The Sensational Alex Harvey Band - The Impossible Dream

I’m a Clevelander.  I’ve never actually lived in the city proper, but like most people in Cuyahoga County I live in a town right near Cleveland.  I can be in Public Square in twenty minutes, which is actually quicker than some people who live in the city proper can get there, so considering my lifetime of rooting for our lousy sports teams and going downtown and supporting Cleveland’s neighborhoods by shopping and eating in them, like most people in the county, I consider myself a Clevelander.  People from Parma and Lakewood probably don’t call themselves Clevelanders, but those are cities you can actually mention to people and they’ll understand you live up North and not down in Cow Country, Ohio.  I really like Cleveland, and one of the things I like having grown up here is a kind of shared community thing from the people around here in the 70’s and early 80’s.  We went to concerts downtown at Public Hall and The Agora.  We went to things called Party in the Park at the several venues they held them at, and even if you were trying hard to find out what kind of music there was to listen to that wasn’t played on WMMS or M105 (WWWM), you were gonna hear those stations every day whether you tried to or not.

One of the mainstays of Cleveland Rock radio back then was The Sensational Alex Harvey Band.  Alex was (and still is) extremely well loved here.  I remember high school bands covering his songs, and Paul Fayreweather devoting a whole set of his show to SAHB.  I wouldn’t quite say SAHB was ubiquitous, but I would say that everyone knew who the guy was.  That wasn’t the case in other cities.  I can remember talking music when I went to swimming camp or on vacation and people had no idea who Alex was.  I don’t know why this was, because these guys were a blast.

This is one of Alex’s classics here in Cleveland.  The Impossible Dream was one of those I didn’t buy until the 80’s because everyone had it, so mine is a reissue on Samurai Records.  I wish Samurai did every reissue, because they always sound fantastic.  They just did a good job pressing records, I guess.  But like I said, this sucker was one of the most popular albums this city has ever heard.  The classic rock station here still ends up playing all thirteen minutes of The Hot City Symphony:  Part 1 – Vambo Part 2 – The Man in the Jar.  I bet they still have some drunk request the damned thing on the Saturday Night House Party radio show.  They always used to put some dink on the air and he’d be at a party and slur, “Hey! Put on The Man in a Jar!”  Our host would just change the hour he played it in every single week.

Which would always get me asking, “Why not play Sergeant Fury or Long Haired Music?  Why is it that people that call in to request songs don’t buy any of their own fucking records!  I mean, if they did, then maybe they’d want to hear a different song once in a while, ya know?  But like hell if they’d ever have the good taste to ask for Weights Made of Lead which is just plenty of boogie music with Alex hamming it up and doing all the crazy vocals that everyone my age can imitate without a seconds thought.  Alex had this great Scottish accent and it wasn’t too thick, so it just made all his songs more fun.

I remember talking to a friend who came to visit us once from out of town when I was a teenager and he was looking at pictures of SAHB and asking me who the mime was.  I couldn’t believe he didn’t know Zal Cleminson, who was on my ever growing list of Favorite Shit Hot Guitar Players.  Zal dressed up like a mime onstage, but the guy could really play and added a great, crunchy guitar anytime it was needed, and could play tastefully understated or way over the top at the drop of a hat.  Or just a change in the song, because like I said, he was a Shit Hot Guitar Player.

Maybe SAHB was partly special for me because they were just such a teenage boy’s kind of thing to like.  They had just enough chops to impress the older Rock Nerds that they could be serious (and while they were often funny, they never slipped into Frank Zappa territory).  The keyboards gave them a slight Prog Rock feel, but the drums and Cleminson’s guitar definitely would be at home in any Pub Rock band.  All in all, they were unique and if you ask me, they hold up very well even today.

Like I said, my copy is a reissue on the Samurai label.  It’s in terrific shape.  I think there’s a click here and there, but it’s a record, and that just happens, ya know?  I wish all my records sounded as good as Samurai’s SAHB reissues.  The drums are nice and full, the vocals crystal clear and the guitars sound great.  My guess is that if you found a copy of this and you had a choice between the Vertigo and Samurai releases, the Samurai would be half price.  I’ve heard the Vertigo’s and they sound really good, too.  But I’d save the money, buy the Samurai and get another album with the savings, at least around here – SAHB records fetch premium money here in Cleveland.  Get one.  It'll treat ya right.

High Fidelity, or Just Rambling?

