Old Enough to Forget

In 1989 rock was alive and well. Seemingly out of nowhere Alannah Myles was suddenly everywhere, and propelled by "Black Velvet" she became an overnight sensation that took over a decade of hard work to achieve. I may as well get right to the elephant in the room right off the bat. "Black Velvet" is still an amazing song. Considering that musically the song is essentially a generic vamp on a bass-driven 12-bar blues shuffle, the song is immediately identifiable. It was also played to death and while it never got old, it sure did get overplayed. It also became the high water mark that everything else would be measured by. Fair or not, that's how things go sometimes. Hair metal and an abundance of musical excess and fret shredding was the flavour of the day, and Alannah Myles managed to be of the times but a step removed at the same time. The guitar work of Bob Bartolucci, who I remembered from the GNP album (also from 1989, I don't remember which came first),...

Eddie Schwartz to me will always be the guy who just killed it, absolutely crushed it with "Special Girl," a song that still makes the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. The band America also released a version of the song in 1984, and while it's musically a pretty close cover, the vocals don't get anywhere close to conveying the emotional gut punch Eddie delivers. Meat Loaf would also cover the song on his 1986 album Blind Before I Stop , and honestly it's not bad, but again it seemed to miss the mark. This was also the album where Meat Loaf butchered Billy Rankin's "Burning Down," which was a weird cover that also completely missed the point of the original. I'm actually getting a bit ahead of myself, and while "Special Girl" is the song I most closely associate with Mr. Schwartz, it was part of an album that really deserved more recognition than it received. I do remember hearing "Strike" on the radio a couple of...