling like they were connected to what was happening in popular music. I suppose in a way I'll have the last laugh on this one as it was just what I expected it to be, and like any good Christmas present it's one I liked but wouldn't necessarily buy for myself.

Thanks Wes.

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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