Old Enough to Forget

Here we go this month's Stylus Over Substance Volume 15. Good lord, if each volume contains five little incomprehensible blurbs, that means this year I've gacked out seventy five of these little literary turds. Man, I'm kind of proud of myself. I suppose I've gotten a little lazier with this, mainly because after a couple of years I've realized that Blogger is probably the worst platform I could have chosen. Few of my pages get indexed, and essentially I am doing this for an audience of one most of the time. Me.  Which is honestly okay, I do this for me because I enjoy it, and every so often something I write makes me giggle or smile. Which is good enough. Besides, this is all part of intentionally listening to the music I have. It may not always be good, or great, but it's always an adventure and I often have no idea where I'm going until I get there. With that here's another five carefully curated random selections. Jefferson Starship - Modern Times (...

Back in '85 Robert Plant was staging a killer second act, and it must have felt like a kick in the nuts to Jimmy Page, the genius producer, player and arranger from all those classic Led Zeppelin albums, that he was relegated to the remainder bin. Death Wish II hardly counts as a career jump start. Surely there as a way to become a force to be reckoned with, or at least be relevant. First he needed to pull together a band. Paul Rodgers, a singer who was practically the blueprint for how to be a rock vocalist apparently needed a job. Chris Slade a drummer who had played with everyone from Tom Jones to Manfred Mann signed on. Rounding out the band was new kid Tony Franklin on bass who was literally just a kid when the other guys were out slogging it out. There was some really awesome music coming out in '85 and then there were some odd ducks. The Firm was one of those weird anomalies that looked like a duck, quacked like a duck and two of the members used to be on Swan Song rec...

Hailed as one of the greatest rock and roll albums ever, Led Zeppelin II would peak at number one on most charts around the world when it was released, and would go on to sell more than 12,000,000 copies in the US and just shy of a million here in Canada. My earliest memories are hearing this constantly on my cousin's record player. "Whole Lotta Love" would be a confusing song to me for years and years as I had no idea Robert Plant wasn't saying, "You need Kool-Aid." Make no mistake it was an awesome song, but it was too weird for me at the same time. It didn't help that when Houses of the Holy came out the only song I heard on the radio was "D'yer Mak'er" a song that to this day makes me throw up a little in my mouth when I hear it. The cover was cool though, and my cousin's had it tacked to their bedroom wall. My cousin's were cool. When the band released In Through the Out Door in 1979 it was a perplexing record, as "...