Brian May & Friends - Star Fleet Project

When I found this album back in '83 it had a remainder cut out on the cover. Makes one wonder what Capital records thought was going to happen with a three song vanity project from Brian May. Me, I loved this from the moment I saw it ... I just knew, KNEW it was going to be awesome. I was determined to love this no matter what. How hard could it be to love something that had Brian May and Eddie Van Halen on the same album? Apparently not hard at all ... but harder than I first thought ... but it didn't matter.

Rounding out the friends, was drummer Alan Gratzer (REO Speedwagon), bassist Phil Chen (Rod Steward, Jeff Beck, Joan Armatrading) and Fred Mandel (Alice Cooper, Domenic Troiano, Queen and Pink Floyd) on keyboards. These boys could play.

As Brian writes on the back cover essay this was just supposed to be a hang and jam with some people he had wanted to play with. You can practically hear the songs coming together. The three songs on the MINI LP are essentially an audible postcard. He'd go back into the studio and layer his trademark guitar parts and vocals that were especially evident on the title track. Brian is listed as the producer, but he enlisted longtime collaborator Mack to mix the album, and it was mastered by Bernie Grundman ... it was a good sounding record.

There are only three songs, well two and a jam. The album opens with "Star Fleet" a song that seems to start already in progress and takes a while to build up. It eventually morphs into something that wouldn't have been out of place on the Flash Gordon Soundtrack, but it is definitely Brian's song. The guitar work throughout is spectacular and the difference in tone between Edward and Brian is rather jarring. I had friends who kind of slept on Eddies playing calling him a one trip tapping pony and here Ed is playing, and boy can that kid play. I'm sure there was a really tight song somewhere in the 8 minutes of exaggerated guitar wankery, but boy howdy I didn't want less ... this was great. Even the band seemed reluctant to end the song as they milked the ending section for all its worth. I only found out decades later there was a video for the song on YouTube.

"Let Me Out" clocks in around 7 minutes and like the first song, there's a framework the guys are working within, but they're given a fair amount of latitude and there are no hard edges here, just a fuzzy boundary. It's a blues shuffle that generation of six string warriors have used as the foundation for jam sessions. Hearing these guys fall into the same familiar tropes as the rest of mere mortals was kind of comforting, and then kind of humbling as these guys were just sweaty barroom players these were guys at the top of their game playing for shits and giggles.

"Blues Breaker" all twelve and half minutes of it takes up side two. "Blues Breaker" didn't pretend to be anything other than a 12 bar blues jam. In parenthesis under the title are the words "Dedicated to E.C." It didn't take a lot of sleuthing to connect blues breaker and Eric Clapton. I read somewhere that Eric heard the song, and didn't think much of it. Which sort of pissed of Eddie Van Halen ... but you can't believe everything you read on the internet so I'd take that with a heaping teaspoon of salt ... maybe not heaping that much salt will make you puke.

My copy of Star Fleet Project is the one I bought back in '83. It survived the great crawlspace flood, and the insert is rippled from moisture but it's otherwise in pristine condition. Listening to this after so many decades is a bit surreal. The reality is this really was a vanity project that outside of hardcore fans of Brian and Eddie is kind of a slog to get through. Oh don't get me wrong, I still love this, and the goofy grin on my face as I heard "Star Fleet" for the first time in years was worth it right there.

This is a little piece of history for the fans, and like Eric Clapton/Jeff Beck/Jimmy Page's Guitar Boogie (1971) it's not meant for everyone. It's like a shared secret, you get it or you don't.

I got it, and still have it.

P.S. For those who really, and I mean really want to go big Brian May released a deluxe edition of this little 3 song MINI LP that has a runtime of almost two and half hours ... I tried, I couldn't.

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 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...

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...

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