Paul Hyde & The Payolas - Here's The World For Ya

This was the album that was supposed to make The Payola$ huge ... all that was missing was an excellent album to propel Vancouver's perennial group of punk to pop heroes to the big time. They'd been skirting on the edge of success for a few years, and were so close to being a really big deal. The band first made it onto my radar when they released "Eyes of a Stranger" back in 1982 and the song was huge here in Canada (okay, maybe just Vancouver, but it seemed like it was huge). I remember an entertainment segment on the local news where the band was pretty excited about the prospect of being able to ditch their day jobs. A year later the band dropped Hammer on a Drum and "Where is this Love" was the big hit (all things are relative, it was on the radio and I liked it, so it must have been a hit), and remains one of those songs that'll get me right in the feels when I hear it. Mick Ronson had produced both of those albums, and while they did okay, from what I've read over the years, A&M had expected bigger things and were a little disappointed.* So for the next album it was go big or go home.

They went big. They enlisted David Foster to produce, and behind the scenes the band was tightening up and retooling. Christopher Livingston was listed in the small print as having played keyboards but was no longer a member, and the band added Alex "A-Train" Boynton as a full time member on bass. The band also changed their name to Paul Hyde and the Payolas, dropping the $ from Payola$ to try and endear themselves to radio programmers. The goal was to crack the American market.

At the time there was shitload of buzz about this, and heck my one trip to Little Mountain Sound occurred when the band and David Foster were recording the album. I kind of sheepishly stood there a little starstruck, while just across from me they were chatting in a doorway. I'm absolutely sure they had no idea I was even there.

During the recording there was an interview with Paul Hyde where he discussed his newly procured Beatles library and he had been studying their harmonies and finding ways to incorporate this new knowledge into the new record.

When the album dropped I remember being very excited, which was strange, as I didn't have any of the band's other albums, and frankly there were songs by the band I didn't care for at all. The incredibly banal "Never Said I Loved You" a duet with Carole Pope, and "China Boys" from their debut come to mind. But they also had songs I did like, and I was rooting for the band to catch the big break.

Just after the album dropped and some of the videos were getting onto MuchMusic I caught the band at Club Soda in Vancouver playing on a small stage and giving it their all. It was great, and I stayed the whole night, and the band even repeated a couple of the singles in later sets.

As to the album, where I was hoping for a blending of David Foster's deft handling of rock and polish like he'd done with The Tubes, Here's the World for Ya was polished and Bob Rock along with second engineer Mike Fraser had recorded a bright (not brittle, or anything, just sparkly), and sonically rich album. This sounded awesome. Foster's production was so slick that it was actually hard for anything to stick. This was less The Tubes and more like Chicago. I mean, for decades the only song here that resonated and was title track - a song that had a clunky start but once it found its footing is as good a song as they ever did. I loved it. The rest of the album though got a couple of obligatory spins and then got filed.

The album did pretty well here at home, and took home a couple of Juno awards, but for A&M it was a swing and a miss and they dropped the band. They must have been a little pissed too, as for whatever reason they never re-issued the band's back catalogue on CD more or less stamped PAID on anything to do with them and that was it. Then again when I'm looking for older stuff that happened to be on A&M it's hard to find. I think they just bury their dead.

So now I have a brand new copy, sealed an everything that I found for a few bucks. I was totally prepared to rewrite history and tell the younger version of myself that I had done the band a disservice and I needed to make amends and yell from the mountaintops that a great injustice was done to a Canadian institution.

The album still sounds great, but even with the power of nostalgia I still can't really get into most of the songs. They pulled off four singles, and while "Stuck in the Rain" is decent and "You're the Only Love" is very good (much better than I remember) they aren't songs I added to any of my mix tapes. "Here's the World for Ya" though is the centrepiece of the album. The beginning doesn't feel as clunky as I used to think it was, and I've listened to it a few times now and absolutely love it. I also can't lay the album's failure to launch at David Foster's feet either. You work with that you got, and while the songs are serviceable there really wasn't a lot here that blew me away. Now having said that, I've likely played the album more times than I ever did back in the day and while it's an enjoyable as a trip down memory lane, I'm not sure how often I'll play this one.

Make no mistake, I'm happy to have found this, and while this isn't the lost gem I was hoping for I still tend to think of myself as a fan, and I'm on the look out for more of their releases.

*Interesting that when Billy Rankin, also was also signed to A&M and was putting together his follow up album (an album that was shelved and buried out of spite) he suggested Mick Ronson as a potential producer, and was told that Mick hadn't done a great job with their Canadian signing ... what a brutal business. Those two albums are considered classics here.