Someone recently posed the question on one of the vinyl collector’s forums: “How do you all find new music to listen to? The radio is crap….” Among many suggestions posted in reply, my response was that I dig deeper into old music to find “new” things to listen to. My taste is all over the place, and having such a broad range creates greater opportunity to find cool records. Here are some records that I found out about somewhat accidentally by being in the right place at the right time. These are records I hadn’t heard of before, but ended up being good finds.
One summer afternoon, my wife and I found ourselves knocking on the front door of an old rowhouse. Yet again I had dragged my wife, who listens almost exclusively to Top 40 Country songs and Christmas music, to go record hunting with me. (If that’s not true love, I don’t know what is.) A man came around the corner and lead us down a hill to where his rusted-out pickup truck was parked. He pulled an old dirty quilt off the hood to reveal about 10 crates of rock albums. A lot of them were in rough shape, and smelled like cigarette smoke, but after thumbing through a few titles I knew that it would be $50 well spent. I ended up finding three gems that really stood out.
Heavy Cruiser (1972) is an album by a band of the same name. It looked promising from the crumbly lettering on the front to the band pic on the back of four guys on a moonscape with guns and bullet belts. It opens with a great crunchy cover of Eddie Cochran’s “C’mon Everybody.” This is a great rock album that runs a gamut of styles from heavy to soft. “Lectric Lady” is one of the heaviest and best tracks. The last song on the second side “Miracles of Pure Device” is unusual and out-of-character for this album. It’s more experimental and noisy and ends with an answering machine loop. Heavy Cruiser was a project of bassist Neil Merryweather, and is basically the same lineup as another band called Mama Lion, but without female vocalist Lynn Carey. A second album, Lucky Dog, was released in 1973.
Privilege (1969) is a self-titled release produced by the Isley Brothers for their T-Neck Records label. It’s a pretty good bluesy/psych rock outing with a lot of good fuzzy guitar riffs and soloing. Privilege was formed by two members of the Philly R&B outfit Soul Survivors. The Isleys invited them to record for T-Neck after having been impressed with their musicianship. On the liner notes on the back of the cover, organist Paul Venturini is quoted as saying “We want you to enjoy this album, feel it, whether your thing is FM or AM….” I can’t help but think how strange it is that a lot of younger people today would have to google that to find out what it means. Man I feel old.
Trapeze had a prolific recording career and existed in several incarnations from 1969-1994. Members went on to be in Deep Purple and Judas Priest. The fact that I had never heard of Trapeze until I found this copy of Medusa (1970) in that record lot makes me wonder what else is out there that I’m missing out on. That’s the beauty of vinyl. There’s a seemingly endless number of records waiting for discovery. Despite the fact that my copy is falling apart at the seams, and there is an annoying jump at the beginning of side 1 (drives my inner record geek crazy) I was really happy to find this one. There’s not many ways to describe it other than saying that it’s a great hard rock album. Great riffs, raspy vocals with a lot of heart, guitar fuzzbox, heavy bass, heavy drums, and cowbell, what more do you need really? Worth checking out.
TRACKING FORCE 