He has posted more classic K-Tel albums from the Seventies and Eighties to YouTube - complete with all the clicks and pops some of you may remember - than any other uploader but hidden in plain sight among those sentimental posts are Brandon Hixson's original K-Tel inspired compilations. Brandon has dubbed these albums, uploaded from CD-Rs unearthed from his personal archives, The Best Albums K-Tel Never Made and he was kind enough to send The K-Tel Kollection an advance notice, including hi-res cover art, of the latest wave a couple of weeks back. We'll be featuring these unique albums a few at a time, in somewhat chronological order, sharing the original YouTube links so you can show Brandon some support as well as exclusive Spotify recreations of each album just for fun.
Don't let the tiny glitch in the otherwise skillfully crafted cover art fool you into thinking this was just a quick, haphazardly slapped together effort. It's obvious just by glancing at the tracklist that Starfall '79 is sequenced by someone with a deep affection for and familiarity with the music of the time. While not completely a disco mix, there are enough dance floor ditties here to shake your booty to. Those who appreciate songs outside the Top 40 will find a handful of such lost hits here.
This compilation of tunes from 1979 and 1980 certainly does feature some of what were back then Today's Best Shots. Whereas Starfall '79 leaned more towards the dance floor, this album has a bit more rock, both hard(er) and soft(er), in its sixteen tracks. Today's Best Shots is an excellent, wide-angle snapshot of a particular time in popular music that is near and dear to a lot of folks, including us.
The primary reason The Kollection doesn't upload mixes to YouTube and the like is that others, like Brandon, have already done it. And over on Mixcloud, there's a whole other trove of classic K-Tel album rips from both Show N K-Tel (who seems to have gone dormant) and Vinyl Voyage Radio. Plus it cannot be any fun to have your upload taken down by the copyright police or getting bombarded by inane comments from ungrateful viewers. Despite those obstacles and setbacks, Brandon continues to post great stuff like The Hitline '81 (not to be confused with this similarly titled K-Tel album). It's the rock tracks on this one that we really appreciate and the first four songs that open the album take us back to our first days here in the desert at the end of Summer 1981. The three songs that close out the album are also favorites.
Radio Frequency '81 also has a few of our favorite songs, including a repeat appearance of Balance's "Breaking Away" but after a couple of listens, we'd have to say Radio Frequency '81 is not as strong a listen as the other three albums featured above. By the time we had started our sophomore year a full month later than our classmates, our tastes had shifted from the everything goes of Top 40 on WLS to the rock and new wave of KLPX and KWFM where half of these songs got no airplay.
We would not have picked Nightstar up in back in the day, even if it had existed. That's not a knock on the quality of the tracklisting but a comment on our evolving music tastes at the time. We've grown older and more open to different music for different moods and activities since then and, earlier this week, we shared this playlist with the unsuspecting neighborhood under the cover of the night and the stars and no one called the cops on us so we'll take that as a whole bunch of thumbs-up. Climax Blues Band's "I Love You" and the not often heard tracks from Jesse Winchester and The Dillman Band get thumbs-up from us. Another great mix.
Kicking off with five great up-tempo songs in a row before hitting a speed bump, Volume 1 of Summer Nights '79 gets off to a great start for a solid nineteen minutes before taking a breather. Comprised solely of songs that were on Billboard's Hot 100 chart dated July 21, 1979, there are several ups and downs and in-betweens throughout this one. This first volume of Summer Nights '79 also ends extremely well with five of our personal favorites in a row so we can't wait for Volume 2. Our favorite track on this one is Night's cover of Walter Egan's "Hot Summer Nights" with Stevie Lange's sultry vocals still doing it for us nearly forty years later.
Volume 2 of Summer Nights '79 opens with Styx's "Renegade", a rocker that dominated the WLS airwaves back in the Summer of 1979, eventually peaking at number 6. In the epic impromptu sister group disco battle between The Jones Girls and Sister Sledge, we have to give it to "You Gonna Make Me Love Somebody Else" while noting both groups recently lost a sister. The interesting thing about listening to Volume 2 and knowing it was all songs from a particular chart from the sweltering Summer of 1979, we anticipated which songs would play after the opening salvo, I was thinking Van Halen's "Dance The Night Away" or The Knack's "My Sharona" or Cheap Trick's Budokan version of "I Want You To Want Me" was coming up but, sadly, they didn't make Brandon's list. Which gave us this idea.
YouTube Spotify
We would have been all over Electric back in the early Eighties. Killer lineup of artists, killer tracklist and dig that sweet "animated" cover art. The only complaint we have, and it's a minor one, is that there are only fourteen tracks. They are fourteen really great songs, though, and at least six of the featured acts have been institutionalized in Cleveland so you know Electric absolutely rocks! This is early Eighties AOR at its finest and hands down our favorite compilation of the eight(!) we've featured today.
The next chapter in The Best Albums K-Tel Never Made will cover 1982.
To see another really good K-Tel album that should have been, go HERE.
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