Recently Heard: Aldo Nova

[ellyssian]

Aldo Nova

Memory
All alone in the moonlight
I can smile at the old days...

Okay, so, no, this album doesn't contain that tune. Although, to be sure, the musical did come out in the same year as this album, which is kind of funny, considering the only reason I knew that was that I checked to see if I could make some kind of joke about one or the other being older. Stole my funny right off, both of them copywritten with the same year.

1981.

And, yeah, so many memories tied up in these sounds. This was often the soundtrack for basketball. Well, this was amongst the tapes that were played. Probably closer to the mid-eighties for that memory, though.

Of course, the lead off track, Fantasy is probably his most famous tune, but the rest of them are also surprisingly familiar after many moons of not hearing them - ever since I moved and left the bulk of the tape collection behind me. Not that it mattered - the tapes had all been played to stretching, and the tape players I owned (and the ones I still own) are all notoriously hungry machines, so the next time you listen to something is likely to be the last.

These tunes are incredibly dated - sound, production, vocal style, arrangements - but these are the tunes everyone listened to and ripped off. And you know, if you actually listen to them instead of passing them off as something past tense, they're still good tunes. Sure there's some cheese factor there, but it's not supposed to be rocket science in musical form, they're just love songs of one flavor or another. Of course, if you actually existed during the early eighties, you probably listened to these tunes - or, at the least, heard the aforementioned lead-off track. Which is not about love, its about drugs.

If you think of Jon Bon Jovi's Runaway when you listen to Aldo Nova, it's not just a fluke. Aldo played guitar on that tune, and on the Blaze Of Glory Young Guns II semi-soundtrack.