Styx - Pieces of Eight

Styx is one of my favourite bands ever ... if I was to tick off on my left hand my top bands it would often run something like April Wine, PRISM, Styx, Toto and Cheap Trick. Depending on where I was on the curve, some of them would change, but Styx was pretty constant. I often forget SAGA, and when I remember I just add them to my list and pretend I have more fingers.

It's a bit blurry now what I got first - I'm thinking it was the blue vinyl Best of Styx, a compilation of songs for their Wooden Nickel albums. It was a treasure to me, and when I lost it I was pretty bummed out. I've been looking for another copy.

In my junior high school the band room had a great stereo and we were allowed to listen to records when on break. I remember hearing Styx's Grand Illusion, and later Pieces of Eight, there. I also remember someone bringing in a John Travolta record and having to sit through Razzamatazz - let's just say it didn't have the same positive impact the Styx albums had, although as it turns out I've not forgotten old John either.

With Pieces of Eight I started to collect their albums, and despite the sphincter-clenching reaction I have to "Babe" from Cornerstone, I was drawn to their rock songs. I loved that the credits on Pieces of Eight included who played lead guitar (sadly the liner notes were missing from my replacement copy, but they're in the CD booklet so I'm still good). From my first exposure to JY's guitar playing I loved his work - oddly, I never really liked the sound of his voice. Tommy was the new kid (although this was his third with the band) and I often found myself drawn to his songs, and he too was a great player. Even now I wouldn't say I'm Team Tommy, or Team Dennis (although if pushed I'd lean to Dennis today, but yesterday it was Tommy). I was into Styx - the band.

With the band's eighth album they seemed to find the balance between their progressive roots and their rock sensibilities. It's funny to listen to this now as it's really not as great as I remember. It has "Renegade" and "Blue Collar Man" and right there is why my memory regards this as an excellent record. My often referenced friend Gerry had in his possession a pair of homemade speakers that were each the size of an industrial sized refrigerator and they had what seemed like a 36-inch bass speaker, several midrange and tweeter speakers and horns and they were loud. We were in a church basement for some youth thing, and he'd set up his "stereo" and for the weekend we played records and practiced being nice to each other. Of course we had to play "Queen of Spades," a song that melted my face when I was a kid. It was the perfect balance of Dennis DeYoung's penchant for over-the-top theatrics with a blistering guitar track - as it was written by JY and Dennis that makes sense. The sheer volume attained by those "Cloud 9" speakers is the stuff of legend. Ah, memories. I wonder whatever happened to those things ... they're probably holding up a bridge in Northern British Columbia.

The first side was decent, and it's good for all that, and I really like "Lords of the Ring." The guitar parts are awesome. I wonder if they'd pitched this to Ralph Bakshi for his 1978 (much maligned) Lord of the Rings. However, the band really hit it out of the park on the second side. Heck, even the weird throwaway "Aku-Aku" that closes out side two worked, as it felt like the band needed to take a breather before ending the album - basically allowing the listener to relax a little and process the awesomeness that had come before.

Rolling Stone, of course, that great bastion of knowing what was good (just to clarify, I was being sarcastic), didn't quite feel the same way, "... sheer self-aggrandizement on the most puerile level." Yup, whoever wrote that wasn't in their mid-teens and in love with guitar-driven rock. The reviewer went so far as to question what was wrong with the people who liked this "slop" - yeah, slop. To that I still say, "Please sir, can I have some more?"

I normally try not to go back to buy on vinyl what I have on CD, but when I found a gold vinyl copy that wasn't too pricey I couldn't help myself. It looks cool, and I like it.

What other reason do I really need?

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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