Duran Duran - Seven and the Ragged Tiger

Once upon a time, the cool boys would trash Duran Duran, and the cool girls the boys wanted to get to know had Duran Duran posters on their walls. They were the best of times, they were the worst of times. Begrudgingly, I had to admit they had a few decent earworms, and their videos were like cool mini movies. It wasn't easy to keep shitting on them, but I tried.

I remember going to the mall back in 1984 with my buddy Mike - not that one, the other one - who used to date my wife (that's a story for another day). We were talking about new music as we walked into a record store, and there on the wall was a Duran Duran poster for Seven and the Ragged Tiger. I launched into my whole "Duran Duran sucks" thing, and he looked me in the eye as if he was about to reveal a secret.

"That's a pretty good album, you know."

I can't remember my response, but it was probably really caustic. I think that was the trip I bought the new solo albums by Dennis DeYoung and Tommy Shaw so I could alternate tracks on a mix tape and pretend it was a new Styx album. Yeah, sad.

It would be a decade after Seven and the Ragged Tiger came out that I'd actually buy a Duran Duran album, and that was 1993's Wedding Album. By that time Andy Taylor was gone, and so was Roger Taylor, leaving John as the lone Taylor in the band. It was a pretty solid album, and I'd pick up Decade, their best-of album, and come to the realization these guys had a lot of really great songs.

Several decades and a few pant sizes later, I found a copy of Seven and the Ragged Tiger in a discount bin and figured it was time to make up for lost time. Besides, I'd never heard the album before, and here was a decent-looking copy, complete with the insert. The vinyl also turned out to be in better shape than expected.

The album kicks off with "The Reflex," a song I always thought was pretty cool and structurally quite interesting. For a band I always blew off as those guys who made videos, the songs behind those videos were actually quite intricate and more elaborate than a lot of the pop floating around in the early 80s.

I kind of figured the songs I'd heard before had the most impact, like "New Moon on Monday" and the infectious (I can admit this now) "Union of the Snake." There aren't really any duds on the album, and the guys actually go big on the album's closer, "The Seventh Stranger," where they stretch out and deliver a near six-minute opus.

After decades of ridicule (a lot of it from me), Duran Duran would have the last laugh as they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of the class of 2022. If you'd told me back in the day they'd be in before A Flock of Seagulls, whose first two albums paved the way for bands like Duran Duran, I'd have thought you were an idiot.

Well, guess who's a dummy?

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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