Old Enough to Forget

Screams is a band who came to my attention through my buddy Jeff. I've mentioned Jeff a few times, often in a derogatory manner as he is one of those jacks of all trades and master of all, types who despite his protestations that he is in fact just a normal guy , is in fact not normal. In short I'm more than a little jealous and proud of my friend ... A while back I found an Elvis Brothers album and I had just written up. Jeff casually brokered an introduction to Brad Elvis (Brad Steakley) and we traded a couple of really pleasant notes. Brad has a pretty active Facebook which is fun to keep up with. Anyway (yeah, I may have to edit this for clarity at some point) I found out Brad had been in a band called Screams, and that Jeff had been looking for the album for a long time. I decided I'd look for it, and I found not one, but two copies in a little second hand record store close to where I live so I sent Jeff one, and kept the other. When Brad and I were trading notes he...

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...

The Elvis Brothers are a new to me experience. I'm trying to remember how this came to be on my radar. I suspect it was the result of hearing the name mentioned by my friend Jeff (who has an encyclopedic knowledge of all things pop that kind of irritates me to be honest - because I'm older than he is, and it gets up my crack that he's more than my equal when it comes to the accumulation of useless trivia regarding music) AND then looking them up on the internet and seeing Adrian Belew's name associated.  Rambling Tangent Alert: Adrian Belew first came to my attention back in 1983 when a wonderful young lady said my homemade DIY "albums" reminded her of Adrian Belew in their quirkiness.  To me this was incredibly intriguing, so I rushed out and purchased Twang Bar King , and Lone Rhino and quickly discovered that my friend was being overly generous as those two albums were life changing and expanded my musical palate beyond anything else I'd ever heard to ...