High Fidelity.  What an elusive concept, eh?  I think a lot of males my age (we grew up in the 70’s) tend to want a certain degree of great sound from their stereo that you cannot get from an ipod in a docking station with two 2 ½” speakers eight inches apart and a 3” subwoofer.  Sure, that thing can be surprisingly better sounding than you would have ever imagined in 1977, but an H.H. Scott receiver and a pair of some long lost to time bookshelf speakers an old girlfriend of mine had handed down from her brother would put that ipod dock to shame.  Not that I had anything that nice back then (I was positively green with envy the day we hooked it up!), but kids my age usually tried to get a decent stereo.

That picture above is the first real stereo I ever owned.  My dad had a little Webcor stereo with a small record changer built in to an AM/FM receiver.  The speakers were 4” cones and weren’t much to write home about.  I saved a lot of money (for me, anyway) and bought this GE stereo.  It was an AM/FM receiver with a phono input and an AUX jack, with a built in 8 track player.  It came with two speakers.  The phono input was just a line level, and my first “turntable” was a shitty BSR changer with a plastic woodgrain base and a ceramic cartridge.  The GE system had pretty decent speakers, though.  They had an 8” woofer and a 3 ½” tweeter.  So yeah, the tweeter wasn’t exactly accurate and good at imaging, but it was damned good with electric guitars!  That thing played surprisingly loud, had bass that didn’t offend me, and best of all, it was durable.  I would bet that had my BiL not wrangled it from me, it would still be working.  He put the speakers on the outside of his garage and left the receiver in the garage for his daughters to use by the pool.  Rain, snow, heat and cold killed the speakers and I don’t know what happened to the receiver part.  It’s a little sad now that I think about it.

That stereo and I got through me growing up.  I also had an old pair of JVC closed back headphones with a volume knob on (I think) the left ear cup.  They were okay, but I got better ones.  I can remember lying in bed late at night and listening to WCSB or even WMMS and hearing all the underground music of the times.  I liked my headphones, and I could just blast them really loud and feel totally lost in whatever it was I was listening to.   I remember one day after my JVC phones crapped out but before I got a new pair I laid on the floor with the speakers on either side of my head at full blast so I could better appreciate Roxy Music Live at Hammersmith Odeon 1979.  I can still hear, and I still have that bootleg record.

I really liked the blue lighted tuner dial.  It was a great color of blue and I don’t know why stereo’s don’t always use blue lights.  They just look really cool if you ask me.  I used to have a bunch of beer lights and a really weird 7UP can that had a big light bulb in it that also had a huge filament that went around a magnet, and when I turned it on the filament it would flick back and forth.  I had some really weird lighting in there, and I thought it was cool.  I used to sit in there in my weird light and listen to Yes and The Doors lying on the floor for hours.  Eventually I got to move my stereo to a room in the back of the house, and that was beyond cool!  I had a couch and it was just a great place to hang out.  I wish my parents had been the kind that let me smoke back then, but they weren’t (if you wondered, I quit long, long ago).  So it wasn’t always cool to hang out at my house, but I still had my moments.

Eventually I got my first Dual turntable from some old stereo shop in my downtown.  I bought records from the guy, too.  I think I still have several of them, and by now some of them are actually pretty valuable.  I think my first Dual was a 1009, and it was pretty old and looked it.  But it was kinder to my records, that’s for sure.  After a while I ended up getting two more small speakers (my receiver had a Quadra Fi button,  and it was cool to have two more speakers.   But then I got a real turntable.  I got a used 1219 with some kind of Audio Technica cart on it, and it sounded great!  I used that until I bought my first big boy stereo.  I wonder what happened to it?  There are people online that would like that old thing.  I bet it’s in a landfill, though.

I can remember coming home from swimming practice and listening to Suzi Quatro or some other such thumpy noise.  I learned a lot from that stereo.  I learned what I wanted from ever stereo from then on.  I wanted some high notes and I wanted a richer bass.  But I also wanted to make sure it would play as loudly as I wanted it without distorting, which my GE did with apparent ease.  I also learned that I didn’t care what anyone else thought about my stereo, because I bought it because I like the way it sounds.  And that’s important!  I remember some girl’s older brother telling me he bought a new receiver at Radio Shack and I think I said, “Isn’t all their stuff shitty?”  He showed me his new receiver and it was one of those monster mega watt things with like fifty knobs and dials on it.  I was blown away!  He had the Realistic Mach One’s hooked up to it and that thing was amazing.  It took up his whole bedroom, but it was worth it, and I had no problems appreciating that thing and asking him about stereo equipment all the time back then.  I knew one day I wanted something like that, but I never did get one of those huge receivers.  They’re just too big.

