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 song 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 that 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 have 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 La France and from 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 be 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 the interconnected threads of the various contributors on the album to see who was who.

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 BTOs 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) 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 to the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough the vocals reminded me of Mi

Hoodoo Gurus - Mars Needs Guitars!

The first time I got this album it was a gift from my old roommate Otto. For a goofy little nebbish he would occasionally surprise me with some left of field musical treasures. Although, I still think he was reaching a little when he brought home the new "Led Zeppelin" album by Kingdom Come and forced me to listen to "Get it On" over and over again. I'd not listened to Mars Needs Guitars in a long, long, long time. The first thing that I jumped out at me was how David Faulkner's vocals reminded me of his fellow countryman Peter Garrett from Midnight Oil. I think the reason this never occurred to me was at the time I didn't have any Midnight Oil until Diesel and Dust in 1987. I'm not saying it was all the time, but there were a couple of songs where it stood out. Not a bad thing, just a thing. Even at the time this felt slightly out of step with what was going on in 1985. It seemed like everyone was using drum machines and synthesizers and having t

Saturday Night Fever - The Original Movie Soundtrack

It was going to happen sooner or later. Nostalgia is a cruel Mistress...she can dull the sharpest edges and over time can even soften the hardest of opinions. I found this in the dollar bin, and frankly at a dollar I was worried about what this would cost me. Not only from a monetary perspective, but my time, and more important my credibility. Fourteen year old me was screaming "Don't you dare. DON'T DO IT! Put it down. Walk away!" Then there was grey bearded me holding it and looking at it, thinking, "How bad could it be? I actually kind of like "Staying Alive" and me buying this record won't bring disco back, and no one will have to know I bought this." I pulled the album out of the bin, and carefully took out the records. They'd seen better days, and there were a couple of decent scratches that would no doubt make their presence known later. The jacket was in decent condition, and both of the albums had the original sleeves. I dusted the

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog