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 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 mixtape - 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.

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...

Old Enough to Forget

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