Old Enough to Forget

The other day I was listening to GNP's lone album, the one with Robert Bevan on vocals, and it brought to mind the old CBC television show The Raes, featuring Robbie Rae (who was really Robert Bevan, if that wasn't obvious) and Cherrill Rae. Prism guested on the show, and they played a couple of songs from their latest album. It's funny the pointless stuff you remember, but I still can't figure out where I hid my spare keys in case there was an emergency. Armageddon was Prism's third album in three years, and it would become the band's commercial high-water mark. In the summer of 1979, the title track "Armageddon" was the best song I'd heard in a long time and, over the decades, has aged into one of the coolest rock songs ever. It pushed nearly eight minutes, but there were no wasted moments. My summer job in 1979, the year I turned sixteen, was with the forestry service. Along with a youth crew of close to forty other raging, hormonal teenage boys...

Loverboy dropped their sophomore album in the fall of 1981 and cemented their place among Canadian rock royalty. (It's a small club, but a club nonetheless.) The first two songs on their debut are classics, but for years I didn't really connect with the rest of that album. It felt like mostly filler back then - and honestly, it still does, but I'm more forgiving now. However, the follow-up, Get Lucky , was something altogether different. They delivered a masterclass in pop/rock that would polarize kids all over the country into two camps: "This rocks!" / "This sucks!" This was decades before Nickelback would take over the mantle of most divisive band in the land. I will publicly apologize to my old dear friend Steve Little, who loved "Gangs in the Streets." Just after the album came out, a bunch of us were hanging out, and Steve had his little cassette player and seemed to be playing this song and Gary Numan's "Cars" over and over...

Many years ago I recall hearing a guy on the radio describe the song "Worlds Away" as Vancouver's unofficial anthem. A bit of a stretch, but my goodness, it is an awesome song. Back in 1982 the trio of Drew Arnott, Darryl Kromm and Paul Iverson (an amazing guitar tech and luthier, by the way) released their debut album Worlds Away. I remember hearing "She Controls Me" and thinking that was a really cool song. At the time I didn't get the album, but with a name like Strange Advance they were pretty memorable, and I would buy everything they ever released in real time - except that first album. Unlike Pokemon, you really can't catch 'em all - but I did catch 'em all, including a long play for "Love Games" that I have since lost to the ravages of time and poor drainage in the crawlspace. In 1985, when Strange Advance released 2WO , where once there were three, it was now just Drew and Darryl (they did add a whole band, including a real l...