April Wine - The Nature of the Beast

The Nature of the Beast was the third album from the classic five-man iteration of April Wine. The triple threat on guitar: Myles Goodwin, who sang most of the songs, Brian Greenway, and Gary Moffet, backed by the ever rock-solid rhythm section of Steve Lang on bass and Jerry Mercer on drums. When I think of the band, this is the lineup that gets my motor running.

By this point April Wine was well established here in Canada, with eight studio albums and two live albums under their belts. You'd think they would have started to coast and rest on their laurels a little.

Nope.

The band hit the height of both their commercial and creative peak with their 1981 release The Nature of the Beast.

It was quite a feat, too. I loved First Glance, especially "Roller." Then the band dropped Harder...Faster and the one-two gut punch of "I Like to Rock" and "Say Hello." That three-guitar medley at the end of "I Like to Rock" just blew my mind. I mean, could they get any better?

Yes they could.

They were still hungry and had something to prove, and they weren't about to slow down.

The Nature of the Beast came out at the start of the year in '81, and I remember getting it as soon as I could find a copy. I put it on having no idea what to expect. The opening riff to "All Over Town" always felt like a middle finger to Toni Basil's "Mickey" before settling into a wicked groove. The first couple of songs were decent, and then "Sign of the Gypsy Queen" came blasting through the speakers.

This song blew me away.

If there's a song I associate with the album, this is the one. Heck, even though I remember feeling the guitar solo was borrowed from David Gilmour's bag of tricks, I still loved it. The song wasn't written by Myles or any of the guys in the band. Apparently it was a remake of an older song by Lorence Hud, who had released it in the early '70s.

It was followed by "Just Between You and Me," another in a long line of April Wine ballads that didn't disappoint.

And that was just the first side.

My buddy Gord, who was also a fan of the band, knew I got the album and asked me if it was worth getting. I told him not to bother. It was okay, but he should save his money.

Yeah, I was a bit of a contrarian.

I was also full of shit.

Forty-five years later, I can admit what I wouldn't admit then.

I really did like it - even the weird spacey "pew pew pew" nonsense in "Caught in the Crossfire." I kept coming back to the album. This was different than Harder...Faster, just like it was different than First Glance. The boys weren't content to stay in one place and keep rehashing the same four chords.

The songs this time around were a blend of hard rock tinged with new wave. Sometimes it was amazing, sometimes not, but I kept listening.

Listening to it now, "Crash and Burn" is still about as much fun as you can have in two and a half minutes. That song rocks hard. Frankly, a lot of the songs are pretty crunchy, which was pretty cool. The last song, "One More Time," is a fitting closer and has some great guitar work, especially the slide solo.

The whole thing is a lot of fun.

The album was produced by Myles and Mike Stone, and this was a great-sounding record. I just wish the credits had a better map of who played what on guitar. I know Myles was a great player, Gary was a monster too, and dang, even Brian could rip it up.

My CD also has zero credits, and the record I have just has a plain insert. If there were more notes, I can't remember what my original LP had.

Oh well, there's always the internet.

If anyone other than Gord were to ask about this one, I'd generally say it's a great album with some awesome songs, and that's the truth.

Sorry, Gord.

Looking back, this really was the band at their peak. They'd put out two more albums during their initial run, but this was really as good as it got for them. Oddly, the last album by the classic lineup, Animal Grace, is one I really liked — or at the very least one I remember as being really good.

Then again, I may just be thinking about "Sons of the Pioneers."

I told you I was a bit of a contrarian. Maybe that's just the nature of the beast.

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...

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