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 "...

Red Rider seemed to come out of nowhere in 1980 with their song "White Hot." It was a wicked bit of rock magic that felt like something new. A big part of the sound was found in Ken Greer who added his string wizardry to the mix much like the late David Lindley complimented Jackson Browne. Ken's use of lap steel as a rock vehicle was pretty brilliant. When the band dropped their follow up in '81 I remember picking it up before anything had started to catch on the radio. "Lunatic Fringe" melted a lot of faces, and it's kind of hard to underscore how big a deal the song was to so many people. The song was a rock anthem that didn't sound like anything else out there. In short, this one song was worth the price of admission. Did I mention Ken Greer's solo? Excuse me while put my face back on. The rest of the album felt somewhat anti-climactic, but by no means was it a waste of time. It was still very firmly rooted in the '70s and while the '8...

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...

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...