Old Enough to Forget

This was the first album I bought by 38 Special. I had no idea that "Hold on Loosely" was a big deal, I just knew that the song was amazing. We had limited radio when I was a kid up north, and unless it was word of mouth or something I'd read about when browsing the magazines I was pretty sheltered. When Special Forces dropped in '82 I snapped it up. Right off the bat the band was kicking in the door and "Caught Up in You" became my second favourite song by the band. The rest of the album then sort settled into a groove as one decent but not especially memorable song after another played. Some of the songs were goofy, "Back Door Stranger" probably isn't a thinly veiled play on words. If it was it was way more subtle than Deep Purple was when they were singing about knocking on a back door. You can take the 12 year old out a teenager, but you can't take a 12 year old out of a teenager. No that wasn't a typo. Now while I'm being casua...

I was thinking about bands with two drummers (mainly because I'd just finished listening to Dickey Betts & Great Southern) and 38 Special popped to mind. It was them or Adam Ant, and at the moment (because, well, you never know) I don't have any Adam Ant. So it was 38 Special, and as I'd recently found a mint copy of Tour de Force I figured this was worth a spin and a reminisce. My first introduction to the band was through a cassette copy of Wild-Eyed Southern Boys my little sister was given by someone she babysat for ... I think that's where it came from ... who knows maybe she stole it. As she didn't have a cassette player and I did, I "borrowed" it - forever (until I lost it). I seldom made it past the first song - "Hold on Loosely" blew my mind, and it didn't take long for me to get the triptych of releases from 1981 through 1983. Each album had something special, but honestly trying to remember any of the deeper album cuts eludes m...

I'd never really thought of The Atlanta Rhythm Section (ARS) as a southern rock band. I'd heard a couple of their hits, but never really associated those songs with the band, they were just memorable songs on the radio. A while back I was reading up on southern rock bands and there was ARS mentioned on the same page as Lynyrd Skynyrd, Molly Hatchet, The Outlaws, and even .38 Special (who deserved more love than they got). I thought, "Am I missing something here? Aren't these the "So Into You" and "Imaginary Lover" dudes? That's soft rock." Still, I squirrelled the band away into my mental list of things to watch for because now I was curious. You may be wondering, "Hey, with all the streaming stuff, or even on YouTube why don't you just look?" My answer is simple. I don't want to. There aren't a lot of surprises out there, and I've got so much stuff in my library already I like discovering stuff, even if it is just...