My one claim to fame as a kid in the early seventies was that my aunt's boy friend was in the band Lighthouse. As that very rarely impressed anyone my age, most kids were into the Partridge Family or at best The Beatles, the information that he played electric viola in a rock and roll band meant that sort of knowing the late Don Dinovo never really bought me that much status. It wasn't his fault, or Lighthouse's either for that matter, for although the band did enjoy moderate success with hits such as "Sunny Days", they were never that popular among the pre-pubescent crowd.

Aside from their associations with my vain attempts at reflected fame, Lighthouse will always stand out in my memories as being the first rock and roll band I knew who used instruments I had only ever associated with orchestras before. In their hey-day they not only had the standard compliment of guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards they also featured a horn and a string section. In many ways they were probably the first fusion band that I knew of, but even more importantly they broadened my perspective as to what popular music could be. It was through Lighthouse that I discovered my appreciation for funk, R&B, and soul.

Of course the first time I saw footage of James Brown, Sly And The Family Stone, George Clinton, or any of the other great soul and funk performers, I was knocked out. The energy, the power, the sex – no wonder they never played that stuff on am radio stations in Toronto The Good in the early seventies (Toronto Ontario was referred to as Toronto The Good for the longest time due to the province of Ontario's absurd liqueur licensing laws which made it almost impossible to be served alcohol on a Sunday. In fact, to this day you can still only buy alcohol in either an officially designated beer store or a wine and spirits store)  – the consequences would have been too sever to contemplate. A whole generation of White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPS) might have grown with a sense of rhythm, and that just wouldn't have done.

Since those early funk and soul deprived days, I've spent many a fruitless hour listening to music that people were passing off as R&B, soul, or funk and being gravely disappointed with what I heard. Instead of horn sections that exploded or who could blow soft and sultry, there was a mishmash of pathetic strings that was supposed to send my heart soaring and the sound of something occasionally bleating in the back ground that could have been horns. So listening to Freeworld's, a band I've never heard of, new disc, From The Bluff, distributed by Select-O-Hits, wasn't a step I took lightly. Their promotional material promising music that combined funk, R&B, and soul with "the energy of jam band rock and the improvisational sophistication of jazz" strained at the limits of what I could believe. I've heard way to much middle of the road dreck be referred to as "soulful" for me to have much hope that this disc would be any different from countless previous letdowns.