Old Enough to Forget

Time for another edition of A Streaming Pile of Hit - where you put the "s" in hit is up to you.  Not sure why I've been going back to the old CCM stuff that I was particularly enamoured with back in the day. Rick Cua had been playing bass in The Outlaws, most notably on a coupe of their later albums: Ghost Riders (1980)  and Los Hombres Malo (1982) and when he dropped Koo'-ah in 1982 I was really looking forward to hearing it. It's weird that this is listed as being from 1985 ... I can't make heads or tails out of where the dates come from. After all both Hughie Thomasson, Billy Jones as well as Freddie Salem from The Outlaws were playing guitar on the album (and killing it by the way), and former Wings drummer Joe English was featured on several tracks. If nothing else there was some pedigree on the album. The songs though were mostly middle of the road, with a little extra punch here and there. I remember wanting to like this more than I did. The songs ...

I know this is likely sacrilege to hard core fans, but this is where I started with the band. "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky" was the song that hooked me. It hooked me good. I think I got the album in late 1981, I know it was about a year before Rick Cua released his first solo album and that was in '82. The same year Outlaws would release Los Hombres Malo - the last album I'd get by the band for decades. I did hear "Green Grass & High Tides" on the radio - once back in the early '80s when they one of the local radio stations dedicated a weekend to the 100 best guitar solos of all time. I remember it being a pretty cool song but honestly it just felt like a retread of "Free Bird" and frankly, that song never did much for me, so any kissing cousins by default didn't do much for me by extension. That was then. But back to my first blush with Outlaws, and frankly it as a good one, even if I wasn't sure what to make of the weird balance be...