Old Enough to Forget

By 1981 The Cars had released four albums in four years. When they dropped Shake It Up late in '81 the band suddenly had a top 10 hit with "Shake It Up" an infectious earworm that contained yet another brilliant Elliot Easton guitar solo. While the other singles from the album that dropped throughout 1982 didn't get as much traction the album still went double platinum and the song "Since You're Gone" is one of my favourite songs by the band ... ever. Roy Thomas Baker was again in the producer's chair and with Shake It Up the band crafted a collection of tightly packed new wave pop songs. It was more of the same, but different - but not as different as the songs on the previous album Panorama . It's always fun reading old reviews, and apparently the reviewer (Alan Niester) with the Globe and Mail back in '81 wrote. "Ric Ocasek and the boys have produced an understated and decidedly underwhelming package that makes no attempt to deviate...

Foreigner was one of those bands people loved to dump on. They were a commercial behemoth, and the band had been on a killer run releasing one multiple platinum album after another since their debut in '77.  Apparently their previous albu m Head Games  from '79 had reportedly "under performed" compared to Double Vision. Which doesn't make any sense, for goodness sake the album has gone on to sell over 5,000,000 copies in the States alone ... sure Double Vision sold a couple million more than that south of the border but  Head Games was hardly a failure. Whatever the reason the band would take some time and literally regroup. They'd jettison Ian McDonald (keyboards, guitars, backing vocals) and Al Greenwood (keyboards) and emerge as a lean mean hit making machine. Depending on where you got on the wagon reactions to 4 were a little split. For me, I'd always liked the songs I heard on the radio, but my first album was Head Games , and that was a transitio...