Loverboy - Get Lucky

Loverboy dropped their sophomore album in the fall of 1981 and cemented their place among Canadian rock royalty. (It's a small club, but a club nonetheless.)

The first two songs on their debut are classics, but for years I didn't really connect with the rest of that album. It felt like mostly filler back then - and honestly, it still does, but I'm more forgiving now.

However, the follow-up, Get Lucky, was something altogether different. They delivered a masterclass in pop/rock that would polarize kids all over the country into two camps:

"This rocks!" / "This sucks!"

This was decades before Nickelback would take over the mantle of most divisive band in the land.

I will publicly apologize to my old dear friend Steve Little, who loved "Gangs in the Streets." Just after the album came out, a bunch of us were hanging out, and Steve had his little cassette player and seemed to be playing this song and Gary Numan's "Cars" over and over.

Steve loved music, and to this day he has an enthusiasm for music that makes us mere mortals feel inadequate. I was trying to be in the "this sucks" camp and said something snotty about bubblegum pop or something equally biting from my 18-year-old bag of insults.

It was said with intent, and I never forgot it. I was a little ashamed of my own behaviour even back then.

Sorry for being a dick, Steve.

At the time, I dismissed "Gangs in the Streets" as a lame and derivative rehash of "Turn Me Loose" without any of the swagger or awesomeness. Of course, over time the song has grown on me, and I find I have a soft spot for Gary Numan as well.

I'm not sure if that can be attributed to guilt, or if I just got worn down over time.

Anyway.

Get Lucky took what worked on the debut, and the band expanded on their mix of accessible rock with a driving beat and new wave pop sensibilities. Doug Johnson's keyboard work added textures and sounds that blended rock and new wave, taking power pop to another level.

This isn't to downplay the rest of the band. Each member added their own elements to the band's sound. As a guitar player, I have long admired Paul Dean's style, and combined with Mike Reno's voice, everything went into the recipe. What came out wasn't overdone - like the perfect oatmeal, it was just right.

"Working for the Weekend," arguably their signature song, bleeds late-'70s rock anthem with a cowbell and delivers one of, if not the, best two-note guitar solos in the history of rock.

Gotta love a wah-wah pedal.

Sadly, like Brian May, Paul too wanted to sing. I mean, seriously, you're in a band with a singer's singer, and you want to sing?

Sigh.

Still, he wasn't so bad you wanted to skip over his contribution (and I did pick up his first solo album), but it did make you wonder: what if he'd just let Mike do all the singing?

Bryan Adams co-wrote the highly infectious "Jump," one of my favourites on the album. It's a song that fit the band perfectly.

It's interesting to follow the band's trajectory at home versus how they fared in the US market. While Get Lucky was their most commercial album, it didn't do as well as their debut here in Canada, and each album would sell less than its predecessor, something I still find very odd.

By the time they released their final album of the '80s, Wildside, the album would go gold in both the US and Canada, but selling 50,000 units versus the 500,000 they did on the debut is a pretty steep drop.

When they were good, they were really good.

I'll proudly cop to being on the "This rocks" side of the ledger.

As to the famous "cheeky" cover with the red leather pants and the crossed fingers hoping to "Get Lucky" - I'm just leaving that where it is.

There was a time when the mystery of the "slim chance in tight pants" (thank you, Paul Carrack) clad in the tight red leather was the stuff of schoolboy fantasies. Turns out the pants were filled by the photographer's 13-year-old daughter.

(I can imagine the pants being passed from model to model like Cinderella's slipper - apparently she was the only one who could fit the pants, they were so small.)

Which kind of takes all the fun out of it now.

Still, it was a hell of an album.

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 band, 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 , ...

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...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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