My little GE and a bunch of older girls seem to me to be the main thing that helped shape my musical tastes.  It’s weird being the oldest.  My parents didn’t have records I wanted to listen to.  I wanted to listen to music kids listened to.  I think from guys I got my appreciation of stuff like Grand Funk, but I think the girls I knew tended to encourage me to listen to Yes and anything else that was something I could feel a personal connection to.  The girl that played Patti Smith for me told me to never buy records to keep in my collection for other people.  She said I’d never play them, and I learned that with a couple of Led Zeppelin albums that I gave away.  I sure do miss all those old days where all the music seemed so new and my very own stereo turned me onto those sounds.  Not that I don’t have my very own stereo (I have one that works really well for me), but it’s funny that so many of those people I used to talk to about music all the time seem to have put that part of their life in the same landfill as my old GE stereo.  I wonder if they ever miss it?

Todd Rundgren's Utopia - Another Live

I found a really nice copy of this the other day.  I used to have it when I was a kid.  It came out in 1975, and I think I bought it back then.  I remember this was one of those albums that I played on my old stereo that I bought with my own money (it would still be working if I hadn't let my BiL have it and he set it up outside for his kids - the speakers absorbed water pretty well).  The first turntable I bought for it was a BSR of some sort with a ceramic cartridge that needed to eat records to stay alive.  So my original copy of this is definitely in a landfill somewhere, but I always check out cheapo copies to see if one is clean for little money, and I found one yesterday.

So I got some of that new Budweiser Black Crown and listened to records last night.  The first thing I thought was that this had the worst cover of almost any good record I've ever heard.  It looks like fan art.  There's a funny insert with a photo of the band, and the words to the songs on side one.  The whole thing looks like a project they were starting, but gave up on and just released, and I remember always thinking that about this record.  But I like this album.  I don't love this album, but I definitely like it.  Side one was new songs back in 1975, and they're kind of Prog Rockish, which I definitely dug listening to while lying on my bedroom floor with my old Radio Shack headphones on, cranked up too loud and thinking a real Rock Concert would be the coolest place to ever go.  So last night I sat on the floor and slapped on my headphones and let this one drag me back for awhile.

I remember taking this down to Canton, where my dad was from and I was born.  I had cousins down there, and I thought my cousin Theresa and her friends were just about the coolest people I knew.  I think she's a year older than me, and she had a little stack of records I coveted back then.  She smoked and I think she drank beer, and I smoked and wanted to drink beer.  They used to give me a hard time back then because I used to smoke menthols, like Kool's or Newport's.  Back then mostly black kids smoked those, and Kool's supposedly had fiberglass filters that would make you cough up blood.  I figured that was bullshit, because why would a cigarette company knowingly kill their customers (I'm glad I don't smoke anymore!)?  I remember when I took this down there Theresa took one look at it and said, "Hell, yeah! I love Todd.  Let's go to Peggy's and listen."  I was real excited, because I knew I had this awesome record and they hadn't heard it yet.

Well, they were in love with the Todd that did Something/Anything and A Wizard, A True Star.  This was different.  There's no Hello, It's Me or It Wouldn't Have Made Any Difference on this album.  Side one is just three long songs, with lot's of keyboards, acoustic guitar throughout The Wheel and almost enough keyboards to make Rick Wakeman jealous.  Strike one with the girls.  But side two is shorter songs, and has a great cover of Do Ya and Todd's classic underdog fan's prayer, Just One Victory.  So the girls didn't hate it, but it felt like I walked to first, and I remember quickly switching to Uriah Heep and then going outside so we could hang around and smoke and try to look cool.

