Old Enough to Forget

My introduction to Dwight Twilley came back in '84 when I first heard the single "Girls" on the radio. It was one of those albums that I remember still remember fondly. There was no internet and finding anything out about people was hit and miss depending on what you could suss from RollingStone, and later on Spin Magazine was cool. Really the only way to figure shit out for the average Luddite like me was to just go to the record store and look. At the time I had no idea what the difference was between Dwight Twilley the band, and Dwight Twilley the solo artist. I just figured it was a phase. I did manage to pick up Scuba Divers , and honestly sitting here I can't remember anything about it. Over the last year I'd picked up the two Phil Seymour albums, and I'd actually spent a fair bit of time listening to those, and I'd written up a slightly longer than usual bloggerity thing only to have a connection issue at some point where I save a blank page, and li...

This was an album I have loved for years and years. I had a buddy who I played guitar with once in a while, and we figured were were a band. Just two guitar players who didn't write, or sing, or have a bass player, or drummer. Didn't matter. We were a band. We could play "Don't Look Back" by Boston ... sort of. Which was to us, a pretty big deal. It was Andrew who introduced me to some pretty cool music. He got me into Harlequin and he played me 20/20's song "Yellow Pills" which blew my mind. This was probably early in 1980, because well ... it was. I had been down at the second hand store, probably looking for Robert A. Heinlein books, because I loved his books, and boy were there a lot of them. I would read Clarke and Asimov too, but Heinlein was my jam. When I was there I stumbled upon a cassette copy of 20/20, and I hemmed and hawed and then put it back. I wanted the record ... but there was no record, only a cassette.  Ick. I rode my bike home ....

Apparently Dwight Twilley had been around a while before I picked up Jungle back in '84. "Girls" was a song that got under my skin, not under my skin as in being irritating, I meant under my skin in a good way - yeah I should have just deleted this and started again, but I feel like I should commit to it, and just push through - hopefully this isn't getting under your skin. Having Tom Petty singing along certainly didn't hurt. It was an album chock full of pop goodness, what I would later come to associate with power pop. There was a certain rawness to the songs that hearkened back to the late '70s first wave of new wave. The album was pretty decent, and I always thought "Why You Wanna Break My Heart" should have been a hit, instead we got to hear Tia Carrere butcher the shit out of it in the movie Wayne's World, and then again when they put it again on Wayne's World: Music from the Motion Picture . Sigh, the same soundtrack Gary Wright figur...