Donnie - Iris - Back on the Streets

Sometimes you pick up an album just to satisfy the earworm 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. 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 underdeveloped 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 their song "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 trailblazer 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 into my subconscious. 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 is an unabashed nerd-rock feast. I'm pretty sure Rivers Cuomo from Weezer was a big fan. The album came out in the summer of '80, and the spillover from the late '70s' first blush with new wave was still very much at play here.

Side one closes out with "Back on the Streets," which took 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 off 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 in 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," which 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 the album, it's a bit of a mystery as to why this didn't catch on. This would have easily fit nicely alongside The Cars and even some of the harder rock with a pop edge that was coming up, but it would have been 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 Donnie 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. I got more than a buck's worth of entertainment. I may not remember much, but I'll remember this was good.

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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