Now, Just One Victory reminded me of swimming.  I swam for years, but only one year in high school, and during Christmas workouts we were allowed to bring records in to listen to while we swam back and forth for six hours out of the day.  The high school pool had a PA, and there were speakers all over so we could actually hear real music instead of the song that just gets stuck in your head the whole time.  I remember one of the seniors telling me Just One Victory was his favorite song, which is fine.  But it was how he looked at competition and the futility of that song that bugged the shit out of me.  I told him that song was great for the fans, who can't do anything but cheer and hope, but the athletes have options.  If you want to win, you don't let the other guy beat you.  If he does beat you, and you can prove you did better than you've ever done before, then you can be proud of yourself even in defeat, but hoping and praying the other guy blows a turn or swallows a gallon of pool water is fucking stupid.  Our medley relay went to state that year.  We would have medaled but Just One Victory false started.  That really pissed me off.  I never false started and coming in to high school, I had been on some medley relays that had made some serious statements as to just how good our team was (it's the first event in a swim meet, and when you're in another state or city where they don't know you, blowing everyone out of the water the first event is a good way to get every one's attention).  That song kind of leaves me salty these days.

Something's Coming was so familiar to me.  Todd does a great job of bringing this classic from West Side Story into the land of Rock.  My dad listened to his 8 Track of that soundtrack a lot, and Something's Coming was always my favorite song on it.  You really can't hide the show tune in it, though!  But my favorite song on the record is and always will be, Heavy Metal Kids.  It's certainly the hardest rocking song here, but I forgot just how screwed up I used to think the narrator in the song had to be when he woke up this morning, got drunk off my ass!  Wow.  These Rock and Rollers were not like my mom and dad, that's for sure!

The copy I found is a promo, with the old pink and black sticker on the front, but it's actually a Bearsville promo label, too.  I think it was played, but not much, and certainly on a better record player than my old BSR.  I'm glad I bought it.

Paris - Big Towne 2061

I was 14 in 1976.  I'm pretty sure I thought I knew everything about everything, but music in particular (I'm pretty sure when you're 14 that's the way it is, and then you slowly forget almost everything so that by the time you're old, you feel like you hardly know anything).  I'm pretty sure that my musical knowledge at the time had no idea that this was the band Bob Welch formed after he left Fleetwood Mac.  I don't think I knew who Bob was.  I had seen the first Paris album at the record store, and I liked the logo, but I hadn't bought it yet.  I think I heard the song Big Towne 2061 in the middle of the night while I was listening to a college station, or maybe even WMMS late at night.  I loved the beginning of it, because I liked the Prog Rock style keyboard that just goes whoooossshhhh at the beginning of the song, and then there's the sort of reggae-ish guitars that come in.  I think it's one of those songs that I heard once, and then got a bug up my ass that I absolutely had to have it, and now almost forty years later I'm still listening to it and I still think it's a great album.

Well, maybe it's not great, but it's really good.  I remember this guy that used to drag his whole stereo around to parties about two years later, and he would bring a crate of records and just play like one song off an album, then play another one.  I thought it was stupid.  I mean, he had like a Pioneer SX 1080, which was the size of a fuckin' TV (well, it was big!), and then he had some Realistic Mach I's (maybe some big assed JBL's, I remember they were heavy), plus his turntable.  I remember it had an S arm, so it was probably some kind of Japanese thing with a Shure cart on it.  He'd drag this whole rig to anyone's party, and eventually I think he started a DJ business.  People used to think he was awesome, but he never had anything I even figured I'd buy.  He was like the radio with no commercials, and since he only had one turntable (at the time) there was always a pause while he got the next record on.

So anyway, I'm digging through his crate one night, and he used to tell me, "No one ever wants to listen to the songs you pick.  You never pick things people can dance to and you never pick anything they already know."  Hey, I know that (but I'll argue the dancing part), but I never asked for more than one or two songs in a whole night.  I mean, I had to listen to Ted Nugent and Boston, so it only seemed fair that I should be able to pick something else!  But I remember digging through that crate of 70's top ten albums and coming across the only other copy of this album I had ever seen outside of a record store!  I looked up and said, "Hey!  You gotta play something off this!"

He says, "I don't think I really listened to that one.  It's kind of old now.  I don't think anyone will like it."

I'm insistent, "No, I promise.  I'll pick a song the girls will like and keep dancing to and it won't bring anyone down."

He looked like he'd heard that before, but said, "OK.  One song."

So I picked a song called 1 in 10.  It's kind of a dancey thing that foreshadows Bob's breakout French Kiss album (I have that and we'll talk about it someday).  But anyway, the girls did keep dancing, people thought it was something new and told Mr. DJ Guy that he had the greatest record collection ever, again.  But I got a little validation that I could, on occasion, pick something that everyone could enjoy.  I could never be a fun DJ unless it was in a situation where it was just people going to check out the music I was playing, and then I might botch that up and play something else anyway, because I only like to play whatever strikes my fancy at that moment!

