Old Enough to Forget

1983 was a pretty solid year for music, and I always thought In Heat by The Romantics was a bigger hit than it actually was. It's not a shot, I mean seriously, "One in a Million" and "Talking in Your Sleep" seemed to be on the radio ... all the time. I was surprised to find out the album only went gold here in Canada, and at home in the states. The boys weren't breaking any new ground musically, but they knew how to craft a hook, and their songs were catchy with a tinge of late '70s new wave and a healthy dollop of power pop. This was good time party rock and boys weren't making any bones about their intentions to "Rock You Up." No scathing or depressing social commentary, or long slow laments about lost love and how much it hurt when you got dumped for the guy in chess club. Four guys, the rock basics: drums, bass, guitars and vocals ... and when the occasion called for it - harmonica. Oh and the drummer sang, I mean who doesn't love ...

Bruce Cockburn is an artists' artist. One whose conviction and seriousness seem overwhelming and to be honest a little intimidating. He always seemed like a guy who had a sense of humour but kept it in a shoe box one the shelf in his closet lest he use it and undermine his own sense of purpose. As a teenager my first exposure to him was when he hit it big with "Wondering Where the Lions Are" a song that is intricately structured. I saw him perform the song on Saturday Night Live, and I remember thinking, "Wow, he's on T.V." followed closely by "Man, I can't stand that song." It was true, it was right up there as a tweofer along with Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" as songs I could appreciate the grandeur and scope of, but couldn't stand. Then there'd be other songs, and for whatever reason I never forgot his appearance on The Alan Hamel Show (that later devolved into The Alan Thicke Show, and would ...

Like an awful lot of people I know Juice Newton from "Angel of the Morning" and it was a catchy song, and bow howdy I do like bells in popular music.Then "Queen of Hearts" was all over the radio. I will admit I like the song a fair too but buying the album never even crossed my mind. Ever. With the passage of time I learned my girlfriend, now my wife, had her '81 album Juice and she was partial to the big songs. So when I found an excellent copy of her Greatest Hits I was pretty stoked and her response wasn't as enthusiastic, but to be fair I think her reaction was due in part to the other dozen or so records in the pile of stuff I'd proudly brought home. To me I felt like a king bearing gifts, to her I was a cat who'd just dropped another dead mouse on the carpet. I'm always perplexed when labels interchangeably market best of collections as greatest hits. I know for sure there were hits on this album, a couple of really big ones, and maybe the...

The late '60s were an awesome time for so many reasons - not least among them was the music. Music was exploding and splintering into a million (okay, maybe a dozen) different directions and the generation gap was widening, and if you were over 30 you weren't to be trusted. There was no middle ground. Maybe not, but there was middle of the road. For a brief period of time up to the late '60s there was this strange no man's land, where popular artists had their songs filtered through the lens of other artists who were considered safe for consumption and that somehow made it palatable to an older generation who wanted to be hip to what the kids were down with, but who couldn't stand what the kids were actually listening to. This is what I believe at any rate. How else to do explain this type of stuff. It's too easy to blame Herb Albert and Jerry Moss who founded A&M and unleashed The Tijuana Brass in 1962 with a range of originals and homogenized versions of p...

Once upon a time the boys in Duran Duran were taking a break, and two of the three Taylors formed a band with Robert Palmer and drummer Tony Thompson who had pounded the literal shit out of the skins on Bowie's 1983 album Let's Dance . In the spring of 1985 they dropped an album called The Power Station , named after the legendary New York studio. I'm guessing the guys were having trouble coming up with a suitable band name as they opted to use the same name. The album opens with "Some Like it Hot" and right off the bat you really get the feeling you're in for a ride. To say Tony Thompson sounds huge on this song is an understatement. At this point in the mid '80s Phil Collin's was sort of the standard bearer for big gated toms and from the get go it's like Tony said to the engineer, "Hold my beer." Having Robert Palmer front was pretty cool, as at this point in his career he was still better known as that guy who covered "Bad Case o...

Growing up the second biggest thing in my life was comics. My dad had some very early MAD magazines among his collection of books. I would end up with a lot of the magazines and dozens of paperbacks of my own as time went on. I loved Don Martin, but when it came to the parodies for movies or TV, there were two names that were above all others: Mort Drucker and Jack Davis. A couple of years after Burton Cummings had left the band to pursue his solo career RCA put together yet another greatest hits collection. Considering the first best of collection had gone platinum in Canada, and gold in the US back in 1971, and the second collection in 1973 went gold in Canada wasn't it about time for another one? After all Burton was riding high in 1977 with his double platinum My Own Way to Rock, but that success didn't seem to help this one too much. It did crack the Billboard 200, but I guess people already had enough recycled Guess Who albums. To me though, this is the album I remember a...

I had never heard of Head East before John Schlitt joined Petra. It didn't help that I didn't really care for his debut with the band on their 1986 release Back to the Street - then again, I wasn't too thrilled either with Greg X. Volz on his last album with Petra Beat the System. Regardless of who was on vocals it wasn't like the band was on a winning streak. I had subconsciously dismissed Head East and anything that sounded like Schlitt. However, there would be a run in the early '90s where the band fronted by John was killing it, and I had to admit that dude could sing. I'd continue to see the occasional interview where Head East would be mentioned, but it always seemed to me that John was trying to get as much distance as he could from his past. You know the typical "God Good, Devil Bad" stuff. I suppose if you've lived through an honest to goodness Paul styled conversion story that involves literally being saved from certain death due to the p...