Julian Lennon - Valotte

Like many people, the first time I heard "Valotte" I was blown away hearing something so beautiful and mature from someone who sounded very much like his lionized father. It was a comparison that would be mentioned whenever the song was played on the radio. It was a great song. The follow-up single "Too Late for Goodbyes" and the video for it were pretty cool, but it was the title track that held all the promise of great things to come.

I didn't buy the album, but I heard it once at a friend's place. It was more a cursory listen than anything, and it didn't make much of an impression. Reading up on the album now, many reviewers were treating this like it was something released by Toto. They thought the music was too much like his father's later work, and that while the album was nicely produced, it felt old and kind of limp. Of course, these are poor paraphrases, but the general sense was this was a giant pile of "meh."

There's no business like show business.

You may be asking why am I even writing about this then if it's just a giant steaming bag of dog waste? Why not? Time is a strange thing, and while Julian's career never took off despite the promising start, this album was always a kind of question mark for me. "Valotte" was a wonderful song, and when I found the album in a dollar bin waiting for a little love and restoration, I figured I was at least getting a couple of good songs for my buck.

The album was produced by Phil Ramone, who had won Grammy Awards for his work with Paul Simon and Billy Joel, so the guy knew a thing or three about making records. But those were guys from the '70s - where was the feeling of urgency and youthful energy a debut album often generated? He was an odd choice to produce a young Julian Lennon, and while Phil's production gave the album a lush feel, it was different from most of the other music I was listening to in 1984.

I know I'm kind of shitting on this one, but I have to admit his touch on the title track was amazing, and I cannot imagine it sounding any different. It's possible he didn't have a lot to work with from Julian, as you can only polish something if there's something to, well, polish (I really wanted to avoid the "polish a turd" thing, as it was completely unfair).

Having said that, listening to the album now with the benefit of a few decades of history, the album is actually pretty good and has aged into itself. The two big singles are still the best two songs, and it's weird to think Sam Peckinpah managed to make not one, but two music videos where nothing blew up and no one was shot.

A song like "Space" is still really cool, but it's very much in the vein of his dad's work; it calls to mind "#9 Dream." Given the similarities in Julian's vocal delivery, it's a catch-22. So why not just lean into it here and there? He'd be damned if he did, and damned if he didn't. Honestly, he did a great job balancing between the two.

Who knows what might have been if the songs had been given to a different producer who could have left a few more rough edges and brought a greater sense of urgency instead of smoothing everything out and aging the effort into something so middle of the road that even the chicken couldn't be bothered trying to cross, as there was nothing on the other side.

Despite all this, I find myself playing the album every so often. He was smart enough to sequence the album so that each side started off with a really good song, and despite all my bitching, it was a pretty good album. But this was about as far as he'd go.

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...

Old Enough to Forget

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