Old Enough to Forget

When I was a kid B.T.O. was synonymous with rock and roll. If there was a bigger, better and more awesome band I wasn't aware of them. The gear everything seemed to rotate around was Randy Bachman, the band's architect, producer, songwriter and occasional singer. Of course this is how I saw it as a twelve year old, who practically lived off Four Wheel Drive , and later Head On . I was of course aware of Not Fragile , how could you not be? I didn't have the album (yet) but the big hits appeared on my various K-Tel records. When Freeways dropped in 1977 I was a sophisticated teenager with slightly more refined tastes, and I was on the fence about getting the album. I had a good friend who had it, and he played it once for me, and the summary judgment was "This is shit." I wouldn't hear the album again for decades. When I found it on CD it was better than I remembered but it wasn't really a Bachman–Turner Overdrive album. There were moments, but it was a Rand...

Yeah, I know I've written about B.T.O. more than once, but dang it, man, these guys were THE SHIT when I was a kid. They were the original monsters of rock for me, and every so often I will go and revisit different albums and take the musical time machine back to the land of nostalgia. I found a nice copy of the debut and figured, why not go back to the beginning and see what the fuss was about? This may have been their debut, but it didn't show up in my collection for a long, long time. I think I first heard the album in its entirety when I got it on CD. The halcyon days for me were those that accompanied the band's bookend releases in 1975: Four Wheel Drive and the Christmas present Head On -  those were my jam. Dang, "Wild Spirit" from Head On should have been as big as anything they'd ever done - even if it was a mono mix, which even as a preteen was perplexing, as I had a stereo. I digress. It's not unusual, in the words of Tom Jones. The first song ...