An awful lot of my friends got started in music thanks to the record collection of an older brother. I don't have any older brothers, and most of my cousins, (at least the ones who lived nearby), are younger. My parents' record collection, as far as I can recall, included not one pop or rock record of any kind. Although they were the right age to be hippies, like many Newfoundlanders of their generation, the whole idea would have been absurd to them. Unfortunately for me, my one older sister was never much of a pop fan. She was more serious about actually playing music than me, and spent her time practicing piano (rather than listening to records and pretending to learn guitar). The only record she had that I ever gaffed was her one Bay City Rollers record.

The Rollers were already past their sell date the time they reached us in the colonies. At the time, in those pre-cable days, we could only get one TV channel in my neck of the woods, and that was frequently unwatchable. Popular culture had at best a four or five-year time lag. Still, you would have had to have spent the 70s in a cave not to have encountered the Bay City Rollers. Besides Kiss, they were the great teen sensation of that era. A good looking band from deepest Scotland, they played simple power-pop, and used tartan as their trademark.

By the time the Rock & Roll Love Letter LP fell into my hands, the craze had already been over for several years. However, as my record collection numbered four albums at the time, Love Letter automatically went into steady rotation. At the age of ten, I listened to this record constantly. If nothing else, it firmly convinced me that I was missing out on something. When I stumbled across it on I-Tunes recently, I could not resist downloading it. Unlike most 70's music, this has aged well.

The song Rock & Roll Love Letter was the big hit from this album, but Wouldn't You Like It is way more fun. Straight-forward British glam rock, the song would fit perfectly in the repertoire of Slade, Bowie, or any other UK rock star from that era. It features solid drums, and guitars that are just distorted enough to be cool. The hi-hat cymbal starts at the beginning and never stops. The pop hooks are just perfect, with big choruses, and verses about absolutely nothing. The solo is so simple its funny, and the bass line changes constantly. It sounds like it was played by a kid who just learned the instrument that morning, and was absolutely delighted with himself. Just like in all my bands, everyone is singing away constantly, chorus or not. To top it all off, every so often there is this weird frog-like noise. As a child, I had assumed it was just a result of the numerous scratches that covered the lp - either that, or the ancient needle on my mothers' hi-fi. At the risk of digressing into geezer land, all our records skipped and hopped. You just got used to it. Just like our rolling and snowy one channel TV, it was the way things were back then in the Neanderthal era. I am delighted to say that the I-tunes version includes this same weird belch. One cannot imagine what the point was, and the internet is no hope. My current theory is that it is an attempt to pay tribute to Slade, who included an infamous burp, courtesy of their bass player, on one of their bigger hits. Either way, it's perfect.

Love Letter is written around a flawless ‘rhyming guitar' hook, one I have just realized I have been imitating every since. Like most Roller hits, it is a cover of an earlier UK release, this one by a guy named Tim Moore. The chorus is as big as you could want, and even features shouted ‘Heys!", perfect for audience sing-alongs. The lyrics are a love letter, to rock - the lifestyle. Every eight bars something completely different happens, all of which fits perfectly with everything else. The handclaps are fat and sloppy. The bridge consists of a bunch of ‘oos', followed by a pointless and utterly ridiculous amp crash.

Absolute genius. Make no wonder Kurt Cobain loved this. First chance I get, I am going to buy another copy, and send it to my sister.