K-tel Dynamite - 22 Original Hits 22 Original Stars

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 went big just to be on the safe side. Alas Canadian Mint wasn't to be found, but I was half way there.

I'd not heard this album in decades, and over the years the songs I liked had found their way into my collection and I still remember how jarring it was to hear many of the song I loved had guitar solos, bridges and sometimes choruses I'd never heard. To fit a upwards of a dozen songs a side K-tel had to work a little editing magic and cut a few corners.

It didn't matter, 22 Original Hits 22 Original Stars - that's what mattered.

One of the things I can thank K-tel for is giving me a varied musical education, and just like going to school for real, sometimes school sucked. I mean, really sucked. I may not have liked them but I did get a healthy dose of Gladys Knight and The Pips, The Stylistics and The Impressions and William De Vaughn. I didn't like their songs, but I listened regardless.

Dynamite opened with "Takin' Care of Business" and then launched into "Rock & Roll Hoochie Koo" and if those were the only good songs, it would have been enough. But no, the hits kept coming. "Rock Me Gently" by Andy Kim was awesome, and even Terry Jack's "If You Go Away" his modest follow up to "Seasons in the Sun" that shared a chord structure and feel was really good. I remember being ambivalent to "Rock On" by David Essex, but I love it now. Heck "Come and Get Your Love" by Redbone, closes out the first side, and it was like I was ten years old sitting on the floor in my room listening to this on my old Electrohome sound in the round stereo.

Side two was a bit spotty, but that's only because it started with a one-two punch to the groin. "Honky Cat" by Elton John remains one of those songs I don't care for, and it was followed by "Rock Your Baby" an R&B special by George McCrae. Oddly I kind of like this one now.

It takes a while but the album goes on a tear starting with "The Lord's Prayer" by none other than Sister Janet Mead. I always thought it was funny that it said it was written by A. Straits and not attributed to God. Ah, the mind of a ten year old (okay I was eleven). Susan Jacks followed with "I Want You To Love Me" and I'll be honest it wasn't until years later I put two and two together and connected the dots that she and Terry Jacks were once a thing. "I'm a Train" by Albert Hammond shouldn't have worked, but my goodness hearing it again I just sat with a goofy grin on my face. Then it was the brilliant pairing that rocked my world. "Stuck in the Middle With You" and "This Flight Tonight" by Nazareth. Sure the songs were brutally truncated but it didn't matter. The album closes with Jim Stafford's "My Girl Bill" that was supposed to be funny, "Ha ha ha are those two dudes going to make out?" To me it was the song that came after Nazareth and I'd have to flip the album over soon.

Listening to this now, it was a pretty cool balancing act trying to be all things to all people within the context of one album. There was enough variety to just about please any listener. Even the songs I didn't really like were part of the experience. This was my mix tape, and a big part of my musical education.

K-tel was my musical gateway drug. I only had two albums (I have more now) but they were enough and I never looked back.

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and 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 that had a bonus track of " Get It On (Bang A Gong)" that when I bought the album 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. However, at the time all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the first cut "Baby Come Back" and proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another and closed out the album (sans any...

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, 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 , "Don...

Lighthouse - Sunny Days

Bin diving at my local record store where there were more than a few choices to make. After picking out a half dozen treasures, I figured I'd stop looking and leave before I caused myself trouble at home. Lighthouse was one of those ridiculously large bands in the early 70s I didn't understand. I mean really, BTO was just four guys, The James Gang was three, until they weren't, what in the world do you do with a dozen guys in a band? Of course I had a radio — it was the first significant purchase I made with my money from cutting lawns. I think at the time it cost about 35 bucks, and had FM and other high frequency things I never got to use living out in the suburbs away from the reach of the big city FM signal. "Sunny Days" was a great song. I remember thinking it was cool and didn't switch to the other AM station when it came on. A few years later, when I got my first record player, the obligatory K-Tel anthologies would feature a myriad of cut up and edited...

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