Old Enough to Forget

Ironhorse was Randy's first band project since leaving Bachman Turner Overdrive in 1977. It was released in '79 coming a year after Randy Bachman had released his solo album Survivor . An album I bought, and tried super hard to like. It had a great cover though. In '79 BTO dropped their last album Rock n' Roll Nights an album I saw many times over the years and never bothered to pick up. I'm looking for it now, sigh. I opted to pick up Ironhorse, because I had heard "Sweet Lui-Luise" a grand total of one time on the radio, and I was hooked. This was classic Randy, and I was exited to hear what else was buried in the grooves.  Mostly I was disappointed. That's how I remember it. Let's spin this and see what shakes out. The band here was Randy on vocals and guitar, with Tom Sparks on vocals and guitar. The rhythm section was ace session played Mike Baird and bassist John Pierce. It's hard to get a read on whether this was a "real" ba...

I meant to pull out my copy of Hot Shots , but as I had recently found a couple of Trooper albums I'd not heard (which outside of their greatest hits album was pretty much everything in their catalogue) I figured why not put on something that was new to me.  It was either Money Talks , or Flying Colors , as there were a couple of songs I remembered from Flying Colors , so Flying Colors it was. Aren't you glad you get to get a little peek into my decision making process? I've not heard the album so it's the deeper tracks here I'm curious about, particularly the Frank Ludwig compositions. Frank had the unenviable position of being a decent writer and a good singer in a band where Ra was a great singer, and the songwriting team of Ra McGuire and Brian Smith were the backbone of the band. This I'm sure was a pretty sore spot, and it's not especially helpful or sporting for me to sit here and stir up the embers of what is now pretty ancient history. When Frank...

Growing up the second biggest thing in my life was comics. My dad had some very early MAD magazines among his collection of books. I would end up with a lot of the magazines and dozens of paperbacks of my own as time went on. I loved Don Martin, but when it came to the parodies for movies or TV, there were two names that were above all others: Mort Drucker and Jack Davis. A couple of years after Burton Cummings had left the band to pursue his solo career RCA put together yet another greatest hits collection. Considering the first best of collection had gone platinum in Canada, and gold in the US back in 1971, and the second collection in 1973 went gold in Canada wasn't it about time for another one? After all Burton was riding high in 1977 with his double platinum My Own Way to Rock, but that success didn't seem to help this one too much. It did crack the Billboard 200, but I guess people already had enough recycled Guess Who albums. To me though, this is the album I remember a...

Yeah I know I've written about B.T.O more than once, but dang it man these guys were THE SHIT when I was a kid. They were the original monsters of rock for me, and every so often I will go and revisit different albums and take the musical time machine back to the land of nostalgia. I found a nice copy of the debut and figured why not go back to the beginning and see what the fuss was about? This may have been their debut but it didn't show up in my collection for a long, long time. I think I first heard the album in its entirety when I got it on CD. The halcyon days for me were those that accompanied the band's bookend releases in 1975: Four Wheel Drive , and the Christmas present Head On - those were my jam. Dang, "Wild Spirit" from Head On should have been as big as anything they'd ever done - even if it was a mono mix, which even as a preteen was perplexing as I had a stereo.  I digress. It's not unusual, in the words of Tom Jones. The first song I re...

I know this is my second post about BTO, but this was a cool find for me. I had mentioned I had been looking for the B.T.O. Japan Tour album for years, and last fall my wife and I were hanging around Commercial Drive checking out the shops. She shopped for clothes and I stood around looking lost for the most part. It was a beautiful fall day, and as we made our way along the drive there on the corner was a small stall with a guy selling records. They were between five and ten bucks, which was a little high considering the condition of some of the records, but as I'd been forced to endure a few clothing shops I felt justified in stopping to see what was there. There were quite a few records I wanted, but I already had them on CD, and the general agreement was if I had it already I didn't need to get it again. I've generally stayed true to this, as frankly I spent a lot of money buying discs to replace the snap crackle and pop of my old record collection. There were three re...

Many years ago I recall hearing a guy on the radio describe the song "Worlds Away" as Vancouver's unofficial anthem. A bit of a stretch, but my goodness it is an awesome song. Back in 1982 the trio of Drew Arnott, Darryl Kromm and Paul Iverson (an amazing guitar tech and luthier by the way) released their debut album Worlds Away. I remember hearing "She Controls Me" and thinking that was a really cool song. At the time I didn't get the album, but with a name like Strange Advance they were pretty memorable, and I would buy everything they ever released in real time, except that first album, unlike Pokemon, you really can't catch 'em all - but I did catch 'em all, including a long play for "Love Games" that I since lost to the ravages of time and poor drainage in the crawlspace. In 1985 when Strange Advance released 2WO where once there were three, it was now just Drew and Darryl (they did add a whole band, including a real live drummer f...

Growing up a good Canadian kid, there was no band bigger or more influential than Bachman Turner Overdrive. I mean when you're a kid anything that seems to last more than a week is a long time. Heck if you can like something for more than a school year it's an eternity. I mean seriously as I got older I confuse events that happened last year, with things that happened a decade ago. But kid years? Yeah, they're like dog years - here I was listening to the radio as a kid rocking out to "Let it Ride" and a year later sitting on the floor listening to a special program on the radio playing the Not Fragile and loving "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" then in 1975 they dropped Four Wheel Drive , which would be the first record I bought with my own money. It was a dilemma too. My older cousins were playing Led Zeppelin, KISS, Nazareth, and Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies - when I told them I wanted to get Four Wheel Drive they weren't as enthu...