Old Enough to Forget

1989 rock was a live and well. Seemingly out of nowhere Alannah Myles was suddenly everywhere, and propelled by "Black Velvet" she became an overnight sensation that took over a decade of hard work to achieve. I may as well get right to the elephant in the room right off the bat. "Black Velvet" is still an amazing song. Considering that musically the song is essentially a generic vamp on a bass driven 12 bar blues shuffle the song is immediately identifiable. It was also played to death and while it never got old, it sure did get overplayed. It also became the high water mark that everything else would be measured by. Fair or not, that's how things go sometimes. Hair metal and an abundance of musical excess and fret shredding was the flavour of the day, and Alannah Myles managed to be of the times but a step removed at the same time. The guitar work of Bob Bartolucci, who I remembered from the GNP album (also from 1989, I don't remember which came first), an...

I was ten years old when I first heard Ian Thomas' "Painted Ladies" on my AM radio. I still really like the song, and throughout the 70s, he was the consummate singer-songwriter. Even his 1979 song "Pilot," which was equal parts irritating and cool with its quirky recorder (yes, a recorder) runs, was a song I kind of liked, but it wasn't a song I was too fond of. However, when Ian performed it on SCTV with Bob and Doug (his brother Dave), it took on a second life. I knew of Ian Thomas from many of his own songs, but also from the various covers of his songs by other artists, from Santana to Chicago. But it was Manfred Mann's Earth Band's retooling of "The Runner" that really floated my boat (oddly, I never did pick up a copy, and it is still on my list of things to look for one day). Fast forward to the summer of 1983, and I'm lining up to see the Strange Brew movie, and in the opening credits, Ian Thomas delivers the title ...