Old Enough to Forget

My earliest memories of hearing songs from  The White Album  is probably from 1972. I remember this because my older cousins wanted to hear "Smoke on the Water" and I wanted to hear "Rocky Raccoon" and I was outvoted. My Aunt and Uncle seemed to have the coolest music from Alice Cooper to The Doobie Brothers. The Beatles had broken up years earlier and none of my friends listened to them.  The Beatles were music for an older generation. Me and the other kids I knew were all over what was on the current top 40 and we'd argue in class about whether CKLG or CFUN was the best station. I'd give a passive listen once in a while to a country station (ick) if my Uncle was on the radio over at CJJC and I have one vague memory of us sitting around waiting for him to play "Kiss an Angel Good Morning" for my Aunt. Regardless, they had an eight track copy of The White Album , and if the stars aligned I could get them to play it. I finally got a copy for myself ...

I was a little kid when I first heard "Spinning Wheel" on my dad's little AM radio. The song was really cool, and those long unencumbered trombone slides when the band takes a beat still puts a grin on my face. It was a strange song bordering on novelty - the cacophonous assortment of instruments at the end is still a thing of wonder. Then as quickly as they came, they went and I never really thought about them. The band's lead vocalist David Clayton-Thomas seemed to be on the CBC a lot when I was growing up. The most memorable was a black clad, complete with the hat David squaring off against Burton Cummings who was wearing a while cowboy outfit. The two went back and forth duelling their hits. Even then I thought it was a but unfair as Blood, Sweat & Tears couldn't match what Burton brought to the table. Still, it was pretty cool. It's funny to see now, because at the time I thought David Clayton-Thomas must have been an ancient fossil back in 1978 - the...

Here we go, another lush strings arrangement of some of the best holiday classics (best is subjective). I know I really shouldn't like this stuff as much as I do. This stuff manages to sit nestled in my sweet spot for all things nostalgic. I'm always reminded of the holiday variety specials I saw when I was a kid. This to me is the sound of Christmas. It makes me think of my mum, who loves strings. This collection touches all the sweet spots (that's twice, now I'm going to work in the hat trick before I'm done) okay, maybe not all, but it goes for the big ones. The album kicks off with "White Christmas" and includes "My Favorite Things" and "Do You Hear What I Hear" and "Little Drummer Boy" which are pretty solid. Actually as I listen more closely the album really does have quite a few sort of new to me moments, which was unexpected and a nice treat. Probably the oddest moment that caught me off guard and gave me a good giggl...

Time Peace The Rascals Greatest Hits was an album I found in a dollar bin and for my buck I wanted to get "Good Lovin'" and ended up getting more for my buck than I expected. The record jacket still had the original shrink wrap on it, and I couldn't bring myself to peel it off, so I didn't. The album itself was in better shape than I expected considering the liner was long gone. Very few pops and clicks. Yeah, I got my dollar's worth. Apparently there was a gatefold version as well ... that would have been nice. The cover I assumed was a nod to  Roy Lichtenstein mixed with Andy Warhol. Or not, who knows. I'm just trying to put that one semester of art history to use.  The album crams fourteen songs onto two sides, and while there are a few covers they appear on the first side. From what I can tell the songs are presented in chronological order and in the early days outside writers helped flesh out their repertoire and songs like "Good Lovin'"...

Number thirteen and still plugging away. I have notice though that I'm not keeping with the theme as consistently as I had expected. The intent of dropping a bunch of mini blurbs was to save me time and to allow me to put down some thoughts on albums without having to go too deep. You know, "Oh I liked this one." that sort of thing. But nope. My balloon is apparently very much full of hot air. Some of these are longer and I suppose I could have just blown a little more air into them and released them on their own. But I didn't, still I did get in a couple of short ones, so I'll take it as a win. Welcome to the summer baby. Get a drink, pull up a chair and let's waste so time shall we? Steppenwolf - Steppenwolf (1968) Max Webster - Live Magnetic Air (1979) Ian Thomas - Long Long Way (1974) The Grass Roots - Golden Grass: Their Greatest Hits (1968) Mel Tillis - Night Train to Memphis (1967) Steppenwolf - Steppenwolf (1968) Steppenwolf is one of those bands who...

