Carolyne Mas - Mas Hysteria

This little known gem is from Carolyne Mas, A New York born singer/songwriter who gained popularity mostly in Canada and in Europe. She had three albums between 1979 and 1981 on Mercury Records. Mas Hysteria was a live radio broadcast on WLIR recorded at a club ("My Father's Place") on Long Island, New York. The rights to the recording were bought by Phonogram in Germany and a limited edition LP was released in 1980 in Germany only, as a promotional tool for an upcoming television concert. Due to it's popularity and sales the record was re-released several years in a row and eventually sold a quarter million copies, outselling her other "official" albums. I don't believe she ever saw any money from these sales.

Mas wrote and played some great rock songs and a few ballads. The band is excellent with awesome sax playing from Crispin Cioe. I saw her live twice, once in '79 and again in '81 and this 6 track album is a great (albeit short) account of what a Carolyne Mas show was really like.

I first saw this LP when I was traveling in Germany in 1981. I saw it in a record shop and assuming it was a regular release, I decided to wait til I got back home to Canada to buy it rather than trying to fit it in my backpack. I found this copy 29 years later.


Tracks:

1.Hold on (3:21)
2.Stay true (4:05)
3.Thomas Dunson's revenge (4:44)
4.Running from the high life (4:14)
5.Sittin' in the dark (12:51)
6.Quote goodbye quote (5:19)


Carolyne has retained a following over the years and released a few more CD's through her website.
http://www.carolynemas.com

She also founded "Our Animal Haus, Inc.", Mas' non-profit sanctuary for unwanted, abused, and special needs animals and birds.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Our-Animal-Haus-Inc/126926305096

Carolyne retired from making music in 2008 in order to care for her aunt and her mother as well as the animals in her sanctuary.

Rose - A Taste of Neptune

I recently picked up this LP again (whatever happened to the one I bought in the 70's is beyond me). I always thought this was a great album with a good mix of pop, pomp and prog rock. Rose had three albums in Canada and were largely unknown to even Canadians except to a small fan base in Southern Ontario and also strangely enough in South Korea. In fact, no Rose LP has ever been released on CD except for this album was released a few years ago in South Korea on Si-Wan Records and can usually be found on Ebay for around $15 bucks.

The title track is well known among prog rock aficionados and is a great song by any standard. Other stand outs are "Bangin' My Head Against the Wall" and "Ride Away". If you want to learn about this band there is very little on the net and most of the web pages that you will find are in Korean.

Rose had three albums but enjoyed only limited success until they reincarnated as "Toronto" in the early 80's with a female singer named Holly Woods. They had a few well received albums in Canada before splitting up in 1984.

I saw Rose a few times live but the most memorable was in the mid seventies where they opened for Triumph. Triumph had only one LP out at the time and were still a small southern Ontario Canadian act. The show was at the dilapidated Delta Theatre in Hamilton which showed dirty movies during the week and had a $2.99 Concert Series on Saturdays all summer long that year. After Triumph became famous, they were well known for their amazing light show and pyrotechnics. For this show they has a string of light bulbs across the front of the stage that flashed in different sequences and something that looked liked a glorified bunsen burner from science class belching out puffs of orange flame to the music. During the last song Triumph bassist Mike Levine burned his arm on the flame and they could not come back out for an encore.

Several years later I met Brian Allen (lead singer / song writer for Rose) and he recalled the show, laughing "Oh yeah, that was the night Levine burnt his arm".