Johnny Rivers

This was one that Dad plonked onto the turntable, and it drew me right in. The cover, not so much. It looked like one of those sort of generic labels one would see on a bootleg 8-Track cartridge. The back cover was not much better, having the song titles listed again, flanked by a few hand-drawn trees, which reminded me of Wright Park. The run of songs on there inlcuded a handful of Chuck Berry tunes, "Secret Agent Man", "Mountain Of Love" (still a longtime favorite), and "Rockin' Pneumonia / Boogie-Woogie Flu". Great stuff. Mom also played this album, but seemed to favor the ballads on it, such as "Poor Side Of Town" and "The Tracks Of My Tears".

The album art was so generic that there wasn't even a picture of the artist himself anywhere on it. Dad had only one other album by him called Realization, kind of a psychedelic/introspective album, with the excellent "Summer Rain". On the photo-collage on the back cover was a guy with dark hair and thick glasses; for a second, I thought it was Doug from The New Zoo Revue!

Much later on, reminiscing about some of the classic stuff with Winter while we were in The Pace, he half-jokingly suggested that we should over-dub a gang of girls to shout, hoot and whistle while the songs were going on, sort of like the cover versions of "Maybelline" and "Memphis". Too bad we never did that!