I think Paris was a pretty good project for Bob.  It never took off (I did get to see them live, though!), but the handful of people that bought Big Towne 2061 seem pretty happy with it.  Soupy Sales' kid Hunt plays drums on this, and Glenn Cornick from Jethro Tull plays bass and the cool keyboards throughout this.  Bob had hit on something with his standard power trio adding some cool keyboards, and Rush would become huge when they added the keyboards a year or so later.  I'm not saying Bob Welch was a major influence on Rush, but maybe he was.  Bob always had weird subjects like aliens and fantasy worlds, so the guys in Rush may have heard what these guys were doing.  But it made for a good branching out from Prog Rock for me, since I really liked that kind of stuff when I was younger than 14.  There was just enough of that there for me on Big Towne 2061, and just enough plain old Rock, too.  I bet this will always be an album I dig out.

I'm thinking at some point I replaced this, because my record is super clean and most of my records from when I was that young got pretty killed by my cheapo BSR turntable.  If mine didn't kill it, then someone else's did!  So it's nice and flat and sound terrific.  Considering how Allmusic gives this a whopping two stars and doesn't even bother writing a review for it, I bet it's worth about three dollars.  Which is kind of a shame.  Bob Welch was pretty damned good and it's too bad more people didn't notice him.

Oh yeah - that's fifty posts!  So that means I don't have to check and see if I've done one before.  So who knows, I may go on some kind of binge and just write about Neil Young or The Pagans for a month.  You never know.

The Doors - Morrison Hotel

When I got to high school, I seemed to need to get a New Favorite Band, as it was pretty clear that Yes wasn’t quite going to cut it with the ladies.  Besides, I was trying to find something really cool.  The kind of band that when I was talking to people older than me would be impressed that I knew inside and out, and loved, and that people my age and younger would be impressed in my devotion to a sort of unheard (at least anymore) kind of band.  I don’t know why I decided The Doors would fit that bill, but until I really got into Punk, they bridged the gap between Yes and The Sex Pistols nicely for me.  I think this was the first album by them I bought, and Morrison Hotel is still probably what I consider to be their best album.

What ended up happening is that about the same time I got into The Doors, everyone my age started digging them.  So much so that by the time I was a senior, Danny Sugarman wrote a book about Jim Morrison and The Doors were actually selling more records than they ever had.  So for me, The Doors were like one of my first pet bands that went out and got uber popular.  I kind of dropped out of that fandom when I got married (pretty young by these days standards, but if it were 1929 I’d have had a long bachelorhood!).  Mostly because I slowly decided Jim was kind of an idiot, and I felt that way for a long time.

But time heals and all that.  So right now I’m listening to the same copy of Morrison Hotel I owned in high school, and it must have come into my collection after I bought my first Dual turntable, because it’s in great shape.  I’m listening to it the way I listened to most of my records at home, on headphones.  I used my speakers a lot too, but I loved my headphones.  They were some kind of Radio Shack branded things  made by Koss.  I had them for years and they were pretty good.  I just got a pair of Grado’s  and there’s probably no comparison, but I’ve got to say that the bite to Robbie Krieger’s guitar that just pierces through everything is really satisfying.  Especially at the moment.  I really didn’t listen to these guys anymore for years and years, but I never got rid of their records because I paid for them with my own money back when it was damned hard for me to come up with record money, and I hoped that some day (like today maybe) I’d sit down and listen to some Doors and hear some of what made me really think these guys were the shit.

I’ve really got to think a lot of it had to do with Robbie’s guitar.  Sure, I probably haven’t let Roadhouse Blues play all the way through on the radio in 20 years, but man, I just played it twice!  That guitar sounds like a switchblade through a leather jacket.  It’s just a great noise.  I think it’s part of being an American kid to feel that I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer is one of the most profound statements in Rock for at least a few years.  I guess we called this stuff “classic” for a reason back then.  Robbie kills it on Peace Frog, too.

Ray Manzarek has to get some credit, too.  I know, he can be hard to take in interviews these days (I’d rather hear him talk about X but he only talks about The Doors), but he sounds pretty cool on this record.  He plays nice blues piano on The Spy and he’s a little understated with that merry-go-round gimmick he could get going sometimes.  I tend to think that John Densmore was certainly as good a drummer as you were gonna find anywhere back then, and I really like how he holds Queen of the Highway together.

