Old Enough to Forget

Three Dog Night has been one of those nifty pleasures for me over the last couple of years. As a kid they were on the radio all the time ... at least it seemed that way up to around 1974 or so, then they weren't on the radio anymore. I'd always liked music and my little AM radio was always on. When Harmony came out in 1971 and I remember really liking "An Old Fashioned Love Song" although at the time I had no idea what the album was called. Of course over the decades time has a way of blurring and I've picked up a number of albums that I've really enjoyed. The albums have come to me out of sequence and I tend to first try to find the classic hits, and then from there listen to album allowing the deeper album tracks some time to breathe. I'm still in awe of the band. The fact that Three Dog Night wasn't centred on a lone front man is a source of wonder. Cory, Chuck and Danny were amazing singers and the band was so good. Mike Allsup the guitarist is so ...

I found Ram in a discount bin and while there was some rash here and there on the record it looked like once the dust and bits of glitter (yes, glitter) were cleaned off the album was likely going to be a keeper. Sure enough after giving a cursory brush to remove some of the surface crap a cycle through the ultrasonic brought this one back to life. Aside from one or two moments of surface noise it played beautifully. I had briefly considered doing a little A/B comparison but I didn't feel like subjecting my needle to needless punishment. Ram is an album I've seen for decades and other than "Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey" I didn't recognize any other songs. The gatefold I picked up didn't have any liner notes, so I'm not sure what originally came with the album but there were some basic credits, and among the supporting cast were Denny Seiwell on drums, Dave Spinoza and Hugh McCracken on guitar. It's funny to me how when I was a kid I just assumed Paul...

A shorter entry this time. I figured since I've done a couple entries featuring Goose Creek Symphony I didn't need to rehash a lot of stuff and repeat myself.  After I'd streamed the band's debut I was intrigued by the alchemy of hippy dippy rock and roots so I set out to find their albums and in short order I'd picked up the four records they released in the '70s. I didn't listen to them in chronological order I initially skipped this one in favour of hearing Words of Earnest because that one had "Mercedes Benz" and "Guitars Pickin', Fiddles Playin'" the song my aunt told me about. I was flipping through my records, and I realized I'd not listened to all of my Goose Creek Symphony albums. I was in the mood for something a little different and I had an image in my head about Welcome to Goose Creek would sound like, and ... I ... was ... wrong.  It wasn't a bad surprise at all ... just not what I was expecting. The album ...

This isn't my first experience with Ten Years After. I have a couple of the band's earlier albums, Cricklewood Green and Ssssh and they were decent early '70s heavy blue rock albums, that featured a lot of meandering jam oriented tracks, and like a lot of bands they were on a treadmill cranking out albums like sausages. Two albums a year in 1969 and 1970 before dropping arguably their most well known album in 1971, A Space in Time . This was the album with "I'd Love to Change the World" a song that did better in Canada than it did in the US when it was first released, although over the years the song has become a staple of classic rock radio. This was the album I really wanted to find, so finding it was a real treat. This was still Ten Years After, rooted in their amped up 12 bar blues, but this time out the band had expanded their colour palate and featured strings and acoustic guitars interwoven with Alvin's blistering fretwork. Six albums in and the ban...

A few nuggets here. The Alice Cooper record has seen better days, but I've found some really cool stuff too. Besides it's all for a good cause. Alice Cooper - Love it to Death (1971) Visions: Mission Andromeda (1987) The Records - The Records (1979) Trooper - Money Talks (1982) Eddie Schwartz - No Refuge (1981) Alice Cooper - Love it to Death (1971) While Billion Dollar Babies was my jam, and I love that album, it never really spurred me to become an obsessive fan. I mean don't get me wrong, when I heard his stuff I never turned it off, and when in the mid '80s he had a career resurgence I was there.  A while back I walked into a shop, and out front was a box that was full of records with a sign saying FREE . Well, it was worth a look. There sandwiched in between an old Irish Rovers record (that I had already. Don't judge me) and some obscure soundtrack was a pretty beat up copy of Love it to Death. "Well what have we here?" I slip the record out, and i...

