Old Enough to Forget

If there was an artist I actively despised as a kid, it was Leo Sayer. "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing" was just plain stupid, and that horrific Frankie Valli falsetto was too much. I always thought he looked like a diminutive version of Robin Williams as Mork flying through the air. Which just shows how time blurs things, as Mork & Mindy wouldn't debut for another two years or so after this album came out ... but I remember the cover, and the blurring of time certainly hasn't helped. I always thought of Leo Sayer as being huge in the disco era, and that songs like the aforementioned dancing song and the ballad "When I Need You" were later than this ... apparently I was wrong. Funny that. I have memories of Leo Sayer on those late-night music shows, and I guess it just all sort of ran together. Anyway, back to my active dislike of all things Leo Sayer. It really wasn't based on anything other than he wasn't rock, and I didn't like how he sang...

As a kid I was enamoured with the movie Yellow Submarine . I don't remember the year I first saw it on our tiny black and white television, it was maybe 1969 or 1970. My parents were having a party and I got to stay up late and as long as I wasn't seen or heard I could do what I wanted. I'm not sure if this was the night I watched Hatori! with John Wayne and Red Buttons (tell me again about the monkeys ...) and Yellow Submarine , but those two movies are intertwined in my memory as a double feature. I always loved the songs Ringo sang. It was 1973 and Ringo was having his day in the sun. Songs like "Photograph" and "Oh My My" were a big deal. Even though "You're Sixteen" was huge, it was always a little creepy sounding even to my ten year old ears. Go figure. Over the years I maintained my soft spot for Ringo, although I never got any of his records. I did of course pick up a greatest hits CD, but my fandom never really translated into sal...

Like a lot of casual fans, I'd heard of Harry Nilsson much like I'd heard of Ernest Hemingway. I knew the name more than anything he's actually written. Over the years I knew of a couple of songs, particularly the beautiful "Without You" and, of course, "Everybody's Talkin'" from Midnight Cowboy . He had also covered songs by others, most notably Nilsson Sings Newman , and others would cover his songs, from the Monkees to Three Dog Night. That was it. As a result of this depth of knowledge (sarcasm alert), I had pigeon-holed him into the '70s pop singer slot where soft rock went to die. One of the albums that was on my radar was Nilsson Schmilsson from late 1971. It was the album that had "Without You" and the truly odd "Coconuts," but as fate would have it, the album I found in the dollar bin was his 1972 follow-up, released while his previous album was still on the charts. It was called Son of Schmilsson , so it was p...