Now, the big star is always Jim Morrison with these guys, and I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that for a poet he was a pretty good rock ‘n roll singer.  I think a lot of people in that field are much better writers (at least of rock songs), and his poetry seems more than a bit pretentious to me (but seventeen year old me would have wanted to kick my ass for that).  But Jim had a great voice for a rock ‘n roll singer.  As Cheetah Chrome would have put it, he had balls.  I mean, Maggie M’Gill is a pretty pedestrian little blues shuffle, and Jim’s lyrics are mediocre at best, but I think it’s every bit as great a way to end the album as Roadhouse Blues was to open it.  It’s all Jim that propels it to something else, and I have got to give the guy credit for that.

My record is in nice shape, too.  It’s not an original pressing, it has a butterfly label instead of a red one but it does have the nice gatefold sleeve.  You can hear a little surface noise.  Maybe I need to clean it, but the jacket is pretty much perfect.  No seam splits, no mashed corners.  I did a good job taking care of this one since 1977 or 78!

Blacktop - I Got a Baaad Feeling About This

As we approach post number 50, which I had damned well better pick a decent record for, I’m  trying to think of what that record should be, and that means for sure, Mick Collins has to be in consideration.  I think Mick is one of the absolute best things about American music.  He’s got a guitar sound that is almost indescribable, and the guy can sing with as much soul and feeling as anyone, anywhere, anytime.  I’m not sure what he would consider his musical direction to be, because he’s all over the map stylistically, but his bands always have a style that they stay true to, but at the same time they don’t mind pushing envelopes.  Mick seems real good about letting the band sound like themselves, and I’d think that probably means he’s a pretty generous musician and it’s probably fun to play in his bands.

So today I’m gonna talk about Blacktop.  This is Mick’s band after The Gories, and no, I wasn’t anywhere near cool enough to know who they were while they were functioning as a unit.  I barely knew who The Gories were, and for me, the book is still out on them.  But Blacktop was awesome.  I mean, these guys were noisy and dark, with big, thumping drums and distorted, raw guitars.  Reading the liner notes of the cd version of I Got a Baaad Feelin’ About This also explains why Mick’s voice is as shredded as the guitars.  I’m pretty sure a lot of people won't  like Blacktop, but who cares?  I think it’s fantastic.  One of the albums I’m more than happy to have the original vinyl of as well as the cd with tons of bonus tracks.

The best thing about the record is that it’s one of those rare albums that are just cohesive and perfect in and of themselves.  You don’t need the cd if you have the vinyl, but it’s nice to have.  The best thing about the cd is they put the whole album in order and then they add everything else after, so you can listen to it the way it came out originally, just quit listening after track 14.  You’ll be good after that anyway, trust me.  Like I said, it’s kinda dark and it’s a record that demands your attention.  Not like it’s hard to listen to, but it’s hard to not listen to it.  You’ll pay attention.  You may get up and dance, but you’ll be involved because this is involving music.

Which kind of means that if you came here because you wanted to find what I have to say about Rod Stewart or Artful Dodger you may not like this at all.  Which is fine.  This is my record collection, and when push comes to shove, as much as I like things like BTO or David Bowie, I bet I listen to things like this more often.  It’s a shame drugs fucked this up (not Mick Collins, he’s not fucked up at all – in fact, I talked to him at a show and he’s a super nice guy), because I think Blacktop could have been something.  I’m not thinking commercial success, but something other than a band I have a record and cd of and wouldn’t ever get rid of either because I think they’re so unbelievably great.  So to me, this is one of the posts I think should get 1000 hits, but it won’t.  It will get 25 in two years, but that’s just the way it is.  Maybe if you haven’t heard them and you made your way to my little blog, you’ll check them out and you’ll like it as much as I do.

Now, my cd is the usual cd – silver and flat with terrific liner notes by Mick.  My record is cooler.  I found it at a record show, and the guy selling it didn’t know what it was, and he seemed pretty knowledgeable about more underground bands.  It was cheap, and it’s almost perfect in every way.  It was fun talking to the guy I bought it from.  I told him it was one of my all-time favorites, and it was Mick Collins.  He knew The Gories and The Dirtbombs but had no idea about Blacktop, and after I told him about it he said he wished he had listened to it.  I told him I was glad he didn’t, because I didn’t think he’d have sold it to me if he had!

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!