Old Enough to Forget

Linda Ronstadt has been one of those wonderful discoveries over the last few years. Get Closer came out in '82 and after her brief foray into new wave that featured a few Elvis Costello songs on her previous album Mad Love she was back to being Linda Ronstadt, and all was right with the world.  Times they were a changin' and Linda was content being herself and she was enough of a presence now that she could be herself and that was enough. For me at the time, Linda Ronstadt was about as far off my radar as you could get. Other than the few songs I knew from the radio she wasn't relevant to me ... at all. It may not have just been me me either, as Get Closer would mark her first album in almost a decade that wouldn't crack the top 5. The album would go gold in the US which is still a pretty solid accomplishment, but she had reached the summit, and no one stays on top forever. Anyway you can read that kind of stuff on Wikipedia, I know I did.  It's about the music, ...

Whoever owned this before me, wrote "Bumpers" in black felt pen on the front of the album, on the back cover, and on both sides the album itself. So yeah, it was a pain in the ass trying to figure out how to remove most of the ink. I was pretty proud of myself, in that I was able to make it hardly visible on the front and back of the jacket. I had a defaced Wishbone Ash album, I applied my newfound knowledge and proceeded to nearly ruin the cover. Anyway, I dropped the dollar because I wanted to get "Cruel to Be Kind" a song I knew from back in the day, and if there was more than one good song it was all bonus. After all, it's not like I have a lot of his stuff. Although I was super close to picking up Rockpile's Seconds of Pleasure when it came out. The only other point of reference was Party of One back in 1990 because I really liked "All Men are Liars" which still cracks me up. Oddly enough the guys he'd form Rockpile with were here suppor...

My wife grew up with her parent's copy of Simple Dreams (which is now part of my collection) so why choose Mad Love for my rambling thoughts? Simple. I wanted to, and it seemed like a good idea. Besides, over this past year I have managed to find an astonishing number of her albums in the dollar bin, and it has been an absolute joy listening to them for the first time and discovering an artist I knew only from the killer guitar solo from "You're no Good" - from there it led to me getting albums by Andrew Gold and Karla Bonoff. It's weird looking back now and realizing that in 1980 Linda was still only in her early 30s and had been releasing albums for over a decade. A decade in kid years from a developmental perspective is kind of like measuring things in dog years. In other words when she released Mad Love she had been around FOR-EVVVVVER. Of course looking at it now, it was a blink of an eye. When I saw this one in the bin I scanned the back cover, which had s...