Corey Hart - Boy in the Box

There was a period of time when Corey Hart was unassailable. It was fun to take pot shots and call him names because he was popular with the teenage girls. Heck, when he covered Elvis' "Can't Help Falling in Love" on Fields of Fire, it was open season. But honestly, it was pretty awesome. To say Corey Hart and the '80s are synonymous isn't a stretch.

With Boy in the Box, it was do or die. After all the success of "Sunglasses at Night," there was no way he'd be able to top his debut. Right? The then 23 year old Mister Hart dropped a remarkably mature effort that managed to capture everything that was cool about the early '80s. He had the look and swagger, and he could deliver the songs to back it up. I guess because I was growing up at the same time, and am a year younger, I totally forgot that Corey Hart was basically my age.

To say the album was a phenomenon here in Canada is a bit of an understatement. Sort of like saying Canadians like beer and hockey. Well, I like beer, and couldn't give a shit about hockey. This album I resisted getting initially. There was something about buying a record that every thirteen year old girl in the country seemed to have. So I played contrarian and bought Gowan's Strange Animal instead, and Bryan Adams' Reckless was still everywhere, so I really didn't need Mister Hart's album. However, in our little country, he managed to move over one million albums with this release alone.

That's one million in a country that was maybe twenty six million people, and when you look at the record buying demographic, you're basically hitting everyone in that market.

Then on a train ride to Quebec City in the summer of 1986 my girlfriend at the time had her Walkman and a copy of Boy in the Box, so I listened to it. I remember sitting there reading the tiny credits, and seeing who played what. For whatever reason I never forgot seeing Gary Breit's name as playing keyboards. That's a story for another time and a different album. What I was enamoured with was the guitar. Good lord, Michael Hehir was (is) a monster. There's very little out there that I can find on him, but goodness me he was the heartbeat that throbbed through the songs on the album. If you think Corey Hart can't rock, then you've not heard "Komrad Kiev" with the heavy guitar. I mean, if this wasn't Corey Hart you'd think you were about to have your face melted.

I remember when April Wine was on tour supporting Animal Grace in 1984, they had a young Corey Hart in tow as their opening act. It may seem like an odd fit, but they were both on Aquarius Records here in Canada, and if the label thought Corey had enough rock chops to open for April Wine's beer drinking rock crowd, maybe he did. We're the ones who pigeonholed him and stuffed him into a box (oh wait, I'll have one more groaner at the end, wait for it).

Corey would go on a tear through the '80s, releasing one great album after another. He's put paid to the decade with the underappreciated Bang! He's still putting out albums every so often, and I still pick them up, and he seems to defy aging. However, most of the rabid fan base moved on, putting the boy in the box on a shelf.

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 , ...

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...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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