Donnie - Iris - Back on the Streets

Sometimes you pick up an album just to satisfy the ear worm you can't get rid of. Now to be upfront, the first album I bought from Donnie Iris was his 1982 release The High and the Mighty - an album I found about a year ago, and I played it a few times and enjoyed myself - but as I sit here listening to Back on the Streets I can't recall any of the songs from it. This isn't really a shot, it's more reflective of my under developed sense of object permanence. I have the same problem trying to remember more than a couple of the songs off the three Tommy Tutone albums I have - and I like those albums. Other than "867-5309/Jenny" and the forgotten hit from their debut "Angel Say No" I couldn't name another song. All of their albums were decent, just not especially memorable. Unless a song gets buried deep into my subconscious there's a good chance I'll more often than not experience a wonderful groundhog day moment when I play an album I've not heard in a while and wonder why I haven't played it more often - and then promptly forget what I heard until the next time I pull it out.

It's weird that Donnie Iris was sued for plagiarizing "Ah Leah" when "Agnes" completely lifted the riff from The Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin'" - and for all that it is a really good song. Borrowing a riff is one thing and now hip hop artists will take entire songs and just sing something else over the music and call it a new song. It's possible Donnie Iris was just a trail blazer and isn't being credited for helping to launch a new genre.

"Ah Leah" kicks off the first side and is a song so good it's always a surprise to find out that at the time it did okay, but it wasn't a big hit. Time of course would elevate the song to being a staple of classic rock radio. I know I wasn't listening to this in 1980, so somewhere along the way this just sort of snuck in to my subconsciousness. This is the song that hooked me, so after over forty years I'm going to take a trip back in time and see what I missed - or managed to avoid. 

Donnie Iris played straight ahead rock and roll but wrapped it in a new wave wrapper which made it seem like something fresh. The result the album is an unabashed nerd rock feast. I'm pretty sure Rivers Cuomo from Weezer was a big fan. The album came out the summer of '80 and the spill over from the late '70s first blush with new wave was still very much at play here. First closes out with "Back on the Streets" which too me a bit by surprise as it's a very "big" sounding song. It's like the guys were trying to see if they could pull of a Jim Steinman styled opus. Yeah, it was great.

Side two opens with the Spencer Davis "inspired" Agnes, which is growing on me with each listen. There's a lot of energy packed into the songs throughout the album, and I happen to love the Question Mark & The Mysterians "96 Tears" styled organ that seemed so at home on late '70s, early '80s new wave.  This was a really cool period in pop music as the transition out of the '70s for a little while allowed bands to wander all over the place stylistically and borrow from the past while still looking to the future. A song like "She's So Wild" is great goofy fun as it's riff rock with new wave, and a screaming guitar solo. Yeah. The album closes out with another "big" effort in "Too Young to Love" that sees Donnie singing sweet, and singing like a really angry Tom Petty doing a death metal version of "Here Comes My Girl" while gargling a teaspoon of cinnamon. While I generally like a good saxophone solo, it seemed weirdly out of place here - a guitar solo was in order. I guess they were paying Kenny Blake by the hour, and if you have Kenny Blake, you use Kenny Blake.

Listening to this, it's a bit of a mystery as to why this didn't catch on. This would have easily fit nicely along side The Cars and even some of the harder rock that was coming up but it would right in step with so many great artists at the time . I'll listen to this a couple more times before slotting it beside the other Donny Iris album in my collection.

Oh, if you're curious - yes this was a dollar bin score, and it ended up being in pretty decent shape and I got more than a bucks worth of entertainment. I may not remember much, but I'll remember this was good.