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, ...

I found this a while back, and what caught my eye aside from the cover, which reminded me of an animation cell from Yellow Submarine ... was the list of artists represented on the back cover. Quite a few I knew and there were quite a few I had never heard of. Thankfully on the inside of the gatefold were thirteen mini bios and pictures which I found really entertaining, and it was cool to see so many names I was not familiar with mixed in with artists that went on to become well known. Now this was a dollar bin find, but the jacket was in great shape, and the record was almost as heavy as the 180 gram stuff that gets the kids excited today. However, it was a bit worn, and after a good clean it plays pretty well but there are spots here and there where it sounds like a warm fire crackling in the background ... but honestly it's not that bad. This is more of a time capsule than it is a cohesive mix tape. With the start of a new decade, Capitol wanted to showcase how in tune they wer...

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 "...

I'll admit that this kind of music wasn't my cup of tea back when I was a teenager. It was generally balls to the wall rock or nothing ... unless it was a power ballad. Of course even back in '78 you'd have had to be living under a rock, with a rock on top of it not to have heard Nicolette's version of "Lotta Love" when it came out. It was a slick syrupy masterclass in soft rock ... the song was a big deal and it pulled the album along with it, peaking at #15 in the States, and #1 here in Canada. The album would go gold in both markets. It was a strong debut. This was all I knew about Nicolette Larson. I was okay with that. Then a couple of years ago right around the time Eddie Van Halen passed away there was a rash of Edward stories. There were more than a few about Ed's turn as soloist on Michael Jackson's "Beat It" and people were talking about it like it was the only time Eddie had played outside of Van Halen. I knew he had been on ot...

Looks like I almost got stuck in the '70s this month. Not a bad thing. Considering how much I go on about the '80s and all that, blah blah blah - I have collected a lot of stuff from the decade of my childhood. Which shouldn't really be a surprise considering most of what's available on vinyl is heavily concentrated in the '60s and '70s. When CDs came out I quickly jumped ship ... hence the lack of records from my favoured decade. Still, man there was some great stuff coming out of my childhood, and a lot of new to me stuff that has truly stood the test of time. Let's take a look at this months ... Five For Fighting No. 10 Nick Gilder - Frequency (1979) Joan Armatrading - Armatrading (1976) Ian Thomas - Calabash (1976) Linda Ronstadt - Prisoner in Disguise (1975) The Vapors - Magnetic (1981) Nick Gilder - Frequency (1979) Nick followed up City Nights and "Hot Child in the City" with Frequency and the single that should have been huge "(Yo...

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...

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...