David Werner - Whizz Kid

Man, is a decent copy of this hard to find!  At least around Cleveland and Pittsburgh, which may be the only places you're really ever gonna find more than one copy.  It's only available on vinyl, but I bought it on cd once.  I was pissed when I opened the package!  The store I bought it at (which still exists and has since given me a few good deals so they're in my good graces again) the guy that owned it used a pristine copy of this to make the cd, and a slightly less pristine copy of David Werner's self titled album.  I just got too excited and didn't notice it didn't have a record label.  Hell, I was in a store, why would they be ripping OOP lp's and making cd's?  No one else does that, so I figured I was safe.  It's a clean copy and it wasn't all that expensive as I recall.

But I still kept buying copies of this album, trying to find better vinyl than I had. A girl I worked with gave me hers, which was toast but I played it for years.  Then I found a pretty decent one for a buck, and traded my beater copy in.  It was okay, but there's some quiet songs here, so it's kind of nice to have it be a quiet surface.  I found another slight upgrade, and I think I switched covers, but then I found a really nice promo copy at Jerry's in Pittsburgh.  It was really cheap, and Jerry knows he can get decent money for a clean promo copy of this, but the promo stamp is really hard to see, because it's just indented into the back cover. The stamp doesn't use ink, so I don't think they noticed.  It's a Dynaflex record, so you never really know what you're gonna get.  But this one is really, really nice, and I think it's about time I was able to cross that one off my list of things I really wanted to have!

So you're probably wondering, "What the hell is he talking about, anyway?"

Well, David Werner was a guy that WMMS and the college stations around here actually played a bit in 1974.  In particular they played the song, The Ballad of Trixie Silver, and 12 year old me was just in love with that song (to steal a line from Paul W.)  It starts off with this pretty piano and slightly country rock guitar, and it's about some girl that sells boutique trash, and she says "Hey, you look a lot like a cowboy," and I still think Trixie Silver is is like a cross between Goldie Hawn in The Dutchess and the Dirtwater Fox (which came out in 76, I checked), and one of my friend Chris' older sister's friends.  In other words, Trixie Silver is really cool.  Amazingly, I still think she's the same and I still think she's cool.  People thought this was David Bowie, so it was hard to find it when I was that young, and I never really had a copy until I was in my 20's and had a job where a handful of us just talked about music all day anyway.  One of the women I worked next to heard me mention that song, and she just said, "God I used to love that album!  I think I still have it and you can have it if you want."  So that was my first copy.  And Trixie Silver was still a great song.

The rest of the album is a little hit or miss, but that's because it's a little more mellow than a lot of albums I really love.  I get in moods to listen to this and just play it all the time for a week or two.  It kicks off with a song called One More Wild Guitar, and it's not all that wild, but it's cool.  I think Werner could have made it bigger if he had come out a year or two earlier, but then maybe he was just a little more artistic than most bands from Cleveland, Pittsburgh or Detroit.  Werner can write songs with wonderful melodies, something Rock and Roll can use to strong advantage, but it doesn't really need it to be great.  This isn't really a record to dance to.  It's a record to listen to, and I think the world can use some more of those.  This is really great stuff, and if you've never heard it, I recommend it highly.  Give it a few listens and really give it a chance and it will pay off.  The production is top notch, and while I won't quite go out on the Audiophile Alert limb, it's a nice recording (when you can find a nice one) and I bet it won't cost you very much money.