OK, so even the Hall’s rabid Beatles fans were underwhelmed by the offshoot Beatles-tribute single I’d stumbled across while unexpectedly researching a relatively decent song I’d foggily remembered from my teenage years of flipping FM channels in hopes of hearing a new song that rocked. Remember, this was the time when the likes of Journey, Kansas, Toto, and the relatively rocking Boston ruled the airwaves. Recent “oldies,” which would form the foundation of the Classic Rock radio format, were always cool for me, but it was tough to find something new and exciting, like newcomers Elvis Costello & the Attractions, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, and The Police.
J. Geils Band, pre-Freeze Frame, and Thin Lizzy, could deliver an occasional, plodding, half-decent new single, and then there were oddities that would make it to FM radio for a couple of weeks, like the song I’ve posted from our most recent Mystery Date.
Horslips, “The Man Who Built America”
For those of you who lived through this age, do you recall half-decent songs that could get you through a stretch of FM radio? I’d never heard of Horslips previously, and I’d never heard them again until a couple of weeks ago, when I stumbled across their collection on eMusic. I downloaded this foggily remembered track as we as the Beatles-themed single I posted the other day. I checked out their back catalog, and it turns out this Irish band came out of the British folk-prog-rock tradition of bands like Jethro Tull and Fairport Convention. See the clip I’ve provided for a more representative Horslips number. Only in the ’70s! Hearing the Tull-like stuff has once again tempted me to pull out my lone Tull album and see if I can better enjoy it while blocking out the stuff that bugs me about them.
The song reminded me of ELO (the riff sounds very similar to “Do Ya”).
That is, until the flute solo.
Not only in the 70s, but even now, I hear singles on the radio that I like, but it never occurs to me that I like them well enough to pursue the band further, or I think that even if I like the single, I can tell that I wouldn’t like much more than that. Often I don’t know the names of the band in question, and sometimes even the name of the song.