John Parr - John Parr

I got this back in 1984 when it came out. "Naughty Naughty" grabbed me the first time I heard it, and to this day is still one of my guilty pleasures. The solo composed of tire skids still cracks me up. I honestly couldn't remember any of the other songs when I pulled this down for a spin. It had been a long time since I'd given this a listen so I figured it was due.

Now, you're probably wondering why my album cover has CBC written in pen on it ... well, that's because it came from the CBC archives. I lost my cover years ago (I could tell you the story, again, about the great crawl space flood, but it's a painful memory, so I won't bore you) and I found this copy in the dollar bin and I bought it just to have the cover. I cleaned up the record inside and gave it to my friend who told me it was, and I quote, "Terrible." I pressed him as to why and he mentioned a bunch of artists he liked that were quite different than Mister Parr. So I ended our text exchange by calling him a Luddite. I always feel better after calling my friends names.

So after nearly forty years how has this held up?

It's a mixed bag. This is very much an early 80s effort and thanks to Yes and their Orchestra Hit from "Owner of a Lonely Heart" that little farty sound was everywhere, although it only shows up here on one song, and then disappeared as quickly as it appeared. I will say though I'd forgotten how strong the album starts off. The first three songs all got some airplay. The first cut "Magical" co-written by Meat Loaf cracked the top 100, "Naughty Naughty" almost cracked the top 20, but did better on the AOR charts where it went top 10, and then the oddly phrased "Love Grammar" also broke the top 100. They're among the strongest songs on the album. The second side doesn't have the same killer start, but it does end with arguably the second best song on the album in "Don't Leave Your Mark On Me" a song I'd actually forgotten about until it came on. Oddly John recorded an even better version of the song on his 1986 follow up Running the Endless Mile - I'd actually forgotten he recorded the song twice.

John Parr was (still is I guess) a fantastic singer - there was an edge and grit to his voice that made it distinctive enough to not be generic. Too bad the music wasn't as good as John's voice. The songs are enjoyable for all that but are pretty standard AOR delivered with bombast and gusto.

It's funny, I remember back in the day being much more dismissive of the album and would only pull out the album to record "Naughty Naughty" onto a mix tape - I seldom played the album. Listening to it now, despite my earlier comment about the songs being generic, they're enjoyable in the moment, even if most of them are ultimately forgettable.

That being said, given how much shitty music is out there now, I'd still take this over a lot of what passes for music today. Am I getting old and cantankerous? Maybe a little, but then again the music was better back then.

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Old Enough to Forget

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