Old Enough to Forget

I'll admit I'm sort of a sucker for this era of soft rock. It likely explains why I'm such a big fan of Christopher Cross ... no I am not kidding. Before Mister Cross though there were others - one of whom was Stephen Bishop. A year earlier he had contributed a couple of songs to Art Garfunkel's 1975 album Breakaway , and this helped him secure a record deal. Careless would feature some of the best players of the '70s: Andrew Gold, Jay Graydon, Larry Carlton and Eric Clapton played guitar, Russ Kunkel and Jim Gordon among others on drums, and Chaka Khan who was also on ABC records appeared as a backing vocalist on a couple of track. Art Garfunkel also appeared on a few tracks. For a debut this is pretty awesome. Stephen co-produced the album with Henry Lewy who also engineered the album. Lewy was no stranger to great sounding albums which included  Mitchell's Blue and Neil Young's Harvest . The album opens with Stephen Bishop's biggest hit - or at least ...

When I first bought There Goes the Neighborhood I knew who Joe Walsh was, but other than a couple of songs on the radio I hadn't had the opportunity to hear any of his solo records. This was also true of the Eagles, but that's only tangentially related. The first Eagles record I'd pick up was Eagles Live in 1980 which more or less cemented my appreciation for Joe Walsh as a player. When Joe released There Goes the Neighborhood in '81 it would be my gateway into his solo career. I didn't quite know what to do with this one when I first heard it - this was a weird album. To me Joe Walsh was the rocker who wrote "In the City" for The Warriors soundtrack and was the guy who did "Rocky Mountain Way" and despite my teenage protestations that Triumph did it better - in the long run, Canada's other power trio couldn't hold a candle to the original. Of course "Life's Been Good" is pretty much the penultimate Joe Walsh song, but th...

Hold Out came after a three year hiatus, and it would set the pattern for his releases through the '80s. After the success of Running on Empty it seemed like an eternity between records but his audience was waiting patiently and Hold Out would become his lone number one album on the Billboard charts. The album didn't do as well here in Canada but it would crack the top ten stalling at number six. This was the album I came to a few years later when my friend Steve couldn't stop heaping praise on the record. At the time I was enjoying Lawyers in Love and I did like the songs I'd heard on the radio. Over the years I've had this album on vinyl, then CD and now again on vinyl. Why get it again? It was on sale ... and I'm a sucker ... and despite some pithy comments to come, I really liked this album. It's always fun going back and reading up on things that are decades old and discovering the vitriol some artists are blessed with from the various critics. Jackso...

Running on Empty is an album I associate with the early '80s, even though it came out in December of 1977. "Running on Empty" was the big song, and boy oh boy it had legs. Reading up on this one it was up for a couple of Grammy Awards in 1979. One for album of the year , and another for male vocal performance for "Running on Empty" which was pretty cool. As a record, Running on Empty was a bit of odd duck when it comes to live albums. Rather than the usual best of approach with crowd noise, Jackson Browne took a hard left at Albuquerque and road tested and recorded new songs. There were live songs, rehearsal songs, songs on a bus (which is really good, you can hear the bus), songs in a hotel room, and songs recorded backstage. He recorded it all over, everything recorded was part of the touring experience. Jackson Browne assembled a band featuring the best of the best. Russ Kunkel on drums, Leland Sklar on bass, Danny Kortchmar on guitar, and the incredible D...

Linda Ronstadt has been one of those wonderful discoveries over the last few years. Get Closer came out in '82 and after her brief foray into new wave that featured a few Elvis Costello songs on her previous album Mad Love she was back to being Linda Ronstadt, and all was right with the world.  Times they were a changin' and Linda was content being herself and she was enough of a presence now that she could be herself and that was enough. For me at the time, Linda Ronstadt was about as far off my radar as you could get. Other than the few songs I knew from the radio she wasn't relevant to me ... at all. It may not have just been me me either, as Get Closer would mark her first album in almost a decade that wouldn't crack the top 5. The album would go gold in the US which is still a pretty solid accomplishment, but she had reached the summit, and no one stays on top forever. Anyway you can read that kind of stuff on Wikipedia, I know I did.  It's about the music, ...

For most of us Warren Zevon generally conjures up one song, "Werewolves of London" and that's about as far as it goes. That particular song was one I was very dismissive of back in the day. To me it was a hatchet job that borrowed too much from "Sweet Home Alabama" and tried too hard to be clever. Yeah, fifteen year old me was a pretty harsh critic. I will begrudgingly admit that over the years the song certainly had it's charms, and Warren's unusual voice and writing is oddly engaging. In the mid '80s my old roommate had the record, and I remember playing it quite a few times and I really enjoyed a number of the songs, particularly "Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner" and "Lawyers, Guns And Money" as well as the title track, which was about as dark and twisted as songs come. With the passage of time I'd more or less forget the album, and when Kid Rock's oddly goofy and somehow catchy sampling of bits and pieces of "...

Back in 1993 when Denis Leary was teaching kids how to spell asshole, he also had a bit where he was lamenting how screwed up and upside down the world had become on his track "More Drugs." Judas Priest on trial "because my kid bought the record, and listened to the lyrics, and he got into Satan." Well, that's great! That sets a legal precedent. Does that mean I can sue Dan Fogelberg for making me into a pussy in the mid-70's? Is that possible, huh?  I have to admit I did laugh at the time, because let's face it, songs like "Longer" and "Leader of the Band" were pretty syrupy. They made the most maudlin songs by Jim Croce and Harry Chapin (okay it was really only "Cats in the Cradle" but let me have it). Dan was a heck of a player make no mistake, and despite how sucky those songs were, they were also really good. Did I have any of his records ... hell no. My girlfriend at the time did have The Innocent Age , and we'd si...

1983 was a great year for music. Of course there were other great years - lots and lots of them, especially the ones during my formative years. The early '80s though was something special. Jackson Browne was someone who had quite a few songs I liked but it wasn't until he released Lawyers in Love that I decided to put some cash on the table (The Fast Tmes soundtrack doesn't count). There was something hilariously goofy and awesome about the title track and it didn't matter where I was (or am, as I discovered when the song came on) if the song came on I had to wait patiently for my cue to sing along. Last night I watched the news from Washington, the capitol (that would be me) The Russians escaped while we weren't watching them, like Russians will (still me, but with gusto) The Tarzan falsetto is still out of my range, but there are times I still give it a shot. The dog doesn't like it. Anyway, the song is still one of those guilty pleasures, but this album got...

My wife grew up with her parent's copy of Simple Dreams (which is now part of my collection) so why choose Mad Love for my rambling thoughts? Simple. I wanted to, and it seemed like a good idea. Besides, over this past year I have managed to find an astonishing number of her albums in the dollar bin, and it has been an absolute joy listening to them for the first time and discovering an artist I knew only from the killer guitar solo from "You're no Good" - from there it led to me getting albums by Andrew Gold and Karla Bonoff. It's weird looking back now and realizing that in 1980 Linda was still only in her early 30s and had been releasing albums for over a decade. A decade in kid years from a developmental perspective is kind of like measuring things in dog years. In other words when she released Mad Love she had been around FOR-EVVVVVER. Of course looking at it now, it was a blink of an eye. When I saw this one in the bin I scanned the back cover, which had s...