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...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continues to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner who had been with Gary from the beg...

Gary Wright - The Light of Smiles

Gary Wright followed up his double platinum release The Dreamweaver in 1977 with The Light of Smiles . It must have been a surprise and a bit of a disappointment when the album didn't perform as well as hoped. It did chart as high as 23 on the Billboard top LP and Tape chart according to what I read on the wiki, but it must have been more of a spike than anything. As the album didn't seem to attain any certifications that I could see. Not that it matters, I've said it before, and I'll likely say it again (more than once) most of my favourite albums never really attained any significant commercial success. I'd seen this album over the years, but that was about it. Gary Wright was Mr. Dreamweaver and I'm sure somehow it was worked into his epitaph when he passed away a couple of years ago. For me I was really curious about this one, lately I've been a sucker for finding albums that follow a big release. For Gary Wright he was flying high after The Dreamweave...

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