Old Enough to Forget

A few nuggets here. The Alice Cooper record has seen better days, but I've found some really cool stuff too. Besides it's all for a good cause. Alice Cooper - Love it to Death (1971) Visions: Mission Andromeda (1987) The Records - The Records (1979) Trooper - Money Talks (1982) Eddie Schwartz - No Refuge (1981) Alice Cooper - Love it to Death (1971) While Billion Dollar Babies was my jam, and I love that album, it never really spurred me to become an obsessive fan. I mean don't get me wrong, when I heard his stuff I never turned it off, and when in the mid '80s he had a career resurgence I was there.  A while back I walked into a shop, and out front was a box that was full of records with a sign saying FREE . Well, it was worth a look. There sandwiched in between an old Irish Rovers record (that I had already. Don't judge me) and some obscure soundtrack was a pretty beat up copy of Love it to Death. "Well what have we here?" I slip the record out, and i...

Funny I thought I'd written about Pat Benatar before ... apparently not. Well, let's make up for lost time and start with her 1984 album Tropico . This was a gear change and an attempt to sort of stay ahead of the curve. Now to be fair, despite always liking some of the songs I heard on the radio - especially those early hits, I'd never picked anything up by her. Over the last couple of years I've found most of her early efforts, and for the most part they were good albums. It was the combination of Pat's vocals, and Neil's music that really worked - even when it was a cover, like "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" written by Eddie Schwartz. Considering the treadmill the band was on, cranking out an album a year like sausages from 1979 to 1985 and the consistency of the band's output is nothing short of spectacular. Seriously. By 1984 the rock and roll of the late '70s was moving toward big hair, and the early new wave had already crashed to the beac...

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, 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 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 times. ...