Aqualung, released in 1971, was the band's fourth album. Jethro Tull would release an album a year from 1968 to 1980, and then they'd slow down a little, but keep dropping albums through the '90s. I started my journey with Jethro Tull's Crest of a Knave , that gave the band an odd late career resurgence. I know that record gets shit on for being the fly in the ointment in Metallica's spooge party back in '89. Considering they had been releasing albums pretty consistently since 1968 it wasn't like they came out of nowhere. Were they metal? No, but they were rock enough to warrant being considered "hard rock" by the voting members. Back to Aqualung , the year was 1971, and with the burgeoning Jesus movement Jethro Tull would take a different tact and pose a different set of philosophical questions relating to the nature of God and human nature and which came first the chicken or the egg. Or in this case to paraphrase AC/DC "Who Made Who?"...

Emerson, Lake & Palmer were never a band I knew a lot about. Like most people I could name at least one song, maybe two depending on the season. It would be either, "Lucky Man" or "I Believe in Father Christmas" but other than that I was more aware of a couple of their album covers. Tarkus was cool and Brain Salad Surgery was mind melting. The first couple of times through ELP all I could think was "Man, this is different." Not bad, just different. Challenging in a good way, and when I sit and play this I start on one side and go through to the payoff that concludes the record, "Lucky Man." While I am not an aficionado of all things progressive rock, I have more than a passing appreciation for complex well thought out musical passages. The early '70s was a strange and wonderful incubator for a lot of really odd ball bands who managed to find an audience that was moving past the psychedelic meandering jam bands and was looking for musical...

This is an album I have never heard. Oh I know a few songs from Teaser and the Firecat , I didn't just fall off the turnip truck. I wasn't even a tween when this dropped, but I remember being moved by "Morning Has Broken" and I found it weird the first time we sang it in church. I had no point of reference to associate a song I liked on the radio with a song a bunch of old people were singing in unison at church. So I just did what kids do, I accepted it and moved on. Then a couple years later Sister Janet Mead score big with "The Lord's Prayer" bringing into vogue for about ten minutes the singing nun armed with a classical guitar. It was a thing. Just watch the movie Airplane, it was still reverberating a few years later. It was perplexing but I just took it in stride. I wasn't phased when Jesus Christ Superstar made Jesus mainstream. Like a young Larry Norman sang, "This time last year, people didn't wanna hear. They looked at Jesus from...

Hey look at this, it's the last Sunday in April and I'm three months in and so far so good.  If I stop now I have a trilogy. However, I am really going for a decalogy, mainly to help wash the taste of L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth dekalogy (should have been spelled drek-alogy) that I actually read. ALL TEN BOOKS.  This time around I've got four treasures I found for a buck, and a Toto album I've bought three times now. I'd never heard of Patrick Juvet before, and I'd not heard the Grand Fund Railroad album so it was fun being able to expose myself to new things. Yeah, I just wanted to say expose myself in a sentence. Sorry. Look, I'm not proud of myself, but I also accept the things I cannot change. Although the ability to proof read and edit are things I should work on.  Five for Fighting No.3 ZZ Top - Afterburner (1985) Patrick Juvet - Got a Feeling (1978) Grand Funk Railroad - Survival (1971) Chilliwack - Segue (1983) Toto - Isolation (1984) ZZ ...

It's not often a classic pops up in the dollar bin. The last surprise that was this big was Tattoo You by the Stones, and that album was in amazing shape including the insert. Part of me wasn't to concerned so long as the big songs were playable. Besides I have the 2003 deluxe edition and that is almost two and a half hours of stuff - much of it I've maybe heard once while it played in the background. Yeah, sad. Anyway here was the 1980 MCA re-issue (at first this confused me as I thought this was an old record - I mean it is old, but older than the date suggested), and someone must have been having a bad day and dragged the needle across the first side. I could feel it with my finger nail so I figured best case was a repeating pop for a few songs. Thankfully "Baba O'Riley" was fairly clean, and frankly on the first side that's all that mattered to me. The songs still sound pretty fresh and while still being very much of their time. When I think of some o...

Christmas with Glen Campbell and The Hollywood Pops Orchestra with The Voices of Christmas there's a mouthful. This is a new to me record, so I'll have to take a listen through to get myself oriented to what's going on. Another of my Christmas bin treasures. This was in reasonable shape, but has a couple of ticks, mainly on the first side - but nothing skips and that's really all that matters. I'm finding with a lot of these older Christmas albums that there is no date on the jacket or the record. So it's off to the internet to try and date this "timeless" release. According to the pretty reliable discogs.com this was released in 1971, and that makes sense. The production with the strings is pure shrill cheese, and I wonder if this was a contractual obligation album, as there's very little out there on this one. Ah, I've just gone through the first side and I think I get the long title now. There are five songs here by Glen Campbell, and a few...