Some old bands aren’t played regularly on the Oldies stations.
Once in awhile I stumble across a band that I’d forgotten about.
That happened a couple days ago.
The Little River Band
They had almost ten songs that cracked the Billboard Top 20.
Lonesome Loser and Take it Easy on Me are probably they’re best know singles.
My favorite is The Night Owls. You can hear the similarities to The Eagles. Both bands used wonderful layered vocal harmonies.
Have you rediscovered old bands that you’d completely forgotten? Then gone to Amazon to grab their greatest hits? Sometimes it’s on Amazon Music if you have Prime.
While going thru a box I came across my 45 “collection”. Just a handful of stuff. Looking thru I found a record I completely forgot about. The A-side is Stoned Cowboy by Fantasy, a FL-based band. It’s an instrumental that is a bit trippy. It’s the closest they came to a hit. Strangely, their fortunes had improved earlier once they got a new female lead singer but of course she doesn’t sing on this.
Some fans have recreated the local rock station I listened to as a kid. It’s a low-power AM station but it is on the Web. They are always surprising me with stuff that I hadn’t thought of in years. The exact opposite of those crappy oldies stations that play the same 50 songs over and over. Several of the bands have stuff posted on YouTube and it’s fun to explore them there.
Maybe not “forgotten” per se, but in the past year I’ve been getting into Madonna, of all artists, who I generally stopped paying attention to ages ago. A friend posted some phone video of a few concerts of hers he saw last year, and I was absolutely blown away by her performance, then started working my way through her back catalog. I was surprised just how damn good her last few albums have been (and how American Life is the most godawful piece of dreck I’ve heard in many moons).
I learned everything I know about LRB from the movie The Other Guys. And, I agree with Wahlberg’s character on how to classify LRB.
I don’t know that I ever rediscover bands I had forgotten about, but I often hear a song and think “I should revisit them”. I just posted in the great songs with bad lyrics thread and T-Rex was one of the bands I brought up (it was about the early glam rock bands in general) and just last night I listened to The Slider. I haven’t really listened to T-Rex in many years but good lord is that album great. I’ll be listening to others over the next weeks. Too bad Bolan died so young.
I made a Pandora playlist for the 90s music I liked during my teenage years. Turns out I should have been way more into The Offspring and Gin Blossoms. I didn’t know I was lost at the time, and now I’m longing for what used to be.
Every few years, I “rediscover” the Beatles. Granted, I know all of their material like the back of my hand, but after being away from the majority of it for a while, it all ends up sounding fresh again. I can’t say that about very many artists.
I have a small number of bands that I knew about I’ve “discovered” recently, I don’t know if that fits. One of them is The Little River Band. I knew them and their songs but didn’t appreciate them until recently. They went from a band I know to one of my favorites.
Another is T Rex, also mentioned. I’ve been listening to Electric Warrier a lot. The person mentioned The Slider. Something to check out later today.
Another for me is Dr. Hook.
Oh, wow, “Lonesome Loser” is a song I haven’t heard in a long, long time. There are a few singers/bands who I remember from the radio but don’t hear them a whole lot.
There’s Clint Holmes’ “Playground in My Mind” from 1972. My Uncle Mike hated this song for some reason.
There are an awful lot of songs I remember hearing on the radio but have no memory of who actually sang them. Sometimes I’m I misidentify the singer like I did with “Lonesome Loser” thinking it was the Eagles.
“Sausalito Summernight” by Diesel is a song I hadn’t heard in a great many years until it come up on my YouTube feed for some reason. If someone had asked me about the band Diesel I would have shrugged my shoulders saying I never heard of them.
Now that I think about it, there’s probably going to be a lot of one-hit wonders on this list.
In my “heavy metal” days my friends and I were fans of a band called Metal Church. Just took another listen for the first time in decades. Cool stuff.
Somewhat related, but every now and then I will discover an “old” band I had never heard of while growing up in the 1970s/1980s. One such band is Babe Ruth. The guitarist was phenomenal - not sure why they weren’t bigger.
I’ve got a wall full of CDs. Occasionally I’ll bring a bunch to one of the fewer and fewer used CD shops in town, but I still have the majority of what I’ve amassed since I got my first player back in 1988 (except for what got lost in a house robbery in 1995…the quaint old days when burglars bothered with one’s disc collection). And I’ll once and a while deliberately look to one of the lower shelves and dig up something I haven’t played in a decade. And all of a sudden, “Wow, that TV On The Radio record was pretty awesome…wonder what happened to them?” “Hmmm…maybe Datblygu don’t sound as much like the Fall as I remembered.” “Sigh. There really only were one or two good tracks on that Yeah Yeah Yeahs album.” Occasionally I’ll literally stop and go, “Okay, I don’t actually remember owning any by this artist.” which is a tad unsettling.
Their eponymously named song off their first eponymously named album (I hear Metal Church were huge Bad Co fans ) is a certified banger! I’m a fan of that early era thrash metal, most of it Bay area, and that is where Metal Church started before moving to my neck of the woods.
My 3-y/o grandson asked me about all the vinyl I have in a corner of my den. So I pulled one out and put it on the turntable - it was the Cowsills first album. Man, did that take me back!! It’s got me wondering what else is on that shelf. Some day when I don’t have a ton of chores, I’ll have to flip thru.
A few years back I made a big push to rip all my old vinyl albums to mp3. There were a few that I hadn’t listened to for at least 25 years that it was good to hear again.
Lake - their debut album
Montrose - their debut album
Mike Rutherford - “Smallcreep’s Day”
INXS - “Shabooh Shoobah”
Like @aceplace57 says, it’s weird how you can put on an album you haven’t heard in decades and the words and music all come flooding back like it was yesterday.
I was into Slade a bit way back in high school in the 80s, loved a few songs but that was it. I recently stumbled across them anew, and went on a voracious consumption binge of their songs, performances, etc. They really had some amazing performance chops and pop composition sense. It’s a real shame they never caught on here in the US, which I understand was mostly due to poor promotion and touring opportunities, they just couldn’t get a finger into the payola pie here to get significant airplay.
) is a certified banger! I’m a fan of that early era thrash metal, most of it Bay area, and that is where Metal Church started before moving to my neck of the woods. 