Rarebird's Rock and Roll Nest

This week, the Wounded Bird label is reissuing three Cheap Trick albums on CD. Those albums are Standing on the Edge (1985), The Doctor (1986), and Busted (1990). I am glad to see these CDs made available for those who wish to purchase them. However, speaking as a long-time fan of Cheap Trick, I do not recommend any of them. The first two of these albums are from the period in the 1980’s when bassist Tom Petersson was temporarily absent from the group, and was replaced by Jon Brant for a four-album stretch. The third, Busted , could easily be mistaken for an album from that period. Before we go any further, I should point out that the first two Petersson-less albums from the ‘80’s were recently issued as a 2-on-1 CD by the Friday Music label. When One On One (1982) and Next Position Please (1983) were first released, they were quite discouraging. It was clear that the absence of their original bass player had a noticeable effect on Cheap Trick’s chemistry, and Jon Brant made no im...

How old does this make you feel? The video game Pac-Man turned 30 years old this past May. For those who may actually be unfamiliar with this game, its title character is a yellow circle whose mouth opens and closes. The Pac-Man runs around a labyrinthine maze eating dots, while four monsters which look like colored ghosts try to catch him. Does this sound simplistic? By today’s video game standards, it is. That’s the way video games tended to be at the beginning of the 1980’s. They were simply-drawn, adrenaline-releasing no-brainers. And they were very addictive. They used to cost 25 cents per game credit at the arcade, but literally billions of quarters per year were dropped into arcade video game machines in the early ‘80’s. These games thrived at a time when the U.S. economy was in a slump that was nearly as severe as the recent one. One particular industry that suffered at that time was the music business, and the video game craze was often blamed for this. The general consensus w...

Time continues to fly. It has now been eleven years since I first created my website Rarebird’s Rock and Roll Rarity Reviews . This is one time when I cannot say that little has changed with the site in the past year. When my old web page service was discontinued by the provider a few months ago, I moved the site to its new domain at rarebird9.net . It’s something I probably should have done a long time ago. Besides having an address that is easier to remember (and, in this day and age, easier to Tweet), I am now provided with more detailed information about the traffic that comes to my site. If I went by the external counter on my home page – which I have been going by for nearly six years – I would think that only 1 or 2 people visited the site each day. According to my web provider’s stats, the site is actually used by more than 30 unique visitors each day, and that includes the home page. Apparently, many types of hits do not register on the Amazing Counters counter. Much has chan...