Here we are at the end of Christmas celebrating Epiphany. In addition to the traditional gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh I offer to you John Fahey's 1974 re-issue of his 1968 album The New Possibility . An album that was an unexpected surprise and will no doubt become a record I return to over and over. I had no idea who John Fahey was when I picked up the album, all I knew was it had an interesting cover, that could have been released any time over the last fifty years. It was the definition of simplicity, and it was on Takoma records, a label I knew from Truth Decay by T Bone Burnett way back in 1980. I figured it was likely some acoustic flavoured collection of Christmas carols and that would be just a-okay by me. One of my all time favourite Christmas albums is A Christmas Collection by Neil Hogan that came out in 1989, and featured finger style steel string renditions of popular favourites. The album opens with "Joy to the World" and sure enough it was exactl...

The late '60s were an awesome time for so many reasons - not least among them was the music. Music was exploding and splintering into a million (okay, maybe a dozen) different directions and the generation gap was widening, and if you were over 30 you weren't to be trusted. There was no middle ground. Maybe not, but there was middle of the road. For a brief period of time up to the late '60s there was this strange no man's land, where popular artists had their songs filtered through the lens of other artists who were considered safe for consumption and that somehow made it palatable to an older generation who wanted to be hip to what the kids were down with, but who couldn't stand what the kids were actually listening to. This is what I believe at any rate. How else to do explain this type of stuff. It's too easy to blame Herb Albert and Jerry Moss who founded A&M and unleashed The Tijuana Brass in 1962 with a range of originals and homogenized versions of p...

For a buck I'll pretty much take a chance on stuff that I'd normally ignore. The Sandpipers felt familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on it - but I figured it was going to be an easy listening experience that would be in the same vein as "Up, Up and Away" by The 5th Dimension ... yeah, for all the reverence Jimmy Webb gets as a songwriter, particularly his collaborations with Glen Campbell - it was a surprise the goofy balloon song was a Webb composition. Well, I came home and cleaned the record, which was in remarkably good condition. As with so many records from the '60s there was no date on the cover, or the album, but a quick search revealed this was released in 1968. The credits are sparse, to the point of being non-existent aside from Tommy LiPuma who produced the album, and a few others on the engineering side. The first track was the title track which was a cover of a Gordon Lightfoot song. It was indeed in the easy listening style with an emphasis o...

Hot diggity, dog ziggity, boom - I found a nice copy (with the odd pop here and there, but I pretend it's the crackling of a fire) of Home for the Holidays in "stereo orthophonic" high fidelity as part of my pre-Christmas haul. My first impressions of Perry Como came courtesy of SCTV in the early 1980s when they parodied Mr. Como as so laid back he would wear his trademarked cardigan and sing lying flat on the stage. It was so funny it stuck with me. I then went through my dad's limited but eclectic collection of strange religious albums, mixed with some Harry Belafonte, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles and Perry Como. It was a weird to juxtapose my steady diet of Styx, Prism, Larry Norman with the oldies I found in my parent's record cabinet - but it all went into the mix and helped me deepen my appreciation of music. Over the years of course I'd have literally dozens of Christmas anthologies and inevitably there would be a Perry Como song or two. This collection ...

There's no telling what you can find if you spend enough time riffling through the dollar bins. I originally picked this one up, and then put it back - then found another copy, so I went back and compared the two and figured it was a sign so I put it in the pile. It cleaned up nice, and I could hardly wait to see what kind of cheese I was in for. As a kid I thought Herb Alpert's trumpet playing was the coolest of the cool and "Spanish Flea" would crack me up every time I heard it, and as I got older I picked up on the subtext and thought it was funnier than ever. Their style of articulated trumpet soloing would go on to provide the thematic fodder for game show theme composers for years to come. I'm somewhat conflicted, as there are truly great heaping dollops of pure whipped cheese throughout the album, especially the trumpet parts on "Jingle Bells" but there are a couple of really nice renditions as well, which actually make this more enjoyable than I ...