The 1981 K-Tel album Pure Rock features fourteen songs from the primo Classic Rock era of 1973-1980 and all but one of them (dammit, Styx) was a Top 40 hit on Billboard's Hot 100 Singles chart. The fact that only three of the songs cracked the Top 10 accounts for the album's less than 24 score on the K-Tel Scale. (The score is so low that I am going to refrain from publishing the traditional K-Tel Scale Scorecard for the album.) Pure Rock is an album more for the rock music fan than the traditional K-tel album buying pop music fan. And I am that rock fan. Here are videos of the first four tracks:
I remember very clearly my Dad receiving Foreigner's Head Games album from Columbia House as part of a two-fer Selection of the Month with Candy-O by The Cars sometime in early 1980 or possibly late 1979 and him being mad at my Mom for not sending his Selection Card back in on time until he found it tucked inside the Columbia House catalog he left peaking out from under the turntable where he had left it after opening the mailer and discarding all the other inserts. I was in eighth grade at the time and both albums were quite popular with the boys and surprisingly, the girls.
The Alberto Vargas cover art of Candy-O was especially popular with the boys, with magazine clippings featuring the titillating cover art spilling out of notebooks in the classrooms and hallways of junior high like highly prized contraband. Even as a horny teen, I gravitated towards the Head Games cover which depicts a girl leaning against a urinal (gross!) wiping something off a bathroom stall with toilet paper. The mysterious and somewhat sinister image coupled with the album's opening track ("Dirty White Boy") implied something else was going on, way above and beyond my inexperience as a 13 year old still wearing clothes my Mom made.
Between the two versions of Pure Rock, there are twenty-five different tunes so I rounded them all up in the sweet Can-Am for the Trans-Am Mix below.
Next time out, we're featuring Danger High Voltage and "the supercharged hits of today":
Pure Rock is available on vinyl and 8-track. (And maybe cassette though my crack volunteer research team, fresh off their legally mandated 72 hour Summer Break, could find no evidence on the Web.) As with most of the latter day, post 1978 K-Tel albums, collectors should be able to find a copy of Pure Rock for less than a couple of bucks. I am a big fan of the Pure Rock album and the playlists above and below are more than three years old, making them some of the first K-Tel playlists I put together. Pure Rock was also issued in Canada with the usual alternate track listing including both different and more songs as well as slightly tweaked cover art. In the U.S., the cover art (below) featured artists names in a red banner; in Canada (above), no artist names were featured in the banner.
Next time out, we're featuring Danger High Voltage and "the supercharged hits of today":
No K-Tel Scale Scorecard? Bah, humbug.
ReplyDeleteWe had the cassette version of Pure Rock in my early youth so I can personally vouch for the fact that it did indeed exist in the US. Head Games and The Grand Illusion were two of my favorite tracks to listen to from it and I usually played it on my single speaker portable cassette player.
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