The Old Grey Cat

Ah, 1978. I remember it well. But I have no memory of ever having seen or read this magazine, a bi-monthly that, due to the lack of advertisements within its pages, looks like it attempted to subsist on subscriptions and newsstand sales. There’s a full-page ad for Carole King’s Welcome Home album on the inside front cover; another full-page ad on the inside back cover for YSL Records, which specializes in Japanese imports; and there’s an ad on the back for Intensive Care, an album by jazz musicians Louie Bellson, Ray Brown and Paul Smith that’s billed as “the first audiophile release from Discwasher Records.”

Beyond that? There’s a half-page “classified” section that charges 50 cents a word; and this Akai-infused subscription pitch:

The magazine itself, as the subhead promises, offers “in-depth coverage of rock, jazz and classical music.” Here’s the contents page:

And, with that, here’s today’s Top 5: October 1978 (via Record Review Magazine).

1) The Rolling Stones – “Miss You.” Jon Sutherland thinks much of the Stones’ Some Girls album, which he says is “the most sweeping and powerful Stones production since Sticky Fingers” and “their finest album in nearly a decade.” He also takes a shot at the punk scene: “The Stones created the spirit the punks are now borrowing, but the punks don’t have the touch of the masters.” Ouch!

Sutherland concludes his love-fest with “[t]he Stones started the trend toward hard rock and the tenacious comment that goes with it. No one does it any better. Probably, no one ever will. The Rolling Stones are the greatest rock and roll band in the world and Some Girls is a reconfirmation of that fact.”

2) Cheap Trick – “Surrender.” Page 11 features Record Review Interview: Cheap Trick, by Boni Johnson, which mixes critical insights with quotes from Rick Nielsen. Of this song, Johnson writes that it’s “as definitive of the Cheap Trick sound as anything they’ve recorded. The melodic guitar lead, strong hooking chorus line, the dash of pop sensibility, and the simple instrumentation are all evident.”

The band had yet to break big in the States, though they had overseas. “In Japan, we’ve done very well. ‘Clock Strikes Ten’ and ‘I Want You to Want Me’ (both from In Color) were hits and we’ve scored gold albums, but it’s just a matter of time before it happens in America too,” according to Nielsen.

That time came the following year, of course, after their at Budokan live album was released.

3) Bob Dylan – “Where Are You Tonight?” Michael Davis weighs in on Bob Dylan’s legacy as well as the bard’s latest album, Street Legal. “There are those who consider Dylan close to a god, and others who regard him as a has-been with the majority somewhere in between. That he should inspire such a wide disparity of views should come as no surprise since the man has followed his changeable muse throughout the last two decades…”

Of the album itself, Davis concludes “I’m a little disappointed, but there are rewarding tracks here. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop listening to the ones that puzzle me; I know Dylan’s music well enough by now to know that the pieces don’t necessarily fall together at the beginning.”

4) Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band – “The Promised Land.” Davis also tackles Springsteen’s third album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, his first since 1975 due to a legal fight with his former manager, Mike Appel. “It appears that he was determined not to lose touch with the streets that inspired most of his songs,” writes Davis. “But of course that environment changed for him. The people that he draws his material from in Darkness on the Edge of Town are no longer street urchins, hanging out on the boardwalks and endlessly cruising and fighting their time away. They are working men who put in 40-hour weeks at jobs that slowly eat away at them, and though they try to ease their frustrations through love relationships with women and competitive relationships with other men, they are only partially successful.”

This song, says Davis, exemplifies “Bruce’s vision of working life existence.”

5) Buffalo Springfield – “Rock & Roll Woman.” Richard Nisley delves into the short but storied catalog of one of greatest rock bands of the 1960s, Buffalo Springfield. The band “had  a string of hits in the second half of the last decade, among them ‘For What It’s Worth,’ ‘Bluebird’ and ‘Uno Mundo,’” explains Nisley. “But they are better remembered for having Stephen Stills, Neil Young, and for their last album, Jimmy Messina, as members. Each went on to become a superstar in his own right, a status the band never achieved. Not that it didn’t have the chance; what it needed was time. The band was together about two years and had another year passed it likely would have emerged from the pack that included the Jefferson Airplane and the Byrds as the country’s top rock group.” Perhaps. Perhaps not.

And in the end…there’s this preview of a surefire box-office hit…