Starship - Knee Deep in the Hoopla

I suppose this was the band's debut album ... as Starship, but before this was Jefferson Starship, and before they went into space, they were merely Jefferson Airplane. Then came litigation and the names Jefferson and Airplane were verboten, so they kept their Starship and embarked on their mission to explore strange new sounds and try as hard as possible to be relevant.

If you're going to try and go commercial, you need to have a song that can be commercial, and boy howdy do little did they ever get the perfect vehicle that encapsulated everything cheesy about the '80s in one song, and that song was "We Built This City," written by Bernie Taupin, Martin Page, Dennis Lambert, and Peter Wolf (I used to think it was the guy from J. Geils, but it's not that Peter). I mean it had it all, including a DJ voice-over. How awesome. "Cheese Gromit!"

As if getting a vocal showcase like "Sara" wasn't enough, Mickey Thomas gets to really stretch out and show off his range on "Tomorrow Doesn't Matter Tonight," which is a pretty cool song and keeps the momentum going. We were in the basement listening to the album and my wife suddenly perks up, "Did he say what I thought he said?" I was only partly paying attention as I was reading a comic (don't judge me). I grunted. She says, "Did he just sing 'I don't fit into your pants. But you can reach for my hand?'"

For a moment, I wasn't sure, so I put it on again.

"No, listen, he sings 'I don't fit into your plans / But you can reach for my hand,' which is too bad, as what you heard would have been a great line."

She looked disappointed and went back to her solitaire game, and I resumed my comic - I needed to know if Lex Luthor would get his comeuppance.

Next up was the insipid, and I mean really shitty, "Rock Myself to Sleep," a song I think I heard before, but tried to block from my memory. Sadly, the late Kevin DuBrow was totally wasted on the song, and I don't wish to speak ill of the departed, but I was never much of a fan, so his presence wasn't the ace in the hole the band was hoping for. To borrow from Dave Lister from Red Dwarf, "Maybe ace-hole." Regardless, a throwaway track that just doesn't work - at all.

The first side closes with "Desperate Heart," written by Randy Goodrum and Michael Bolton, and is pretty solid but not as good as the version Bolton would release on his 1985 album Everybody's Crazy. Yeah, there was a time Mister Bolton rocked, and played a wicked guitar.

Anyway, considering how uneven some of the previous Jefferson Starship albums were, this was pretty solid. I know people like to shit on "We Built This City," but I really liked it then, and even now knowing it's cheese, I still love it.

Turning the album over, the album continues with okay songs but nothing memorable. Grace takes the lead on a forgettable and formulaic "Hearts of the World Will Understand" that went in one ear and out the other. I'm not sure what's going on, either I've become harder to please, or this is going downhill.

Ooh, the next one seems to be going for something grandiose, let's see where this goes.

"Love Rusts" really wanted to be something, I'm just not sure what it was going for. There was a sense of '80s moodiness and a theatrical element with the atonal keyboard runs and ultimately resolves into nothing and then it's over, and so is the album.

While there was nothing truly horrid like "Rock Myself to Sleep," there wasn't anything memorable either - good or bad. It was just sort of "Meh."

After almost four decades, I'm not going to be the first person to not be overwhelmed by this album. However, I can honestly say that the first side was pretty solid and, if nothing else, the first three songs were worth what I paid for the album. There's no denying the talent in the band, and when things were good, they were really good. Craig Chaquico doesn't get enough love for his fretwork, and while I prefer Mickey Thomas to Grace Slick, they're both good singers.

I appreciate the fact the band was honest in their own assessment of the album. There were just enough good songs to get knee deep, but not all the way into the hoopla.

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 , ...

David Baerwald - Bedtime Stories

The little sticker on the shrinkwrap says, "You may remember David Baerwald from David & David's Boomtown ..." You bet, I remembered David Baerwald. Back in 1986 Boomtown was an album with moments of sheer brilliance. The whole album may not have been as top shelf as the first few tracks, but that didn't matter - it is an excellent album. I waited for a follow-up ... and waited, and then in 1990 it was a solo David, David Baerwald, who dropped Bedtime Stories . I snapped it up. "All For You," the opening cut, is still my favourite song on the album. It was mesmerizing. I'm not sure if the song got any airplay, it may have, but that may have been wishful thinking on my part as it was on a lot of mix tapes at the time and I heard it a lot in the car. The CD had a great booklet with all of the musician credits and lyrics. Oddly, when I found a sealed copy of the record (a great score), it just had a plain paper insert - the picture of David walking wit...

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 continued 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 b...

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