Kansas - Drastic Measures

This is my favourite Kansas album. Other than a couple of songs I'd heard on the radio, I didn't really know much about the band. I do know my buddy Gord liked them, and I first heard "Relentless" on one of his mix tapes - and that was an awesome tune. I didn't really have any baggage when it came to the band.

When I picked up their 1982 release Vinyl Confessions, I didn't realize there was a changing of the guard when a young John Elefante replaced Steve Walsh on vocals.

By the time Drastic Measures dropped in 1983, I'd gone back and picked up the excellent (to me) Audio-Visions and had started collecting the band's back catalogue. I was really getting into the band. I'll be the first to admit my preferences leaned toward the rock songs, and the more meandering wiffle waffle stuff I put up with to get to the rock songs.

Yeah, I'm thinking about "A Glimpse of Home" from Monolith with its pure cheese old-timey sci-fi radio intro... but I'm wandering off track. I'm really just trying to say that the prog elements were wasted on me. I wanted the big guitars, the big hooks, and the soaring vocals.

Even the cover was a departure for the band. For the first time since Song for America adopted their distinctive logo, Drastic Measures featured a simple font spelling out the band's name and album title. Frankly, I thought the bazooka was a nice touch. Then again, I had no sense of history.

As if to put more distance between the '70s and drag themselves into the '80s, vocalist and violin player Robby Steinhardt departed. This was the album where John Elefante and his brother Dino took on the majority of the songwriting, with Kerry Livgren contributing only three of the album's nine tracks. At the time, this didn't mean anything to me. All I knew was the album charged out of the gate with "Fire with Fire" and didn't look back.

Many of the songs seem to hint at John's immersion into the heady world of being a "rock star," and he seems to be trying to make sense of his newly minted fame through his lyrics. Of course, I could also be completely full of shit, but I still really like "Everybody's My Friend" with its opening "Hello, hello" followed by Phil Ehart's splat-splat drums.

Kerry's song "Mainstream" gives a glimpse into the pressures of trying to feed the Kansas machine, and you get the sense that there were further changes coming.

Which leads into the actual sound of the album.

I'm pretty sure this can be attributed to co-producer and engineer Neil Kernon, who coincidentally produced Steve Walsh's new band Streets that same year as well. I've always found the album to be rather dark sounding, with a muddy bottom and an overly accentuated midrange. Phil's drum sound wasn't as crisp and snappy - it wasn't like he was playing on a cardboard box, but it was its own sound.

Frankly, in the context of the album, I really liked it. I liked all of it. It was cohesive, and it shed all of the band's previous baggage in terms of what a Kansas album was supposed to sound like.

The album closes out with Kerry's "Incident on a Bridge," and it's a fitting closer.

"And I know, for each life there is a reason
And I know, for each time there is a season"

As fate would have it, this would mark the end of this chapter in Kansas history.

Kerry and Dave would leave and form the band AD, and Steve Walsh, after a couple of albums with Streets, would return to Kansas. Along with new guitar player Steve Morse, they would start another chapter with the band.

Those are, as they say, stories for another day.

Drastic Measures, to me, will always be a favourite album - not just a favourite Kansas album. I can totally see how this album represented the nadir of the band's output, as it was an overt and very obvious attempt at commercial success.

Did it succeed? Depends on who you ask, I guess.

I loved this album, and through John and Dino Elefante, a whole world of music opened up. The output from Kerry Livgren, first with AD and then solo, filled my shelves. Heck, even Steve Walsh and his two albums with Streets, along with his own very good solo work, have a place in my heart.

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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