Old Enough to Forget

Look at that, six months in, and I'm keeping up with my once a month schedule of dropping five snapshots of albums I've found. This time around it's another mixed bag of goodies, and these are all new to my collection, which is generally a lot of fun. I finally picked up Stan Meissner's debut, and it was a nice score. I also found more Edgar Winter albums, and continue to go down the Rick Derringer rabbit hole - the man was a monster player and while not underrated, he was certainly underappreciated by the masses. Probably my favourite album this time out was finally connecting with Ian Thomas' debut album from 1973. What an incredible album. Yeah, full props to "Painted Ladies" and the alleged drama about the hit that never was, but there is so much more to this Canadian icon. I worry that he will be nothing more than a footnote as time passes, as the majority of his work remains out of print and can only be found by looking for old vinyl. Criminal, I say...

After Molly Hatchet's Flirtin' with Disaster , Danny Joe Brown left the band and ventured out on his own, releasing his one and only solo effort as the Danny Joe Brown Band. The album was produced by the legendary Glyn Johns and mastered by George Marino at Sterling Sound. By all accounts, it would seem that the folks at Epic put some budget behind the band, and if it wasn't for the changing musical landscape, I wonder if this wouldn't have been bigger. 1981 was the changing of the guard. A new decade was underway, and rock was becoming more polished. The hair wasn't going to get longer, but it was going to get bigger. New wave and techno were just on the horizon, and the three-guitar attack of bands like April Wine and Molly Hatchet - who would release their second album, Take No Prisoners , with Danny Joe Brown's replacement Jimmy Farrar later that same year - were on the way out. Although April Wine's Nature of the Beast was huge, so there goes that theo...