Old Enough to Forget

As a teenager I knew more about Yes from their Roger Dean album covers than I did about their music. When I eventually upgraded my old Sound in the Round record player to a stereo that could go loud in the late '70s, the receiver also had a built in 8-track player. While never a fan of the fade out and click in the middle of a song, I did have a couple of cartridges I'd picked up, and I actually had a copy of Fragile , that I have no recollection of getting and played it a few times and remember not getting it at all - although "Roundabout" was as awesome as it was perplexing. Then the tape got eaten and that was that, and I didn't really think about Yes until the fall 1983 when the radio station across the line played this weirdly cool song called "Owner of a Lonely Heart" by ... Yes. Well, I remember thinking "That was cool." However, the classic Howe lineup wasn't my jam. I liked the Trevor Rabin era, and am still partial to his work wit...

I heard "Mutual Surrender (What a Wonderful World)" on the radio - once. It was a nifty track that appealed to me enough to look for the album. I bought the CD and the other song I liked that made it onto a few mixes was "Dying to be Free" an oddly haunting track that really appealed to me. A year later the band was seemingly everywhere with their infectious "I Don't Mind at All" a song barely three minutes long that sounded like nothing else the band had recorded. To many it was the biggest bait and switch since Coke had tried to re-brand back in 1985. Okay maybe not that big, but I had a friend who bought the album thinking he was getting the new Beatles and declared it was a huge steamy pile of poop, aside from one great song. I don't have Yoyo on vinyl (I have it on CD), but I did recently find a sealed copy of their debut, and I know I already have it on CD and I'm not supposed to be doubling up, but come on, a sealed copy? It was cheap to...

This was the album that was supposed to make The Payola$ huge ... all that was missing was an excellent album to propel Vancouver's perennial group of punk to pop heroes to the big time. They'd been skirting on the edge of success for a few years, and were so close to being a really big deal. The band first made it onto my radar when they released "Eyes of a Stranger" back in 1982 and the song was huge here in Canada (okay, maybe just Vancouver, but it seemed like it was huge). I remember an entertainment segment on the local news where the band was pretty excited about the prospect of being able to ditch their day jobs. A year later the band dropped Hammer on a Drum and "Where is this Love" was the big hit (all things are relative, it was on the radio and I liked it, so it must have been a hit), and remains one of those songs that'll get me right in the feels when I hear it. Mick Ronson had produced both of those albums, and while they did okay, from ...

Thanks to my friend Carol who was travelling in Australia I was able to snag a copy of Love an Adventure from 1985, and it's sort of an eye opener. It was a used copy with just a plain insert, so no real credits, but the back cover showed a slightly different line-up than the later RCA re-issue. Brian Canham, and James Leigh are pictured, as is bassist "Pierre Pierre" which was a pseudonym for Pierre Gigliotti. Then there was drummer Anthony Argiro who is pictured here, but on the RCA version Jame's brother Vince is credited. Even the wiki on this isn't clear as it doesn't list Anthony at all, so who knows maybe he recorded the parts but by the time it was released was out of the band. Regardless, this is a bit of a conundrum as I'm listening to this one and it is an earlier pressing that doesn't include the dance mix of "Funky Town" a song that frankly isn't missed here. However, if it was to be shoehorned in, coming after "Living i...

Pseudo Echo has everything that was awesome about '80s synth music. These guys were right in the same wheelhouse as Ultravox, Simple Minds, or OMD, or ABC (sort of) - well, a lot of bands, even Depeche Mode but not really, more like Psychedelic Furs. I find it strange that when the big dump of acts from Australia that overwhelmed the airwaves here by bands like Ice House and The Church, that Pseudo Echo wasn't in that mix, they were really good. Sure, one could argue they were a little derivative, I'd argue that when hair metal was a thing that was the height of derivative rock - and I loved an awful lot of it.  Apparently their version of "Funkytown" was big in Canada, but I don't remember it - at all. At the time I didn't realize the original album was released in Australia in 1985 with a different track order. By the time this was released here in 1987 it suffered the same fate as Angel City's Face to Face - it was a cobbled together effort to gain...

Yeah I know I've written about B.T.O more than once, but dang it man these guys were THE SHIT when I was a kid. They were the original monsters of rock for me, and every so often I will go and revisit different albums and take the musical time machine back to the land of nostalgia. I found a nice copy of the debut and figured why not go back to the beginning and see what the fuss was about? This may have been their debut but it didn't show up in my collection for a long, long time. I think I first heard the album in its entirety when I got it on CD. The halcyon days for me were those that accompanied the band's bookend releases in 1975: Four Wheel Drive , and the Christmas present Head On - those were my jam. Dang, "Wild Spirit" from Head On should have been as big as anything they'd ever done - even if it was a mono mix, which even as a preteen was perplexing as I had a stereo.  I digress. It's not unusual, in the words of Tom Jones. The first song I re...

For a buck I'll pretty much take a chance on stuff that I'd normally ignore. The Sandpipers felt familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on it - but I figured it was going to be an easy listening experience that would be in the same vein as "Up, Up and Away" by The 5th Dimension ... yeah, for all the reverence Jimmy Webb gets as a songwriter, particularly his collaborations with Glen Campbell - it was a surprise the goofy balloon song was a Webb composition. Well, I came home and cleaned the record, which was in remarkably good condition. As with so many records from the '60s there was no date on the cover, or the album, but a quick search revealed this was released in 1968. The credits are sparse, to the point of being non-existent aside from Tommy LiPuma who produced the album, and a few others on the engineering side. The first track was the title track which was a cover of a Gordon Lightfoot song. It was indeed in the easy listening style with an emphasis o...