Shari Ulrich – One Step Ahead

Funny how you can know a name but not know anything about the artist. Shari Ulrich is one of those artists who just skirted on the fringes of real success here in Canada. That sort of reads as a dismissive shot, but it's not.

Many years ago I was a camp counsellor for a couple of summers, and one of my fellow "shapers of future minds" was Rick Scott's son, who was incredibly funny and we had a hoot over those two summer camps. Anyway, I can't remember how it came up that he was Rick's son, most likely because I fancied myself a songwriter who could sing about food and animals ... yeah, whatever you're conjuring in your mind's eye, it's even worse. Why am I telling you this? I have no idea, but it's one of those things that came to mind when I was sitting here listening to One Step Ahead.

Regardless, Shari was a member of the Pied Pumpkin, which was apparently a biggish deal in the early '70s, and then she, along with Valdy, was a member of The Hometown Band, a band I sort of knew of, but knew nothing about other than they were Valdy's backing band for a while.

This is going somewhere, really, just bear with me. In the late '90s I got a chance to work at United Way in Vancouver and over a 14-week period I was out and about coordinating workplace campaigns. It was an awesome experience. As part of my toolkit I had a VHS cassette that showcased the work being done in the community, and the soundtrack to the video was provided by none other than Shari Ulrich. The song she had provided, "Hand of a Hero," was a surprisingly (to me at any rate) awesome pop song that I heard over and over and over, and it never wore thin.

I became a fan through that song. I was a fan with no other point of reference, but I considered myself a fan nonetheless.

Fast forward a couple of decades and I find in the bins her 1981 release One Step Ahead, and I snapped it up. Reading the back jacket revealed a local who's who of the best players you could imagine. From Chilliwack alumni - Bill Henderson, Ab Bryant, and Claire Lawrence (who was also in Home Town Band) - to drummer Marc LaFrance and Doucette guitarist Brent Shindel, and Robbie King on organ.

Honestly, she had me before I read the credits. After a careful cleaning I put the album on, and it was pop magic. There was just enough edge here and there to qualify as a pop/rock album. It was also very much a late '70s album that would be right at home with albums by Christopher Cross and David Roberts. Again, not a shot, I love this stuff.

The album was also produced by Claire Lawrence, and this is a great sounding record. It pushes a lot of my happy buttons, which I always find fun considering my love for harder guitar-oriented rock. To those who aren't as enamoured with shiny pop songs, one could argue the album, while sounding great, is also fairly generic and seemed to be deliberately crafted to be commercially accessible.

I have a counter to that as well. So?

This was her second album for A&M, as she had dropped her debut album Long Nights a year earlier, and then in 1982 she'd move to MCA and release Talk Around Town. Then she'd sort of go dark for the better part of a decade.

Those early '80s albums seem to have been kept in the vaults, which sadly seems to be a common theme for so many artists. Which is too bad.

This was a fun find, and it was as much fun listening to as it was to unravel the interconnected threads of the various contributors on the album to see who was who.

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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