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".