Streetheart - Meanwhile Back in Paris

1978 was probably one of the more formative years for me musically. At the time I didn't really think much about it, but looking back, holy cow and boy howdy, it was a banner year. It was the year "Baker Street" made the saxophone sexy, and the guitar solo in that song still makes me smile. It was also the year my cousin introduced me to Ted Nugent through his incendiary Double Live Gonzo and Prism's sophomore album, See Forever Eyes. The number of bands I waited patiently to hear on the radio or at a friend's house was just mind-boggling. I started making a list of the bands and songs I could hardly wait to hear, but it got so long that it just looked silly. It's a great list.

I didn't have much in the way of vinyl, so it was up to friends and spotty AM radio to supply my favourite songs. One of the coolest songs from my youth was "Action." And no, it wasn't by The Sweet (although that's an awesome song, and I did actually own the 45 at one time); it was by Streetheart. The song had it all: a big riff, a wicked groove (dare I say discoesque?), a solid bottom end, and a killer vocal.

Over the years, Streetheart would release a lot of great songs and weave themselves into the fabric of Canadian classic rock. I had (and have again) a couple of their albums but never did get the debut. Then one day, there it was in the bin, just waiting for someone to rescue it and give it a home. Sadly, there was no liner, but the jacket was okay, and despite the surface rash, the vinyl was fairly free of clicks and pops after a good cleaning.

That first track is still the one that gets my attention. Drummer Matt Frenette's hi-hat over Daryl Gutheil's synth, combined with the gut-reverberating thump of Spider Sinnaeve's distinctive bass, sets the tone, and to top it off, Paul Dean's searing guitar rips it up. It was a pattern Matt and Paul would emulate a couple of years later when Loverboy dropped "Turn Me Loose," but it's "Action" that has the cocky strut. Behind the scenes there was stuff going on, and Paul would leave the band just as Meanwhile Back in Paris started to take off in Canada. Matt would leave after the next album and join Paul in Loverboy.

Being able to finally hear this album and dig into the deep cuts has been a lot of fun. I don't know why I assumed it was one killer track followed by filler. I went in expecting to have my worst suspicions confirmed, and after two sides and a repeated play-through to make sure, I can confidently say this album is pretty darned good. I do have to say the big rock ending on "Can You Feel It" has a rushed fade that's rather jarring - something I don't remember and not how the song plays on my best-of CD. Oh well, maybe it was an anomaly that got fixed on subsequent pressings or the reissue.

The band released a pretty definitive double-CD anthology that covers just about all the high points, but dang, revisiting the albums in their entirety has been enlightening. For anyone curious what this lineup would have sounded like delivering some of Streetheart's other classics, I'd recommend seeking out One Night One Take, which captured the 1993 reunion with Paul and Matt. The sound quality, while not great, captures an extraordinary performance.

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock, almost progressive at times who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , "Don...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continues to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner who had been with Gary from the beg...

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