Old Enough to Forget

I'd been trying to find Rock N' Roll Nights for a few years, and I finally gave up and ordered this from overseas. Go figure, sometimes what you want is indeed more pressing than what you need. After years on the treadmill cranking out albums, this was the end of the line. Well - the end of the line as far as being a relevant commercial enterprise. Which isn't actually true either. The band was already running on fumes, and was on life support after Randy's departure following the disappointing Freeways in 1977 (who says you can't mix metaphors?). When Randy left, that was officially the end of Bachman–Turner Overdrive. Still, the band had been a veritable machine, running on fumes or not, and you gotta feed the machine so for a couple of years the remaining members tried to keep B.T.O. rolling down the highway. I'll freely admit that as a kid I was completely bullish on Bachman–Turner Overdrive - but I also stopped paying attention after Head On . Oh I still...

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 ...

I know this is my second post about BTO, but this was a cool find for me. I had mentioned I had been looking for the B.T.O. Japan Tour album for years, and last fall my wife and I were hanging around Commercial Drive checking out the shops. She shopped for clothes, and I stood around looking lost for the most part. It was a beautiful fall day, and as we made our way along the Drive, there on the corner was a small stall with a guy selling records. They were between five and ten bucks, which was a little high considering the condition of some of the records, but as I'd been forced to endure a few clothing shops, I felt justified in stopping to see what was there. There were quite a few records I wanted, but I already had them on CD, and the general agreement was that if I had it already, I didn't need to get it again. I've mostly stayed true to this, as frankly I spent a lot of money buying discs to replace the snap, crackle, and pop of my old record collection. There were ...

Growing up a good Canadian kid, there was no band bigger or more influential than Bachman-Turner Overdrive. I mean, when you're a kid, anything that seems to last more than a week is a long time. Heck, if you can like something for more than a school year, it's an eternity. Seriously, as I got older I started confusing events that happened last year with things that happened a decade ago. But kid years? Yeah, they're like dog years. Here I was listening to the radio as a kid, rocking out to "Let It Ride," and a year later sitting on the floor listening to a special program on the radio playing Not Fragile and loving "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet." Then in 1975 they dropped Four Wheel Drive , which would be the first record I bought with my own money. It was a dilemma too. My older cousins were playing Led Zeppelin, KISS, Nazareth, and Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies . When I told them I wanted to get Four Wheel Drive , they weren't as...