Old Enough to Forget

The Northern Pikes were never one of my go to bands. They skirted the periphery for me, although they had a couple of killer tunes: “Things I Do For Money” was a nearly perfect ‘80s songs with a wonderfully syncopated delay on the guitar and a head bopping groove. The other was “Hopes Go Astray” which was (still is) a captivating song from  Secrets of the Alibi but don’t remember much else. The only thing I remember was being a bit disappointed. I was probably mix tape hunting, and aside from that one great song ("Hopes Go Astray") I didn’t pull anything else off and I suppose that was enough for me to bury it. Who knows. I was pretty quick to pass judgment and often it was brutal, and as I've found out in hindsight my loss. The band would keep dropping albums I more or less ignored ... okay it was more but I'm trying to soften my ambivalence. When they dropped "She Ain't Pretty" I had to admit it was catchy, but the little hairs on my neck didn't s...

As a kid I'd belt out "All By Myself" whenever I heard Eric Carmen's song come on the radio. It was a huge song ... at least to me. For a long time that was all I knew about him. I was a product of AM radio and unless my older cousins or my cool Aunt and Uncle had it I was stuck in that tiny bubble.  The first time I saw a Raspberries record I was at my buddy Andy's apartment in the mid '80s and was sitting on the floor looking through his voluminous collection. Andy was a couple of years older than I was and back then he was on the local co-op radio doing his thing. The station didn't have a lot of bandwidth and I couldn't get it out in the suburbs, so I never got to hear him and his dulcet tones. Andy was cool, had a cool voice, and a cool record collection. He loved The Grateful Dead, Michael Nesmith, and thought commercial music was a cancer. His girlfriend, and one of my closest friends Lori and I happened to think Starship's "We Built Th...

Down ’n’ Outz were initially formed as a creative outlet for Joe Elliott to explore his love of 1970s-influenced glam rock. Particularly, but not limited to, those who fell out of the Mott the Hoople family tree. I'd never heard of the band before, and This is How We Roll is the band's third effort and the first to contain original songs, which were written by Mister Elliot.  While I am at best a casual fan of all things Mott and the various Hooples they jumped through I do like a lot of that I've heard over the years. Joe wrote all but one of the songs on the album, and he is absolutely not doing anything that hasn't been done before, but his love for the era and is palpable and the songs here are all really good. Heck even the band's name smacks of the same spelling deficiency the lads in Slade suffered from.  When I first saw the album in the clearance bin ... by now you must know I am notoriously cheap, for 75% off I was curious. The cover photo reminded me o...

Good old Sammy. I knew of Sammy at least a year or two before I ever heard the opening riff to "Heavy Metal" from the sountrack album. It was a song I should have loved, but it always sort of stuck in my craw like a spoonful of cinnamon. It should have been tasty ...  I'd seen Sammy's name in the credits of a couple albums I had back in the day: I think the first time I saw his name was in the credits on a Servant record. Servant had incorrectly attributed "Rich Man" to Sammy on their debut album Shallow Water ... I was this many days old when I learned Dan Hartman wrote the song, not Sammy. His name also popped up on Working Class Dog.  Rick Springfield covered "I've Done Everything For You" and absolutely made it his own. A few years later when Sammy replaced Dave in Van Halen  everyone knew who the Red Rocker was. Sammy is cool. Absolutely and unequivocally cool. For whatever reason I never really clicked with Sammy's stuff. I had all of...

The first time I heard "Owner of a Lonely Heart" on the radio, I was smitten. "What in the heck was that?" It was one of those HOLY SHIT songs that seemed to come out of nowhere. KISM from Bellingham had a strong enough signal to reach over into the suburbs where I lived. The song quickly worked it's way into heavy rotation, but I don't remember hearing it on the two big stations in Vancouver. It took me a while to find the record after first hearing the song. There was a record store across the street from where I worked and I looked for this new Yes album, and all I found where the old Yes records, nothing new. Of course this only happened once, and I'm sure this was all compressed into the span of a couple of weeks, if that. Soon the song along with the bleeding edge orchestral blasts that were unlike anything I'd heard before was everywhere. This was Yes? Yes. Of course there was no internet back in the day, just word of mouth and the burgeon...

My earliest memories of hearing songs from  The White Album  is probably from 1972. I remember this because my older cousins wanted to hear "Smoke on the Water" and I wanted to hear "Rocky Raccoon" and I was outvoted. My Aunt and Uncle seemed to have the coolest music from Alice Cooper to The Doobie Brothers. The Beatles had broken up years earlier and none of my friends listened to them.  The Beatles were music for an older generation. Me and the other kids I knew were all over what was on the current top 40 and we'd argue in class about whether CKLG or CFUN was the best station. I'd give a passive listen once in a while to a country station (ick) if my Uncle was on the radio over at CJJC and I have one vague memory of us sitting around waiting for him to play "Kiss an Angel Good Morning" for my Aunt. Regardless, they had an eight track copy of The White Album , and if the stars aligned I could get them to play it. I finally got a copy for myself ...

Before Frank Mills punished the world with "Music Box Dancer" in 1979, Hagood Hardy had an unusual cross-over with "The Homecoming" back in 1975. Okay, to the purists out there yes "Music box Dancer" was actually recorded in 1974, but then "The Homecoming" got it's start in a commercial for Salada tea in 1972. What this has to do with anything is beyond me, but there you go. By 1978 Mr. Hardy was a known commodity with his brand of piano tinkling and it made sense that he put out a Christmas album at some point ... and then it happened.  A Very Special Christmas  was licensed to K-tel from Attic Records. Who knows how this came about, but there was a time the little label from Winnipeg wasn't that little. The album features sixteen tracks that cover all of the required bases. It should be noted that this album predates the A Very Special Christmas anthologies of Christmas music by about a decade. Those were good, but each album was a lit...