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Showing posts with the label Billy Rankin

Gary O' - Strange Behavior

Strange Behavior is an album I remember fondly and for many years I looked for it on CD - I never did find a copy. When I set up my old system in the basement, this was one of the first records I played (to be fair, it's not like I had a lot of vinyl left to choose from, but what I had left was special, at least to me). I could picture Gary standing there playing his Roland G-707 in a sheepskin collared bomber jacket - he was the epitome of cool. In short I was having a great time reminiscing. I'm playing this now and partway through the first side the little things that irritated me back then, weren't as pronounced now. I'm a sucker for hi-hat work, and a good drummer, sure the Simmons kits in the early 80s had a sound that defined the decade, but in terms of any accentuating hardware was practically non-existent here. The result on Strange Behavior is a driving beat without any accoutrements so to speak, although here and there buried in the mix you can hear a symbo...

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...