Glenn Frey - No Fun Aloud

When Glenn Frey passed away back in 2016, it sort of sucked the fun out of pooping on his solo work. There was no doubting his talents as a writer, a singer, and honestly, as an underappreciated lead guitar player. However, Glenn also seemed to have a penchant for leaning into the syrupy side of pop.

After the Eagles imploded, you knew it was only a matter of time before the dynamic duo would start releasing solo albums, and it would be interesting to see who really had the Midas touch when it came to putting out music.

Glenn struck first in May of 1982 and released No Fun Aloud, and right off the bat it was like the most insipid and middle-of-the-road elements from The Long Run were being used as the template for what would constitute success. The one-two pillowy punch of "I Found Somebody" and "The One That You Love" got some play, but honestly, were pretty disappointing. There was a little life in the reworked "The Greeks Don't Want No Freaks" song "Partytown" - Glenn really did have a great voice when he wanted to use it. Sadly, the little bit of energy infused into the album was quickly sucked out of the room with the last two tracks on the first side, the worst offender being the inexplicably awful "I've Been Born Again," which I will admit to a little bit of schadenfreude imagining some hardcore Christian hearing it and thinking, "Glenn's been saved! Hallelujah, praise be!" Only to find out he was writing about a girl. Still, not a great song.

Side two opens with Glenn covering "Sea Cruise," and all that's missing is Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman reprising their roles as Chuck Clarke and Lyle Rogers. Then again, Ishtar didn't come out until 1987, so maybe this was a case of art imitating life being imitated by art and then pooped into a bag that's set on fire and then placed on a doorstep before ringing the bell and running away.

This is followed by more mid-tempo songs. It's like Glenn just wanted to put out a laid-back album that would be ideal for playing in the dark while you kissed your best girl. Maybe it was a good make-out album, but what if you're sitting in a room by yourself? This music won't exactly inspire an erection. Glenn finally lays one out cold with the album's closing track "Don't Give Up," but it's not enough to redeem the album. While it's likely the best rocker on the album, it's a song that, when stacked against the best of what was coming out that year, it wouldn't have been tall enough to ride the ride.

While the album did go gold, it must have felt like a gut punch to a guy who had sold millions of records with his old band. I suppose if there was any comfort, cold or otherwise, it was that Don Henley's first solo album, also released in 1982, only went gold too - so they were at least even. However, when Glenn released The Allnighter in 1984, it too went gold - but Don's Building the Perfect Beast in the fall of '84 would sell three million copies... going triple platinum.

I'm a little surprised at the vitriol I'm heaping on this, as frankly, when I found the album I was pretty excited to hear the deeper cuts on the album. I know I only paid a buck, and aside from a couple of pops and clicks on "That Girl," the album cleaned up really well. After forty years of waiting to hear this, perhaps my expectations were out of proportion. I'm generally pretty bloody forgiving and try to find the silver linings. After all, it's not like this really doesn't fit with the rest of his solo work, so why dump on it?

Fair question. I don't really have an answer, and frankly, maybe it's just a mood thing. If I was expecting a syrupy delight with a heaping dollop of bland R&B, maybe this would have ticked a few more boxes.

Then again, Glenn always seemed pretty self-aware, and he did call the album No Fun Aloud, except he spelled "allowed" incorrectly.

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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