Had I Known You Better Then, I Would've Said Those Three Ol' Words -- Daryl Hall/John Oates's Abandoned Luncheonette

While I do try to keep (negative) reputations from influencing what unfamiliar things I will listen to, it does mean that they're often things I won't go after quickly. Artists with a reputation for flaccid or sneer-inducing pop I tend not to judge near so harshly, but not knowing which will really strike a chord with me means I'm wary of touching any of them without some point of familiarity. Mix in the fact that, my current and varied and peculiar knowledge notwithstanding, I used to have no idea who wrote or sang this song or that one and it doesn't help much. Of course, those who were at a point of absorbing a lot of those facts when artists were regularly and visibly releasing music can say, "They did..." and hum or sing a few bars, sometimes even just name a song and things will fall into place. Recommendations when I stumble into something, too, can help with this.

One day a few years back, I was flipping through a crate of duplicate and unwanted records my father had, taking what I wanted for myself. After picking out the known quantities--a copy of my favourite Beach Boys album (Surf's Up) as well as the double-LP reissue that combined their later album So Tough by "Carl and the Passions," named for a pre-Beach Boys group Carl was in, packaged with Pet Sounds; The Association's Greatest Hits; and newly-appreciated-to-me Sparks' debut under that name, A Woofer in Tweeter's Clothing (they were called Halfnelson and released a self-titled debut under that name, but renamed themselves Sparks and the album was reissued as eponymously as that instead), I was left sorting through mostly obscure disco, pop, and electronic music, the dance/electronic end very much derived from the taste of one of his friends. Things like Michael Garrison's 1979 debut In the Regions of Sunreturn, which is out of print even on CD, or Larry Fast's 1975 debut as Synergy, Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra, which is an utterly fantastic album that made the charts in its day--#68, anyway--but is sort of lost today. There were some other in-between sorts of known quantities like Golden Earring's 1975 album Switch, sandwiched between 1973's Moontan (which spawned the huge hit "Radar Love") and 1982's Cut (which spawned the other big hit, "Twilight Zone").

There was one other album that managed to jump out at me, simply because it looked a bit odd, had names I knew, and had those names arranged in a peculiar fashion: