Ready An' Willing

To give you an idea of how far behind I am with the blog, when I picked up this record, there was snow on the ground. Okay, that might not be saying much, since we had a longer than normal winter here in New England, but with this record sitting in the "to be blogged" pile since April, it shows how much trouble I've been having in keeping this thing current.

Back in April, my wife and I took a weekend vacation on the New Hampshire/Vermont border. It was a great trip, and the unexpected ice and snow storm certainly made it memorable. While we were walking through the college town of Hanover, I spied a some hole in the wall store with a sign advertising "used vinyl". I made puppy dog eyes and my wife, and asked if we could duck in there and look around for a little bit. I wasn't expecting very much, but I still managed to add some classics to the collection.

Over the last few years, I've done a fair job of making the point of how much I hated Whitesnake when I was a teen in the 80's. These are definitely different times, and I've been slowly building that Whitesnake collection.

When I first started to sink into a 70's rock obsession, and finally understood the attraction to that sound, I took my first tentative steps towards Whitesnake by downloading their 1980 album, Ready An' Willing. I mean, I was already a huge fan of Deep Purple's Burn album by this time, and with half of the roster for Ready An' Willing having spent time in Purple...well, it just seemed like the safest place to start. I obviously took right to it, and it remains one of my favorite Whitesnake albums (although Lovehunter gives it a run for it's money).

I've entertained the thought of chasing a UK pressing for this one, but holding this US pressing in my hands, with a reasonable price tag, and I took the more convenient option.