Bachman - Turner Overdrive II

I’m never gonna apologize for my love of the first few Bachman – Turner Overdrive albums.  Never.  BTO was one of the first bands I ever loved, and Bachman – Turner Overdrive II may be one of the first albums I ever bought with my own money.  It may even be the very first.  I know I got it when it was still in the charts, so I was eleven.  I thought I was very sophisticated for having an album with songs like Welcome Home on it, which I thought the slow parts of were what Jazz would be like.  And I just knew that one day, I’d have a basement bar like my friend’s dad that had a real stereo had, and I’d sit around drinking brown liquor in a rocks glass and impressing my grown up friends by grown up me proudly proclaiming that, “I was into jazz at a young age.  Remember Welcome Home by BTO?  That’s what got me into jazz.”  Grown up me would then bask in the awesomeness that a statement like that was sure to bring.

So it turns out that’s still what I think jazz should be, and if it isn’t that, then it’s boring.  If that makes me boring, so be it.  I’m done trying to like music that’s boring to me.  I like Rock N’ Roll, I make no apologies and you can listen to all the noodly guitar playing and drums solo’s with brushes you want.  I want some amplification.  I don’t seem to care how dumb it is, and BTO is loud and dumb and I love it!  Besides, C. F. Turner has always seemed to me to be like the manliest man of all when it comes to singing.  Cheetah Chrome talked about the difference some guys singing have, and he just said that some guys have more balls in their singing, and all the guys lacking in that department can look at C. F. Turner and know that they’ll never measure up.  Is there anything more purely male than Let It Ride?  I don’t think so.  It starts off with those almost jangly guitars and some acceptable harmony singing, then the monster riff kicks in and C. F. lets it go,  While you been out runnin’ I been waitin’ half the night

Dude’s pissed.  You can tell.  He’s doing things worthwhile, and the old lady isn’t.

But this album just stuck in my ear all the time because all the riffs are huge, and the lyrics weren’t way over my head when I was a kid.  Hey, I wanted to ride my sting ray bike around and be able to sing the words with my friends and not feel stupid because I thought he was singing something totally different than he really was.  Thanks, C. F.  That big voice of yours cut through everything into my eleven year old brain, and it stuck good.  I knew back then that the whole thing with girls was gonna be a bitch, but I wouldn’t be alone.

Then there’s like the monster hit that Randy Bachman sings, Takin’ Care of Business, which was everywhere on the radio back in ’73.  Hell, it’s still on the radio all the time!  I always thought it was strange that the biggest BTO hits were Randy’s songs, because they were never the really heavy ones.  I think even my parents could stand the poppy Randy songs, but they were damned glad when I had this album I had a lowly GE plastic mono record player with a nickel on the tonearm to grind the needle into my records better.  You couldn't hear it more than two or three feet away, so it would be a few years before my parents found out what a woofer was.

So obviously, the copy I have now isn’t my original, but it’s not bad.  The original wouldn’t play, I’m sure.  But mine is pretty flat, quiet during the songs but a little noisy in between, and it’s got the old red label, just like mine did when I was a kid.  Now, should you run out and get this if you don’t have it?  Probably not.  But I wouldn’t get rid of it in a million years!