Tracks
Rock Solid
Sands of Time
It’s Thursday, must be time to write about another obscure NWOBHM single.
The one-off release from BOLLWEEVIL has everything you could want in a NWOBHM single. It’s got a monochrome picture sleeve. The sleeve has a great image of a shrunken head on it (I’ve always been amazed at how creative NWOBHM bands were with these simple picture sleeve designs). The single was released on the highly collectible Ellie Jay label, which also gave us other great singles including BASHFUL ALLEY and BIG DAISY as well as other rarities of the genre including SPEED, ANTHEM, SHADER, and SUSPECT. It came out in 1981, which was right at the peak of the NWOBHM movement. I mean really, what more could you want in a NWOBHM single?
Oh, right, maybe I should mention the music.
It’s really good! ‘Rock Solid’ is the killer here. It rolls along at a brisk pace. It has sort of a simple guitar line but also sports a nasty, fuzzy edge that packs a lot of energy into the tune. The best comparison is the first CRUCIFIXION single, which I’ve gushed about in a separate review on a previous Thursday. ‘Sands of Time’ is similar but is a bit more restrained; it’s not a bad song at all, just not on par with ‘Rock Solid’. This single might be a tad raw or primitive for some ears, but in my opinion you’re getting two rock solid tracks of undiluted NWOBHM goodness here. All in all, this single is the complete package, which explains why it’s remained one of the more expensive NWOBHM singles for the past 30 years or so now.
I have always had a soft spot for the BOLLWEEVIl single because it was the first NWOBHM vinyl rarity that I got to see and hear live and in person (settle in kids, it’s story time). Back in the early 90s, when the internet was barely a thing and ebay was a grammatical error, vinyl dealers advertised in the back pages of ‘Goldmine’ magazine, one of the oldschool music publications. My dad had a subscription dating back to when time signatures were just being invented, so I grew up surrounded by stacks of back issues. So when I started searching for Metal vinyl, ‘Goldmine’ was naturally the first place I looked.
One of the regular advertisers back then was a British fellow named John Allinson, who mailed out a small, stapled, set-sale list once every month or so. As luck would have it, John had retired to a small rural area in the Appalachian Mountains that was only about a one-hour drive from the 2-stoplight town that I lived in. Once he realized that I was serious about buying metal albums (well, as serious as an 18-year old burger flipper could be), he invited me to come visit his place. While I spent my minimum wage paycheck on various items, he showed me some of his really cool, rare vinyl and played a lot of awesome stuff for me too. The item that he was proudest of was his copy of the BOLLWEEVIL single, which he proclaimed was in no one else’s collection at that time.
Looking back, I have no idea whether that was true or not; John was a very nice fellow but no one knows everything when it comes to Who Owns What. Nevertheless, it was amazing to be able to drive just an hour from home and see something like that. For some context, it was over an hour’s drive just to get to the nearest Camelot Records store. Need more context? My town was so rural that it took the local movie theater about one full calendar year to receive any new movie. We didn’t get to see ‘Star Wars’ until 1978; it debuted on May 25, 1977. As such, finding some top metal vinyl rarities so close to home was about as likely as finding an aircraft carrier in a Paleolithic dig site. Years later John sold off his collection. I managed to get a couple of things, but I’ve always wished that I could have obtained his copy of BOLLWEEVIL that I’d seen at his house back at the beginning of my collecting journey.
Kaum aufzufinden ist diese Stahlperle bei deren Anblick der glaeubige nwobhm Juenger Traenen des Gluecks vergiessen wird. Rock Solid ein Super Midtempo Song, typisch britische Gitarrenarbeit und typisch britischer Gesang. Sands of time faengt balladesk an und endet in einem virtuosen Soundgewand. Hier kriegt man fuer seinen investierten halben Tausender wirklich was geboten.