Old Enough to Forget

Hold Out came after a three year hiatus, and it would set the pattern for his releases through the '80s. After the success of Running on Empty it seemed like an eternity between records but his audience was waiting patiently and Hold Out would become his lone number one album on the Billboard charts. The album didn't do as well here in Canada but it would crack the top ten stalling at number six. This was the album I came to a few years later when my friend Steve couldn't stop heaping praise on the record. At the time I was enjoying Lawyers in Love and I did like the songs I'd heard on the radio. Over the years I've had this album on vinyl, then CD and now again on vinyl. Why get it again? It was on sale ... and I'm a sucker ... and despite some pithy comments to come, I really liked this album. It's always fun going back and reading up on things that are decades old and discovering the vitriol some artists are blessed with from the various critics. Jackso...

Linda Ronstadt has been one of those wonderful discoveries over the last few years. Get Closer came out in '82 and after her brief foray into new wave that featured a few Elvis Costello songs on her previous album Mad Love she was back to being Linda Ronstadt, and all was right with the world.  Times they were a changin' and Linda was content being herself and she was enough of a presence now that she could be herself and that was enough. For me at the time, Linda Ronstadt was about as far off my radar as you could get. Other than the few songs I knew from the radio she wasn't relevant to me ... at all. It may not have just been me me either, as Get Closer would mark her first album in almost a decade that wouldn't crack the top 5. The album would go gold in the US which is still a pretty solid accomplishment, but she had reached the summit, and no one stays on top forever. Anyway you can read that kind of stuff on Wikipedia, I know I did.  It's about the music, ...

For most of us Warren Zevon generally conjures up one song, "Werewolves of London" and that's about as far as it goes. That particular song was one I was very dismissive of back in the day. To me it was a hatchet job that borrowed too much from "Sweet Home Alabama" and tried too hard to be clever. Yeah, fifteen year old me was a pretty harsh critic. I will begrudgingly admit that over the years the song certainly had it's charms, and Warren's unusual voice and writing is oddly engaging. In the mid '80s my old roommate had the record, and I remember playing it quite a few times and I really enjoyed a number of the songs, particularly "Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner" and "Lawyers, Guns And Money" as well as the title track, which was about as dark and twisted as songs come. With the passage of time I'd more or less forget the album, and when Kid Rock's oddly goofy and somehow catchy sampling of bits and pieces of "...

I'll admit that this kind of music wasn't my cup of tea back when I was a teenager. It was generally balls to the wall rock or nothing ... unless it was a power ballad. Of course even back in '78 you'd have had to be living under a rock, with a rock on top of it not to have heard Nicolette's version of "Lotta Love" when it came out. It was a slick syrupy masterclass in soft rock ... the song was a big deal and it pulled the album along with it, peaking at #15 in the States, and #1 here in Canada. The album would go gold in both markets. It was a strong debut. This was all I knew about Nicolette Larson. I was okay with that. Then a couple of years ago right around the time Eddie Van Halen passed away there was a rash of Edward stories. There were more than a few about Ed's turn as soloist on Michael Jackson's "Beat It" and people were talking about it like it was the only time Eddie had played outside of Van Halen. I knew he had been on ot...

Coming in on the heels of Journey's 1983 album Frontiers , Steve Perry struck out on his own and released his solo effort Street Talk in 1984. To say Journey was a big deal during this period is an understatement. The band had been on an upward trajectory, and while Frontiers didn't perform as well as their 1981 release Escape , it was still a big deal. I suspect there was a lot of internal pressure within the Journey camp as to what was next so members of the band decided to strike out on their own. Neil Schon had previously released a pair of albums with Jan Hammer, and in '84 he teamed up with Sammy Hagar and released Through the Fire as HSAS (Hagar Schon Aaronson Shrieve). I had them all on vinyl, and frankly I can't remember much about them.  It was Steve though, who as the voice of Journey had the best shot at solo success, and with Street Talk , he dropped an album containing ten polished pop songs, that were closer to the generic adult contemporary artists o...

My wife grew up with her parent's copy of Simple Dreams (which is now part of my collection) so why choose Mad Love for my rambling thoughts? Simple. I wanted to, and it seemed like a good idea. Besides, over this past year I have managed to find an astonishing number of her albums in the dollar bin, and it has been an absolute joy listening to them for the first time and discovering an artist I knew only from the killer guitar solo from "You're no Good" - from there it led to me getting albums by Andrew Gold and Karla Bonoff. It's weird looking back now and realizing that in 1980 Linda was still only in her early 30s and had been releasing albums for over a decade. A decade in kid years from a developmental perspective is kind of like measuring things in dog years. In other words when she released Mad Love she had been around FOR-EVVVVVER. Of course looking at it now, it was a blink of an eye. When I saw this one in the bin I scanned the back cover, which had s...