Thanks so much, Jeff! That's exactly the sort of reminiscence and input I was hoping for on this thread.
Allow me to date myself -- I too was old enough to be buying Yes, Crimson, and other progressive rock records by the late 70s. To be specific, I was 15 in 1978 and by that time was into prog. I had my own weekend job and could buy a few records: Nektar, Hawkwind, Focus, Genesis, FM, Sahara, and solo efforts by Robert Fripp and Jon Anderson were also to be found in my small stash of vinyl. But I somehow missed Starcastle entirely (which might have been harder for me to do had I the advantage you may have had in this regard, if you were in Illinois back then as well).
The first time I ever remember hearing of Starcastle was in 1996, when Jimmy Wagner and I became friends in San Francisco. Jimmy had been the keyboardist for a mid-eighties San Francisco-based incarnation of Starcastle, formed around Gary Strater who lived in the Bay Area at that time.
I remember Jimmy talking quite a bit about Starcastle and offering to loan me a cassette of the first Starcastle record (I definitely recall being struck by the castle-on-a-cloud image on its cover). I turned down the offer simply out of fear that I might misplace the only copy that Jimmy had, back in the days before Amazon and eBay made it much easier than it was then to locate or replace out-of-print items.
So, until hearing "Fountains" and "Lady of the Lake" here on SA a few months back, I had no idea what I was missing, and no idea of the quality and importance of what Jimmy had once been a part of. Now I fully understand why, over ten years later, Starcastle and his time as its keyboardist were still such important elements of Jimmy's life! Jimmy and his girlfriend Kismet left San Francisco some months or at most a year after I became friends with them, and I spoke to them only once after that...I hope life has been kind to them, and I hope we all cross paths again someday.
Jimmy, sadly, doesn't appear on any Starcastle albums, although there is some YouTube documentation of the iteration of Starcastle of which he was a part ( see
http://www.markmcgee.com/starcastle.html ). And happily, two members from that version of Starcastle, Scott McKenzie and Mark McGee, do appear on three tracks each of the 2007 reunion release, SONG OF TIMES.
Meanwhile, Jeff, from the last few months of listening to Starcastle, I totally relate to your description of their music as a "musical comfort zone." I find their music consistently comforting and uplifting--emotionally powerful, but in a different way from music that is edgy and boundary-pushing.
Btw it is *possible* that I too smoked perhaps a *little bit* of weed back in the late 70s, and it has occurred to me that if I still permitted myself such indulgences, I'd definitely want to combine them with listening to a little Starcastle...