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 , ...

David Baerwald - Bedtime Stories

The little sticker on the shrinkwrap says, "You may remember David Baerwald from David & David's Boomtown ..." You bet, I remembered David Baerwald. Back in 1986 Boomtown was an album with moments of sheer brilliance. The whole album may not have been as top shelf as the first few tracks, but that didn't matter - it is an excellent album. I waited for a follow-up ... and waited, and then in 1990 it was a solo David, David Baerwald, who dropped Bedtime Stories . I snapped it up. "All For You," the opening cut, is still my favourite song on the album. It was mesmerizing. I'm not sure if the song got any airplay, it may have, but that may have been wishful thinking on my part as it was on a lot of mix tapes at the time and I heard it a lot in the car. The CD had a great booklet with all of the musician credits and lyrics. Oddly, when I found a sealed copy of the record (a great score), it just had a plain paper insert - the picture of David walking wit...

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 continued 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 b...

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