2 posts tagged “hard rock”
There were four of us in the same grade growing up: Kevin at the top of the street, me in the next house down, Mario across the street from me, and Robert two houses down. When we started buying records in junior high we planned for maximum variety, coordinating our purchases so as not to duplicate each others' collections, taping the records that the others bought. Add in taping off the radio (the new album in its entirety every night at 11:00 on WAVA) and we amassed pretty sizable cassette collections. But of course the cassettes are long gone, and I never got around to replacing most of them with records or CDs. In 1980 Kevin bought Michael Schenker's first album after leaving the Scorpions (again) and helming the new Michael Schenker Group. I've been longing to hear "Feels Like a Good Thing," so I snapped up a copy of the album at last weekend's record show, and here it is, aw, yeah!
Like the Piper track I posted a while ago, the drums at the beginning are some tempting sample fodder. And Schenker has always been a great soloist; he may have the most fluid playing style in all of hard rockdom. Deep Purple's Roger Glover produced the album, I really like the balance here, just before turning the snare up to twenty-two became all the rage. The four of us saw MSG at the late, lamented Capital Centre, where we saw so many concerts during our teenage years. They would run a summer series of B-level acts with tickets for just eight bucks! I think that was the deal with MSG. They may even have been the opening act, but I can't remember who the other band was. Was it Foghat? No, I think they were paired up with Molly Hatchet. Anyway, I don't remember the show at all, but I do remember the concert jersey I bought: black with white sleeves, with the MSG logo and Schenker's trademark white Flying V on the front, tour dates listed on the back. I wore that one a lot.
Here's another entry in my USB-turntable-need-obviation game, which goes like this: "Ooh, I want one of those USB turntables so I can rip some more vinyl to mp3 files, like, say, Neil Merryweather's Kryptonite album. But I may as well search the blogs to see if somebody's already done it... Well how about that, there it is! Guess I don't really need a USB turntable after all (yet)." I loved Neil Merryweather's albums before I even heard them: look at that album cover, how could an album by long-haired space-flying superheros be anything less than stellar? Kryptonite the album kicks off with "Kryptonite" the song, and it's hard-rock heaven: no subtlety, no concessions to the blues, stupid yet perfect femme fatale lyrics ("And little did I know, that underneath her clothes, she had a heart... OF PURE KRYPTONITE!"). It's loud, dumb, and irresistible, and it's right here:
Ah, that was always good for a pick-me-up back in my record store days. It would have been perfect for one of my evenings of drunken backgammon and record-playing with my friend Pete back in Maryland, but I could never find the record at the right time. I've been hearing a lot of chatter about the Mynah Birds lately, the legendary 60s Canadian band led by a young, draft-dodging Rick James and featuring an also-young Neil Young as a supporting member. Lo and behold, Neil Merryweather, born in Canada as Robert Neilson Lillie, was also in the band, though after Young had left. "Wheels within wheels," man! And he played in a band with Bruce Cockburn, too! I am a sucker for reading intricate band and musician bios, and Merryweather's is particularly interesting, though his Wikipedia entry ends abruptly around 1970. But I know, because I have them, that he put out two great albums in the mid-70s, 1974's Space Rangers and 1975's Kryptonite. Merryweather would surface in the 80s as the auteur of Lita Ford's post-Runaways solo career, producing, playing bass, and co-writing four songs for her first solo album, Out for Blood. And that's about where I lost track of him.
