Melissa Etheridge - Melissa Etheridge

Back in the day I had two of Melissa's albums: this one and her follow up Brave and Crazy. I was a rocker (at least I said I was, but I still liked Christopher Cross, so go figure) and not hearing anything as captivating as "Bring Me Some Water" I stopped listening to her stuff. It didn't help that the radio stations I liked didn't seem to play anything of hers so I just moved on.

Of course she'd go one to have one hell of a career I know little or nothing about. Despite me thinking her debut was as good as it got for her history tells another story. If you're a fan, I mean a REAL fan you know more than me. So I'm going to just listen to this one in a vacuum and contain my commentary to the ten songs on her debut. Seems like a reasonable compromise and it'll keep me contained and hopefully on track.

The album opens with "Similar Features" and man is it a great track - it still sounds so good. I bought the album because "Being Me Some Water" was jaw dropping. Looking at the track list the first side was all new to me. It was inevitable that I was going to be weighing everything I heard against the song on the radio. Even now as I get reacquainted with the album I find myself almost falling into the same trap I set for myself all those years ago. To be honest, when I found the record again I bought it again so I could get that one song ... call me a sucker.

Admittedly back then and even now It was a terrible way to listen to the record. I still inadvertently focused my attention on one song but I was determined not to miss out on a whole album worth of great songs. I had been looking through the wrong end of the telescope, I wasn't going to do that again. Having said that back in '88 I didn't dismiss the entire album but I had passed judgment early and moved on to other things before I was able to really let this one sink in.

It happens ... it still happens.

However, here I am decades later with another chance to revisit an album I always thought was good but still associated with a single track, and while after the dust has settled I still think the centre piece is "Bring Me Some Water" it is not the heart and soul of the record. It is a album that is at its best when listened to in a sitting ... in my case I played it over and over for a couple of days.

What stands out is the interplay between the core trio of Etheridge, drummer Craig Krampf and bassist Kevin McCormick who produced and arranged the tracks. Niko Bolas served as co-producer and also recorded and mixed the album. To help fresh things out they brought in Waddy Wachtel on guitar along with some others (they're names I don't recognize, but their contributions sounded great). However it is the core trio who anchor everything, and they ... are ... awesome, and the record sound so good.

I only had a couple of her albums and while I don't have a lot of knowledge with respect to her later output, this one will forever cement her place as one of the greats.

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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