Jack Wagner - All I Need

I honestly figured this was worth the dollar.

Going in, I knew that "All I Need" was an earworm - back in 1984 I worked in an office where we had a TV in the break room. Whoever got there first could choose the channel, regardless of how many other people would end up in the room. At least that was my interpretation of the rules. Most afternoons I'd have to sit and suffer through General Hospital. However, there were enough times where I'd get there first and change the channel to watch Looney Tunes that people made a concerted effort to beat me to the break room.

So with respect to General Hospital, it provided interim employment to Rick Springfield and, like Pernell Roberts, got to play a doctor on TV - although Rick got to play another character as well, a rock star named Eli Love (I am not making this shit up). Given my love for his music, I can give him a pass. However, there was another young cocky character named Frisco Jones who in the '80s was breaking hearts and also pretending to be a singer on TV. It's funny, he was probably only 25 at the time, but there was an irritating quality to his character - I was probably just mad that I wasn't able to watch cartoons.

Then a weird thing happened. Jack Wagner's "All I Need" started getting airplay and the fictional and real worlds were overlapping. It got a lot of airplay. At least there wasn't a video, but man, that song was played all the time for what seemed like FOREVER.

Fast forward nearly four decades, and I stumble upon a copy of All I Need (full-length 10-cut album! You mean there was a shorter version? Also, am I the only one who thinks he's sniffing his armpit?) in the unloved dollar bin, and subconsciously I start humming "All I Need" as I pick up the album and look at the credits on the back cover. Glen Ballard, who apprenticed under Quincy Jones, co-produced the album - later he would go on to great success with Alanis Morissette. Apparently, this was his first production credit.

This was an '80s album in the purest sense of the word. It kicks off with "Premonition," a not-so-subtle reworking of "Maniac" from Flashdance. I happen to love that song, and I almost bought the album by Michael Sembello back in the day, but I didn't. Still, this set the tone for everything that would follow; Jack was aiming to be an MOR pop star. The songs contain all the cheese you can imagine, and honestly, I'm kind of at a loss for words. Part of me really wants to just enjoy it for what it was ... but despite having solid production (that is dated now but, at the time, this was as good as it got) and some fantastic musicianship, the songs on the record sometimes seemed to border on parody or, dare I say, fairly decent karaoke - then again, he was a guy playing a guy playing a musician on TV. "After the Fact" opens with Jack opining, "You know, a man can only take so much..." Yeah, Jack, I know exactly how you feel.

I know I've been taking shots, but Jack Wagner could sing. There was something in how he was recorded (or processed) that felt off. I will give props to his signature song, "All I Need," as I can no longer claim any objectivity. I like it even if I made fun of it. He does nail that one, and it's really quite good. However, as good as that one is, the album's closer - another ballad, "Lady of My Heart" - is as irritating a sugary love song as there ever was. Think of the worst shitty show tune you know, and you'll be close. If you want to have the ideal image, pretend Rob Lowe is playing the saxophone in the rain on this one. Yeah - it's that good.

There was a little itty part of me that had kind of secretly hoped he was like an underappreciated Rick Springfield - nope, he just ended up being Eli Love's long-lost cousin who was fathered by Dr. Noah Drake's evil twin, who was killed in a scuba-diving accident, before releasing Jack Frisco upon the unsuspecting citizens of Port Charles.

On the positive side, he was like a less irritating version of Michael Damian.*

*I have to come clean, I only know him from his version of "Rock On," and I just think it's fun to take cheap shots because he was an easy target, but I will say this, if I find one of his albums I will likely pick it up. I owe him that much.

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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