Rick Springfield - Living in Oz

I make no apologies for liking Rick Springfield. I had to flip a coin to pick whether to play Working Class Dog or go with 1983's Living in Oz. Tales you lose, if you want to read about "Jessie's Girl," it'll be another day on a different post.

From 1981 through 1984, Rick Springfield put out an album a year, each going platinum in the States. Oddly enough, in Canada Living in Oz sold less than Success Hasn't Spoiled Me Yet, and that one sold less than Working Class Dog - he was trending down up here in the Great White North.

Which was a shame, as Living in Oz was pure power pop driven by the guitar wizardry of the incomparable Tim Pierce. Funny, if you read the reviews that were out at the time, Rick was a bit of a conundrum. He was supposed to be the pretty-boy pop star who wasn't supposed to have actual musical chops. He was also an (gasp) actor on a soap opera. The man had no shame. Since I didn't watch daytime TV, I never saw him with a stethoscope draped over his white coat.

The biggest criticisms seemed to be around his inability to pick a lane - was he a teen idol or a rocker? It was too confusing. Besides, he was too good-looking to be this good. (His follow-up Hard to Hold didn't help with this assessment either.) It didn't matter to me. I liked him, and the album charges right out of the gate with "Human Touch," and the first side didn't let up. I still get a buzz from the guitar riff from the title track. The first side was all killer and no filler.

It's been a long time since I've actually sat and listened to this all the way through. This is really good. The second side leads off with "Motel Eyes," a song that for me never really clicked. I can't put my finger on why - it should have worked, and even now, as it's playing, I really like parts of it. Goodness, Tim Pierce is killing it, but it's not one of my favourites on the album.

"Tiger by the Tail" was a harbinger of things to come, and would have been right at home on his 1985 release Tao - an album I really wanted to like but never got into. So yeah, this song didn't make it onto any of my mixtapes.

Rick salvages the second side with a one-two combination in "Souls" and "I Can't Stop Hurting You," which are great songs. Heck, the guitar to "Souls" still ranks as one of the best pop solos I've ever heard - although the rabbit Mr. Pierce pulls out of his hat on "I Can't Stop Hurting You" is just as mind-blowing.

I know I keep going on about Tim Pierce, but my goodness, the man has incredible chops, and his work throughout this album is mind-blowing. The '80s really were the best of times.

The album closes with "Like Father, Like Son," which is an odd duck. It's an orchestrated lament that doesn't really fit with the rest of the album, but as a closer feels right. Sometimes I really like it, sometimes I don't, but I always let it play through.

Rick Springfield is one of those guys who doesn't seem to age or slow down and has never really gone away. If you want to feel old, the guy is in his 70s now and he's still killing it - bastard.

I was pretty happy finding this for a couple of bucks. Other than a pop or two at the start of side one, it was a very clean copy. Score. I think my favourite part was seeing how someone had cut out Rick's picture with a pair of scissors. At least whoever had the crush on Mr. Springfield left me the side with the lyrics and credits.

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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