Old Enough to Forget

This is one of the albums I saved from a box of rather suspect records my mother in law found in the crawl space. It seems that no one was entirely sure of the origins of the box, but it was an eclectic mess of audible bric-a-brac. Mixed in with a very beat up Supremes double album (that couldn't be salvaged) were a few things that looked like fun. None more so than this Freddy Fender record. "Wasted Days & Wasted Nights" was a song I remembered, but the version on this collection likely dates back to the original 1959 recording. It's hard to tell as the credits are sketchy - well, non-existent. There's a certain charm to this one and it's rough and spotty in places but the bones of the song that he re-recorded to greater fanfare in 1975, the same year this collection was released by Pickwick, the king of budget opportunistic hits packages. I should have known it would sound like dogshit, especially with the little blurb on the top left on the back cover: ...

Number thirteen and still plugging away. I have notice though that I'm not keeping with the theme as consistently as I had expected. The intent of dropping a bunch of mini blurbs was to save me time and to allow me to put down some thoughts on albums without having to go too deep. You know, "Oh I liked this one." that sort of thing. But nope. My balloon is apparently very much full of hot air. Some of these are longer and I suppose I could have just blown a little more air into them and released them on their own. But I didn't, still I did get in a couple of short ones, so I'll take it as a win. Welcome to the summer baby. Get a drink, pull up a chair and let's waste so time shall we? Steppenwolf - Steppenwolf (1968) Max Webster - Live Magnetic Air (1979) Ian Thomas - Long Long Way (1974) The Grass Roots - Golden Grass: Their Greatest Hits (1968) Mel Tillis - Night Train to Memphis (1967) Steppenwolf - Steppenwolf (1968) Steppenwolf is one of those bands who...

Jesse Crawford and his Organ & Chimes for Christmas fall squarely into a generation divide that pretty much generates one of two responses: "What the hell is this?" or, "Oooh, this sounds like what church sounded like at Christmas." For those who opt for the first, you may as well stop as this will not get any better. As to the second option, let's be honest those who think this sounds like church likely only ever saw the inside of a church through old movies. For me, I'm sort of caught in a weird place where I can't listen to this and not conjure up images of the nude organ player from Monty Python or insert a terribly inappropriate voice over to the music that in my head sounds like a southern baptist preacher with a lisp who sounds a bit like Peter Lorre mixed with Ernest P. Worrell.  However, then there are times I'll feel warmly nostalgic and remember the midnight Christmas Eve services from my childhood where before the service the organis...

White Christmas was a pretty hard album to date - there doesn't seem to be a lot of good information on it, but the nearest I can figure is Capitol licensed this out to Pickwick and they packaged it up and released it in 1970. It's a compilation likely taken from some of Jackie Gleason's prior holiday releases, and from what I've read about the budget re-issues is less is more, but most of the time, just less.  This was one of the many Christmas albums I snapped up from the dollar bin, and this cleaned up amazingly well. It's nearly perfect, what a score. Here we have The Great One (who was the great one long before old 99 laced 'em up) pulling out all of his lush strings and easy listening magic and applying his touch to nine holiday classics. I'll admit, this was never my favourite style of music, but there is a certain nostalgic charm to this stuff - in small doses, and I can deal with a short collection of relaxing and "happy" strings. It'...