Old Enough to Forget

I'd not listened to this is in a long, long time. My memories of this are mostly warm and fuzzy except for "Bad Is Bad" a song that to me was true to it's title. My buddy back in the day would go on about how "Ghost Busters" and "I Want a New Drug" were the same song ... I know there's a feel in the bass or the melody or something. I suppose there was enough merit to warrant a settlement, but to me all I heard was a gaggle of chicks shouting "Ghost busters" over and over. I found it irritating, and now it's nostalgic, go figure - and for all that I still can't hear it. The album was huge and it seemed to hang around a long time. I suppose that was due more to the fact that it was released in the fall of '83 and didn't really seem to take off until the spring of '84 and the band kept mining singles for almost a year. The album was like a Russian doll. It's an album very much of it's time but was also outside...

I remember this album, or at least the two songs I most closely associated with the album: "Looking For Clues" and "Johnny and Mary." The first was quirky and the second was very new wave. I love the second, and was perplexed by the first. Over the years Robert Palmer would come to exude cool, but to me he would forever be the geeky guy holding up a magnifying glass who was looking for clues. Of course that's not entirely accurate either.  When I found a copy of Clues I was pretty stoked to go back and hear what was going on back in 1980. The album opens with "Looking for Clues" and it's hard to imagine that it's been over four decades since the song came out. It's still so good. Chris Frantz from Talking Heads played bass drum on the track. The next song "Sulky Girl" was a straight ahead rock song in the same sort of vein as "Bad Case of Loving You" which sort of made sense, and I suspect this is what people were expect...

1986 was a great year for music, and the summer soundtrack was particularly good that year. There were two album in my collection that were joined at the hip, Peter Gabriel's So , and Steve Winwood's Back in the High Life . As the summer cooled down Bon Jovi would drop Slippery When Wet , followed closely by Paul Simon's mesmerizing Graceland . Those are just the tip of the iceberg, and are stories for another day. Still when I think of Winwood, I think of Gabriel, I don't know why - they're really nothing alike other than they were a couple of Englishmen who reached their commercial peak at the same time. I'm not going to go back and list off Steve Winwood's other accomplishments with bands like The Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, or that lone Blind Faith album ... the guy had laurels he could have rested on. Heck with all that he was still only 38 (which seemed ancient back then) when he dropped Back in the High Life . By comparison, Tom Petty was 36 and...

But Seriously Folks , released back in '78 was Joe's first solo album in a few years, and although I didn't know it at the time it was a pretty typical Joe Walsh record. ... that says nothing and makes no sense. Bear with me, I'm going to see what I can do with that and hopefully redeem myself. I have a pretty good idea what I meant. I'm just waiting for my coffee to kick in. Joe Walsh had been building his solo career after leaving The James Gang (I still remember going to the drive in theatre with my uncle Lloyd and my cousins where we saw Zachariah (if you know, you know) and The Holy Grail in a double feature. I'd see both movies more than once, and of those two I'd see one way more times than I should admit). While his first solo record Barnstorm did okay, it was his next two albums, The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get and So What that would go gold. Joe was setting to be a pretty significant solo artist.  Then he joined the Eagles and put his so...