Old Enough to Forget

For most of us Warren Zevon generally conjures up one song, "Werewolves of London" and that's about as far as it goes. That particular song was one I was very dismissive of back in the day. To me it was a hatchet job that borrowed too much from "Sweet Home Alabama" and tried too hard to be clever. Yeah, fifteen year old me was a pretty harsh critic. I will begrudgingly admit that over the years the song certainly had it's charms, and Warren's unusual voice and writing is oddly engaging. In the mid '80s my old roommate had the record, and I remember playing it quite a few times and I really enjoyed a number of the songs, particularly "Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner" and "Lawyers, Guns And Money" as well as the title track, which was about as dark and twisted as songs come. With the passage of time I'd more or less forget the album, and when Kid Rock's oddly goofy and somehow catchy sampling of bits and pieces of "...

Like an awful lot of people I know Juice Newton from "Angel of the Morning" and it was a catchy song, and bow howdy I do like bells in popular music.Then "Queen of Hearts" was all over the radio. I will admit I like the song a fair too but buying the album never even crossed my mind. Ever. With the passage of time I learned my girlfriend, now my wife, had her '81 album Juice and she was partial to the big songs. So when I found an excellent copy of her Greatest Hits I was pretty stoked and her response wasn't as enthusiastic, but to be fair I think her reaction was due in part to the other dozen or so records in the pile of stuff I'd proudly brought home. To me I felt like a king bearing gifts, to her I was a cat who'd just dropped another dead mouse on the carpet. I'm always perplexed when labels interchangeably market best of collections as greatest hits. I know for sure there were hits on this album, a couple of really big ones, and maybe the...

I have a soft spot for this album. Back in '84 I got this solely based on "Love Will Show Us How" A mini master class in pop perfection. When I lost my records, I replaced this with a CD, and then recently for whatever reason a near perfect record showed up in the dollar bin - so I had to drop the buck.  I know this is probably not the popular opinion, but of the solo efforts from the Fleetwood Mac camp this is the album I like best. Oh sure Lindsey Buckingham released Go Insane in '84 as well, and I really liked the title track, and I appreciated how weird he got, but it wasn't something I pulled out very often - and of course I no longer have it (you never know, that could change one day). Then there was the witchy woman herself, Stevie Nicks, who I will admit had some great songs, but mostly I found her voice irritating. So here we have Christine who must have figured it was time to do a solo effort as well - and no doubt this cost a boatload of money to produc...

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...

Over the last year I've been on a Linda Ronstadt kick. I managed to find several of her albums in the dollar bin that were in fantastic shape, and from there it led to a couple albums by Andrew Gold, and today the bins coughed up Karla Bonoff's 1977 debut. Karla contributed to Linda's release Hasten Down the Wind the year before, as a songwriter and providing backing vocals to two of the three tracks she'd written for the album.  The album itself was in decent shape, the jacket was okay, but sadly there was no insert so who knows what may or may not have been on the liner, but the back cover had a lot of information which I always appreciate. This was an album I was looking forward to hearing as I'd never heard the album or anything by Karla that I can remember, and I wasn't sure what to expect (I had some idea but you never know. There are a lot of great writers that need good singers. J ennifer Warnes comes to mind, who was great with Leonard Cohen songs, any...