Curt Cress Clan - Curt Cress Clan

The first time I recall seeing Curt Cress' name in the credits was on SAGA's Wildest Dreams back in '87. Who was this guy and where was Steve ... for that matter what happened to Jim? His name would pop up again on SAGA's much maligned (I love it) '89 follow up The Beginner's Guide To Throwing Shapes. I have a couple of other albums with Chris. Pete Schilling's song "Major Tom (Coming Home)" and Far Corporation, the brainchild of Frank Farian featured Curt on drums. Reading up on Curt he's been on literally thousands and thousands of recordings over the years. He is a monster player who knows what he's doing.

Curt Cress - Clan, or CCC, or Curt Cress Clan was released in Germany in 1975 on Atlantic Records when he was twenty three years old. When this was released he was already a seasoned professional who'd been playing professionally since his early teens.

I managed to find a wonderfully pristine copy in a small shop in Vernon BC of all places. There's a story in there somewhere. I am not complaining. It was an album I was curious about, and while the back cover featured a picture of Curt it was a pretty generic shot, and really didn't give anything away. I was leaning hedging my bets and assumed it was going to be Krautrock, but honestly I really didn't (still don't) know what that means.

One of the bigger hints as to what lay ahead was the inclusion of fluegelhorn in the credits. I started thinking, fusion or some such thing. Which as it turns out is probably closer to the truth. Apparently Curt was still a member of the band Passport at the time, which was sort of the German equivalent to Weather Report. I'd heard of Weather Report mainly because so many musicians I had read about were alumni: Omar Hakim, Jaco Pastorius, Alex Acuna, Chester Thompson too mention a few.

Don't let my feeble attempts at name dropping give the impression I have any idea what I'm talking about when it comes to fusion, jazz fusion or whatever Curt Cress Clan put out. This was not in my wheelhouse, but I can appreciate it ... up to a point. Nuances are lost on me ... and frankly this all sort of sounds the same. It's all just notes in a blender to my ears. I do love smoothies, thank goodness for blenders.

This isn't a long album, and sadly I couldn't find it on out there to stream, which means that Curt Cress Clan has been marooned in that nether world of lost and forgotten records. The album opens with "Cyclone" which opens with a solo drum section that eventually morphs into a more coherent piece. This is probably the most drum centric composition on the album. The jacket lists eight songs, but there are nine. The second side has five songs, with "Movin' Right Along" being the one missing from the cover.

The band here is more than competent:

Dave King on the bass, and man the guy could anchor a groove
Volker Kriegel played guitar, and man he was clean
Kristian Schultze provided the keys
Ack van Rooyen brought the fluegelhorn to the party

While this isn't my go to kind of music, it was fun and honestly if I didn't know this was recorded in 1975 I wouldn't have known. Yeah some of the keyboard sounds and stuff are cheese dated, but the recording sounds really crisp.

All in all listening to Curt Cress Clan was a really fun experience, and there was more than enough musical wizardry on display to keep and hold my attention. Then again as I've said before I'm not exactly a connoisseur of this kind of music. I'm more of a genre voyeur who managed to catch a peek through the blinds and it was kind of exciting.

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...

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 treasurers 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, what in the world do you do with a dozen guys in the 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 classics, among them Sunny Days and other golden nuggets that...

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