Saturday, July 26, 2008

Non-archaeology post Another in our continuing series of Great Albums You've Probably Never Heard Of: Crash and Burn by Pat Travers:


You know, I was going to go all snarky and kind of label this a "great" album, but since listening to it right now it's a lot less. . .ummmmm. . .crotch rock than I remembered. Mainly because the song I particularly remember is Snortin' Whiskey which was the big hit off of it and is fairly heavy. In fact, Travers was always pretty hard rock and most of the album is just that. OTOH, a few of the tracks on this one are not what you would expect. He does a cover of Bob Marley's Is This Love? which was the first time I'd ever heard the song. Born Under a Bad Sign is also more bluesey than you'd expect and he's got a slower ballad-type song on it. Probably more jazz-like rhythms than you'd expect from a basically guitar-heavy rock band of that era.

He never really reached a whole lot of commercial success; what he had was primarily on the old AOR stations, which is where I first heard him. Apparently, he influenced a lot of other hard rock guitarists though and still tours today. I have an original vinyl copy but I bought it from iTunes, too. Apparently, the Hot Shot album is considered his best, but alas, this is the only Travers album I've ever heard.

Side note: I got this album along with a bunch of others when I joined one of those record-by-mail clubs. You know, they used to advertise 13 LPs for 1 cent! Of course, you had to then agree to buy like 5 more at the regular price which was like $12.99 or something (expensive in those days). And they would automatically send you their pick of the month unless you sent a card back in with a different pick or rejecting it altogether. Hence, my first order of 11 or 13 or whatever had a lot of LPs that I had always kind of thought I should get but never did. I know I got this one, a Marshall Tucker, Christopher Cross (shut up), Pablo Cruise (shut up), and some others.