Mean Streak

There are times when I'm at work, and I can no longer keep my mind on the task at hand. I've been there since 6:30 in the morning...it's a rainy day and I haven't been able to go out and play basketball at lunch...now it is the afternoon and my brain is fried. I need a distraction to keep from bouncing my head off the desk, so I bring up eBay on my computer and start searching for new vinyl. I hit my usual searches, then I'll look for whatever band I'm hot on collecting at the moment, and if I need to kill some more time, I'll search for vinyl for those albums that I've downloaded but just have never purchased. This particular day, Y & T popped up in my ipod, and the search was on.

Y & T were a Metal band from the L.A. scene in the late 70's and early 80's. I listened to them early on, when I was first starting to get into Metal. I have a clear memory of being out on the lake in my father's fishing boat in '83 or '84...I was bored, but I had my Walkman cassette player with a live Y & T show that I recorded off MTV. That cassette got me through the afternoon. In the years to follow, I quickly forgot all about Y & T as I moved on to harder and faster Metal bands. Earlier this year I was reading a book from Martin Popoff's Ye Olde Metal series, and found a chapter about the band's debut album in 1978, Struck Down. I had never ventured that far back in the band's catalog, but I also found that I couldn't remember any of their songs. I quickly downloaded a couple of the band's albums, but none of them even sounded familiar. I really enjoyed them, but everything was new for me with this band. 1983's Mean Streak album is classic early 80's Metal. Love it.