Old Enough to Forget

By 1981 The Cars had released four albums in four years. When they dropped Shake It Up late in '81 the band suddenly had a top 10 hit with "Shake It Up" an infectious earworm that contained yet another brilliant Elliot Easton guitar solo. While the other singles from the album that dropped throughout 1982 didn't get as much traction the album still went double platinum and the song "Since You're Gone" is one of my favourite songs by the band ... ever. Roy Thomas Baker was again in the producer's chair and with Shake It Up the band crafted a collection of tightly packed new wave pop songs. It was more of the same, but different - but not as different as the songs on the previous album Panorama . It's always fun reading old reviews, and apparently the reviewer (Alan Niester) with the Globe and Mail back in '81 wrote. "Ric Ocasek and the boys have produced an understated and decidedly underwhelming package that makes no attempt to deviate...

Courtesy flush for the reader ... I will often plop down a long meaderambling introduction before getting to the point ... or as close as I can generally get. I've read this one, it's pretty incoherent at times. If you may want skip intro if you're inclined. SKIP INTRO When Heavy Metal came out in the summer of '81 it was jaw dropping. I really didn't have many of the magazines because they were a little too out there and were more expensive than the comics I normally bought. The movie though - that was another thing altogether. Besides most of the guys from SCTV seemed to be in there somewhere, and there were cartoon titties. Den would have approved ... and he did (if you know, you know). It was the music though. The first scene opens with a space shuttle with the bay doors open, and an astronaut driving a Corvette makes it's way through the atmosphere - and blaring through the speakers is Rigg's "Radar Rider" and from that moment I was hooked. T...

1978 was an unbelievably cool year for music. From hard rock to new wave, and yes (unfortunately) disco (for those who liked that sort of thing) music was alive and well and it was a heady time. The Cars seemed to come out of nowhere, and while they wore their rock credentials on their collective sleeves they were also very different. They were living in the future and bringing it to the present. Yeah, that's as confusing as it sounds. The band enlisted the legendary Roy Thomas Baker to produce the album, who certainly knew a thing or two about getting the most out of a band. The guy's list of credits is unbelievable.  It's kind of weird and fun sitting here listening to an album I actually never had as a kid. I mean, it's not like I didn't know the songs but for whatever reason I wouldn't pick up the album, and all the others, until the early '80s. Before Heartbeat City , I might add, and that was because the rock station here played "Since You're ...

A while back on a SAGA page someone posted a picture of a ticket stub with the name Starcastle crossed out, and SAGA written in pen. I don't know why this stuck in my memory, but it did. One day I was looking through the clearance section at an old video store that had recently added a record section and I found a couple cool looking albums. Among them was this Starcastle album featuring a great cover (with the Hildebrandt signature I'm going to assume this was done by the brothers. I'll look it up later*) right off a pulpy science fiction paperback. There was Roy Thomas Baker's name in the production credits, so if nothing else there was some muscle behind it and someone at Epic believed in the band.  The back cover shows six rather dashing and very serious looking fellows, two of whom had fine moustaches, and the guy in the back row far left could have been the inspiration for Michael Sadler's (lead singer from SAGA) epic 'stache from the '70s...