Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Tuesday Tuneage
Tarney-Spencer Band - "No Time To Lose"
1979

My barber is just a few years younger than me and always has The Jack FM on in his shop, so invariably we come across some blast from the past music-wise while he's cutting my hair. A couple of years ago it was "No Time To Lose." I didn't comment on the song at the time, being blown away that I was hearing it for the first time since high school and quietly racking my brain trying to remember the artist who sang it. I rushed home after and went to The Jack's website to look up their playlist and found out: Tarney-Spencer Band. A quick download ensued and two years later I've listened to it a couple of thousand times. Or so it seems. Love the chorus, love the moodiness, love the Cosmic Slop vibe it gives me.

See, the thing is, when I look back on songs I heard on the radio back around 1979/1980, I find the majority of them depressing. Not that they are neccessarily depressing, but I think I was filled with a lot of anxiety and dread at the time because a lot of that music does not bring back good memories. But "No Time To Lose" doesn't hit me that way even though it has a slight downer vibe. Maybe a girl randomly smiled at me the day I first heard it. I don't know, and at this point I don't care. I just love that I was able to download the song and didn't have to go searching through the used LPs bins to pay four or five bucks for what is probably a crappy album overall.

(As for the video ... well the frontman has a Jackson Browne thing going looks-wise: Browne haircut, sporting a leather jacket and boots when everybody else is going for the "regular guys" look of jeans and teeshirts, for some reason roller skating at what looks to be Venice Beach is featured, the drummer is having way too good of a time for such a serious-sounding song, and it's nice that they brought in the background singers for the video. Oh, and the YouTube link from above sounds like it was recorded from that four dollar slab of vinyl I mentioned above. Weird.)