My Music Blog 2025: May 24, 2025

 

Saturday, May 24, 2025

 

Time: 6:33 PM

Song: Rock n’ Roll is a Vicious Game

Artist: April Wine

Mode of Consumption: Listening to the vinyl album “First Glance” by April Wine.

Link to song: https://open.spotify.com/track/76F3ohBe5qt8QuTqspRpiD?si=dfa3e855b75f42bc

 

The cover of this record has five men from the waist up against a gray background with the band name in red and the album title in black surrounded by yellow above them. All five guys have longish hair, three of them have beards, all are white, and they look exactly like you would expect a rock band from the 1970s to look like. 

 

Four of the members are gazing straight ahead, the one in the middle is wearing sunglasses with big rims and looking off to the side. It’s a rock and roll statement, I suppose, but also probably something the photographer suggested to add a little variety and depth to the shot. 

 

“You think the guy in the middle is the singer?” I asked. I know nothing about April Wine. 

 

“Probably.” Jodi said. “Did we decide what April Wine’s big song was?

 

“I don’t remember.” 

 

As I type this, I’ve searched Spotify to find that the song that appears to be April Wine’s hit is “Just Between You and Me.” 

 

This album came from a bulk lot that I bought from a man in Winslow, IL. On the back of the album cover, someone has put their name in cursive in black ink. He didn’t want to lose this album, or he just wanted people to make sure that they knew it was his.

 

There were three April Wine albums in this lot, so he dug what they were sending. That’s the interesting part of buying a bulk lot of records from someone. You get a tiny glimpse into the music that they liked. I can’t imagine there were a lot of people in northern Illinois with three April Wine records in their collections, they just were never that big of a band in the states. That’s a serious investment. 

 

I wonder what it was about them that caught his attention. Was he waiting for them to hit it really big so that he could tell others that he knew them before they were big? Did he consider “Just Between You and Me,” a sellout song when it arrived in 1981?