Michael Sembello - Bossa Nova Hotel

Michael Sembello is probably best known as the dude who performed "Maniac" and absolutely nailed the guitar solo. It's a near perfect pop song and a song I always really liked. A lot. I always wanted to get the song, but I didn't want to get the Flashdance soundtrack, because I didn't want to. It was too much like having to listen to the kids from Fame all over again, and I know Irene Cara was a fine vocalist and all that, but I never really liked her stuff. I'm sure the passage of time has softened the edges off my opinion, but I'm sticking to my guns.

I do remember almost getting this album. The cover had two oiled up dudes levitating off the ground while the guy in the white diaper cupped the other little dude's junk. It was a weird cover, and Michael Sembello, with his half black, half white face, looked like a reject from the Star Trek episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was sitting reading an old Godzilla comic. It was a little too much for my 20 year old brain.

So I passed.

Over time the song would appear on numerous '80s anthologies and collections, so I didn't need to worry about picking up the soundtrack or Michael's album. Forty years later I'm flipping through the discount section and I stumble upon Bossa Nova Hotel, and it's in decent shape and was under three bucks. It was actually a harder decision than you'd think, because a few months earlier I actually did find a copy of the Flashdance soundtrack for a buck, and it was in pretty decent shape. So I'd already scratched the itch that was "Maniac," so did I really need to get this one?

Apparently the answer was yes, I did need this. Okay, want. I wanted this.

I was curious, after all. Setting aside the weird cover, it was quite possible this was a hidden gem. After all, this wasn't an afterthought or some low budget indie recording. Phil Ramone produced the album, and Michael himself was a seasoned session player who had worked with Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson. So the dude could play.

I've been listening to the album most of the afternoon while working on stuff in the basement, and this is certainly an enjoyable middle of the road album that sounds great. For lovers of what has now devolved into the genre "Yacht Rock," this album would likely float their boat.

Reading up on the album and Mister Sembello, it would seem he wanted to introduce Brazilian rhythms into pop music. Sort of like Sergio Mendes but without the coach's whistle, and long before Paul Simon had the same idea. If the Police could fuse rock and reggae, he could fuse Bossa Nova with rock. Okay, light rock.

The results are a little bit like The Thing with Two Heads, except instead of the charm of Rosie Greer having it out with a mad scientist attached to his neck, you have the bastard love child of Christopher Cross (and I FRIGGIN' LOVE CHRISTOPHER CROSS) and Michael McDonald singing along to a Linn Drum machine.

Any of the urgency and magic Michael managed to capture in "Maniac" was a one off. "Godzilla" is a song so inexplicably bad I wanted it to succeed. I had hoped it was a call and response to Blue Oyster Cult's song of the same name. Nope.

The album closes with the truly strange "Superman," that oddly juxtaposes Jesus Christ with Superman, and normally I'm all for weird and wonderful, but this was just ... off.

He's as fast as a speeding bullet
Change the water into wine
And the last time he came
They cursed his name
With a Krypton cross
They cut him down
Superman
Are we ever going to see you again?

I suppose it explains why diaper dude from the cover has the sword in the side wound, and the other guy has the green rock around his neck. Then again, I'm probably reaching here. It would be fun to ask Mr. Sembello about the cover.

Still, if this is playing in the background it's enjoyable enough, and for all my bitching and moaning, it's a decent release, but sadly nothing special. It mostly just calls to mind artists who have done the same thing, only better.

Did I mention "Maniac" was a near perfect pop song?

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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