Old Enough to Forget

This isn't my first experience with Ten Years After. I have a couple of the band's earlier albums, Cricklewood Green and Ssssh , and they were decent early '70s heavy blue rock albums that featured a lot of meandering jam oriented tracks, and like a lot of bands they were on a treadmill cranking out albums like sausages. Two albums a year in 1969 and 1970 before dropping arguably their most well known album in 1971, A Space in Time . This was the album with "I'd Love to Change the World," a song that did better in Canada than it did in the US when it was first released, although over the years the song has become a staple of classic rock radio on both sides of the border. This was the album I really wanted to find, so finding it was a real treat. This was still Ten Years After, rooted in their amped up 12 bar blues, but this time out the band had expanded their colour palate and featured strings and acoustic guitars interwoven with Alvin's blistering fret...

Ten Years After is one of those bands a lot of people know about, but don't really know much about. At least that was the case for me. Alvin Lee is a name I knew of, but much like the band, I couldn't really name more than a song ... which I'll name later, likely a couple of times. They were kind of like Status Quo in that regard. Yeah, I know I'm a Luddite, but cut me some slack, this stuff was just a tad before my time. I may be getting old, but I'm not that old ... yet. Still, I do like a lot of the late '60s and early to mid-'70s jam bands. As it happened, I was out and about looking around a record store I'd not been to very often. They had a back wall lined with dollar records (I'm cheap). This wall didn't have that much going for it, as it was chock full of showtunes and a lot of questionable stuff (maybe one day I'll buy an Al Jolson album, but I'm kind of on the fence), but in the midst of all this nonsense I managed to score a c...