Old Enough to Forget

Okay, this one might be a little more pissy than usual. Mainly because I think enough water has passed under the bridge now, and frankly no one reading this will think, "Oh my, thank you. I can save myself the time and skip the album, I'll just stream 'It's in the Way that You Use It.'" Look this is going to be a meanderamble and likely veer wildly of course before it eventually ends. I can save you some time. Here's the score: 4 killers, 6 fillers. Although I only mention three songs in a positive light. Two of them are memorable, the others are good in the moment. Let's call it 4 good songs for the sake of brevity. That's not necessarily bad, if Mister Clapton was a baseball player he'd be the goat.*  August followed a year after Behind the Sun reintroduced Mr. Clapton to the world as a commercially viable artist. The album went platinum primarily on the strength of "Forever Man" a song Phil Collins did not play drums on. Th...

1983 was a weird year. While Culture Club and Duran Duran were taking over the world with their videos, Genesis managed to sneak in under the radar and launch a sneak attack that took everyone by surprise. Okay, maybe not everyone, but it took me by surprise. What I knew about the band would have fit on the head of a pin. A large pin mind you, but other than a couple of songs I'd heard from Duke or Abacab I had never really listened to Genesis. I knew this was the band Phil Collins was in when he wasn't making solo records. You know, the "In the Air Tonight" guy who had the cool drum sound that everyone drummed on the dashboard when the song came on if you were in the car. With respect to this album, the song that first got my attention was "That's All" and it was catchy but didn't really make me want to rush out and buy the record, but I looked forward to hearing it on the radio. It was "Mama" that got me right in the feels. The evil laugh...

The late Rupert Hine was a producer of the highest order who made incredible albums with SAGA, The Fixx, Howard Jones and Eight Seconds to name just a few. I knew he had a solo career that was a bit sporadic, but never heard any of his stuff. He released a trio of albums in the '80s. Starting with this one,  Immunity in '81 then he would drop another in '82 and finally one more in '83 and then he'd take over a decade before releasing his last solo album in 1994. I bought this as a curiosity, and really had no idea what to expect. Sometimes a producers fingerprints are unmistakable and are every where regardless of the act they're working with. Yeah, I'm thinking of David Foster ... although I do have to say The Tubes were the exception to the rule ... but you know what I mean. Rupert Hine's work with other artists was transparent. His style seemed to provide focus to the band he was producing, and he brought out their best work.  Immunity is an odd work....

Released in the fall of 1982, it was probably in the summer of '83 that I first heard the title track. Phil Collins mania hadn't gripped the world ... he was a blip on the horizon - you could see him coming. His distinctive drums were the reason the song grabbed me initially, but it was a killer tune, and Daryl Stuermer's guitar solo was the icing on the cake. Yes, this was the same Frida who was in ABBA, although at the time she seemed to be old as dirt she was probably only 36 or 37 years old. Of course considering I was still in my teens (okay, as late into my teens as you can get) that's a big gap. I bought the album mainly for the title track, but I found there was a lot to like and as a bonus (at least to me) was Jim Rafferty's (brother to Gerry) "I See Red," a song I always really liked. Both Russ Ballard and Rod Argent contributed a song each, with Russ Ballard's "I Know There's Something Going On" being the big song here. There w...

There was a period of time (it was actually pretty short when you look back on it - but at the time it seemed like forever) when Mister Collins was pretty much everywhere. Either with Genesis, or solo, or behind the kit just being a drummer. I saw him with Robert Plant, and there was little fanfare made about it. He first started making inroads with his early solo career - come on, who hasn't played air drums to "In the Air Tonight"? But when Genesis took the world in 1983 with their self-titled monster, it seemed like everyone needed a little more Phil in their lives, and we got our Phil until we were all filled up. No Jacket Required is the album where he and Hugh Padgham fitted all the sonic pieces together and where Phil's now-patented gated-reverb drum-splat sound would practically define the '80s. The song where all of this sonic mayhem manifested itself on a grand scale was the earworm "Sussudio," a song that elicits a pretty strong reaction, bot...