Old Enough to Forget

Okay boy howdy hang on to your hat, I'm about to drop the needle on Ted Nugent's 1977 release Cat Scratch Fever . This will be my first time sitting and actually listening to the album. At the risk of repeating myself, something I do a lot, as a kid my love of Ted started and ended with Double Live Gonzo! It was everything I wanted in an album, and with my limited budget it covered all the bases. As the years went by I never really felt the need to go back and revisit his early albums, and that was okay. Over the last couple of years I've managed to snag a couple albums and they've been good fun, but listening to albums now doesn't have the emotional gut punch I used to get in my youth. If there's anything that kind of sucks about getting old (and there are a lot of things that suck, trust me) it's that making deep connections with anything is harder than it used to be. Hearing the studio cuts of some of the songs I only really knew from their live iteration...

Paper Lace, oh man. "The Night Chicago Died" and "Billy Don't Be a Hero" (although I don't think it was their version I remember. That honour went to The Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods in North America) were earworms of the highest order when I was a little kid. There was something decidedly infectious about the songs, and while as I got older I developed a certain disdain for the songs that moved me in my youth, there was always a spot in my heart for this stuff. It's why I still like to listen to "Seasons in the Sun" and "Last Kiss" and am not ashamed to admit this was my jam. Of course, Paper Lace was never a band who seemed to rise above their early success and were more or less thrown onto the pile with the other AM gold singles that bombarded the airwaves in the '70s. Revered but still mostly forgotten. This particular Polydor release appears to be a repackaging of ...And Other Bits Of Material, the band put out in 1974. As ...

By the summer of '83, The Kinks seemed to be everywhere (in Canada at any rate) with their quirky song "Come Dancing," and the band seemed to be on the verge of getting their second wind. At least that's how I saw it. To me they were a bunch of old has-beens who wrote a couple of cool songs in the '60s, and wrote "Lola," a song that always felt like the companion piece to Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side." Considering Lou's song came out a couple years after, I suspect there was more than a passing wink and a nod to The Kinks. This was my first Kinks album. When I got this, I knew maybe a couple of songs and thought "Lola" was a song that was cool and weird. It was also old ... really old. Van Halen did the definitive version of "You Really Got Me," and that may seem sacrilegious, but it is what it is. Oh, there were probably others I'd heard, but as far as I knew they were a '60s band that had a couple of h...

Thanks for popping in. This month is a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I seemed to be in a bit of a maudlin mood and went back to the '70s for a couple albums by Dave Loggins and Ian Thomas. They were both young men at the time, with a level of maturity that seems beguiling to me now as I sit here listening as an old man. Yeah, make no mistake, my youth is in my rear view mirror now. Told you I was feeling maudlin. Regardless, for a bunch of albums that go back several decades, it's funny how this still feels fresh to me. Peter Schilling - Error in the System (1983) Toronto - Lookin' for Trouble (1980) Steve Winwood - Arc of a Diver (1980) Dave Loggins - Personal Belongings (1972) Ian Thomas - Delights (1975) Peter Schilling - Error in the System (1983)  From the catalogue of one-hit wonders on this side of the Atlantic, Peter Schilling hit it pretty big with "Major Tom (Coming Home)," a catchy song that seemed to be here and then gone. Which is to...

Hooters released their follow-up to Nervous Night in the summer of 1987. It hadn't seemed like two years between albums. When the album dropped, I picked it up right away. I really don't recall my reaction at the time. I do know I immediately pulled "Satellite" off the album as my favourite track, and it ended up on a lot of mix tapes. There were a couple of other songs that I liked too, but I'll admit to having shelved the album pretty quickly after hearing the highlights and giving it a few spins. It was a damning judgment, but this was 1987 and I was getting so much music that my attention span was pretty short. However, there was always something about the band I liked, and I would pick up their next album, Zig Zag , in '89, and then I would more or less lose track of the band. Getting back to One Way Home , I will say that it's been a hoot (sorry) getting to hear this again. Now, I do have this on CD, but finding a pretty mint copy of the record was t...

The Powder Blues were a strange anomaly who seemed to come out of nowhere, and for a couple of years their boppin' rhythm & blues was right there alongside the skinny ties and rockers. Uncut was an album that was self-financed and initially released late in 1979 on the band's own indie label, Blue Wave, because everyone they shopped the record to would say the same thing: "No one wants to hear the blues, this won't sell." They had released the album and sent copies to radio stations. Some sources claim they sold upwards of 30,000 copies before the same labels who had passed on the band were vying to get their hands on them. The album would be picked up by RCA and would reissue the album, minus one track ... it was a cover, and I suppose it makes the original more valuable. Uncut was (is) a really solid album. Songs like "Doin' It Right" and "Hear That Guitar Ring" were huge songs here, and the album would go on to sell a couple hundred ...

By 1974 Andy Kim was already a pretty established writer and performer. Most of us kids knew "Sugar Sugar" but couldn't have told you who wrote or sang it ... it was The Archies and that was that. Of course, everything is processed through a lens, and there's a huge difference between what I was able to process as an eleven-year-old who was obsessed with the radio and music and the knowledge and trivia I have accumulated over the intervening decades ... decades . Good lord, when did I get old? Andy Kim was his eponymous release on ICE Records in 1974, and it was distributed here in Canada by London Records. The song everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, knows is "Rock Me Gently," a song that was made to sing along to. Like so many others back in the day, much of my record collection was comprised of K-Tel anthologies, and there were two that I played until I almost wore the needle through the vinyl. Canadian Mint . 22 songs that were carefully edited and condensed...