Billy Squier - Emotions in Motion

I love Billy Squier. I'm not a fanatical fan by any means and can't tell you what kind of sheets he was rolling around on in the video for "Rock Me Tonite." I only saw the video a couple of times. It was goofy, but honestly no worse than the video for Steve Perry's "Oh Sherrie" or any of the other early videos by musicians who didn't know where to look when they were on camera. It should not have been a career killer. I kept the faith and dutifully bought each album when it came out, and while some were better than others, they always had at least one killer track, and the rest were never just filler. Heck, his final album in 1998 was the stripped-down, intimate, acoustic Happy Blue. It was really good and apparently sold only 10,000 copies... and I bought it twice.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

My journey didn't start with The Tale of the Tape. I hopped on the bandwagon, along with a lot of other people, when he released Don't Say No in 1981. "The Stroke" was a masterclass in the double entendre and a relentlessly infectious riff. One of my more shameful recollections involves my buddy Gord (I always blame Gord for shit like this), who was in town visiting. We decided to go and hang out at Dairy Queen. We were goofing around and generally acting like teenage idiots when in walked David Mainse, the guy who used to be on 100 Huntley Street here in Canada. Of course there was a jukebox in the Dairy Queen, and while poor David sat there eating his lunch, we played "The Stroke" over, and over, and over. Please note the restraint I have shown in avoiding a needless masturbation joke... it was hard.

Yeah, not a proud moment, but at the time we thought we were hilarious.

Fast forward to 1982 and Billy drops Emotions in Motion. I start hearing songs like "Emotions in Motion" and "Everybody Wants You." Those songs were great, but I didn't pick up the album until almost a year later. I remember the moment that sealed it for me. I was riding with my buddy Ron, who had a big blue Super Beetle with a stinger for a muffler, and we were cruising around while he played Emotions in Motion on his cassette deck. The windows were rolled down, the music was blaring, and it was a perfect summer day. Over the roar of the engine, "Keep Me Satisfied" came on, and something about the song just grabbed me. That was it. I went out and bought the album.

Now, with all this gushing, you'd think this was the greatest album since sliced bread (no, not David Gates). Nah. Don't get me wrong, I loved a few of the songs, and my mixtapes were full of Billy Squier, but entire albums? I'd play them, and often all the way through, but my attention span was pretty sketchy and there was so much good music coming out that I was never at a loss for something to put on. So this album was essentially relegated to the shelf after mining what I considered the good stuff for my mixtapes.

That's part of the fun in going back now after all this time and trying to absorb what I may have missed the first time around. Back then, one good song was enough to make me a fan. I remember reading People magazine - don't judge me, it was in the office where I worked, and they still had reviews back then - and while the review didn't quite shit on the album, it certainly went after Billy for being a whiner about his success and the burdens of being in the public eye. This was all above my pay grade at the time. I either liked it or I didn't, and I didn't get too caught up in the lyrics. Sure, I listened to the words, but I was drawn to the music first and foremost.

Listening to this now, I'm struck by how cohesive everything is. The killer songs are still the killer songs, but this is a solid album from start to finish.

The album was produced by Mack, who had also worked with Queen. Freddie and Roger provided backing vocals on "Emotions in Motion." This wouldn't be the first time the guys in Queen would pop up on someone else's album. Billy's band included guitarist Jeff Golub and drummer Bobby Chouinard, who would appear on many of his recordings, as well as keyboard player Alan St. Jon, who added some great textures to the songs.

The cover art was provided by Andy Warhol, a little tidbit I always thought was really cool, and kind of a stroke of genius if you ask me.

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 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 , ...

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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