The Tubes - Love Bomb and Remote Control: The Rundgren Bookends

For a moment in the early '80s it seemed like The Tubes were finally going to get their due.  After back to back gold albums in Canada, a feat they never managed in the US - then again there were more zeroes required to go gold there, the band was on a roll. Then came Love Bomb ...

I guess the band decided they needed a change and after a couple of albums helmed by David Foster that found the boys moving away from their more outrageous elements to focus on commercial success, they would once again bring Todd Rundgren back into the fold to produce their 1985 effort Love Bomb.

Now I had been waiting for the follow up to Outside Inside for a couple of years and I remember seeing a video for "Piece by Piece" and liked the song, but the video was awful. I only ever saw it once ... it's on YouTube if you're inclined. I tried to find the record once or twice and then more or less forgot to keep looking. Besides, I had Fee Waybill's 1984 solo effort Read My Lips, which I always really liked, but I was in the minority apparently. 

A while back when I had pulled out The Completion Backward Principle I got to thinking about Love Bomb so I bought and downloaded a copy and not long after I picked up the album. What stood out was how truly awful the cover art was. I mean, after so many great cover concepts this is what they settled on? Good grief. Like so much of their music they're all over the place, and interspersed between the good is the bad and the ugly. When they're good, like on the lead off track "Piece by Piece" they're very good ... then they'll go into their adult contemporary mode and drop a generic track like "Come as You Are" and then they'll just be themselves and drop stuff like "Bora Bora 2000" and the the title track "Love Bomb" which to me is musical fridge art.

The second side, or as it was labelled on the jacket 2nd THING opens with "Night People" an odd song that I'm not sure I like or am irritated by. Maybe it's just me because much of the charm with The Tubes is the tension between being commercially accessible and artistically expressive songs the band would craft. Not everything worked, and that was just how it was. It's not like I didn't like weird after all, it was "Dancin'" their duet with Olivia Newton-John, that made go buy The Xanadu Soundtrack. Doesn't get much goofier than that - and that shit was awesomeness!

Still, there's only so much I can take when things stray too far into the absurd. By the time they get to "Theme From a Wooly Place (Wooly Bully/Theme from a Summer Place)" I'm actually praying for the band to knuckle down and quit screwing around and craft another bit of pop magic. I suppose this is where fair weather fans didn't know what to do with what was going on and to that end I was figuring out where my bread was buttered. Maybe I wasn't a fan after all, and just rode along when the songs suited me.

Love Bomb would just, to put in bluntly, bomb. Although they did score a minor hit with "Piece by Piece" (which was an excellent song) it wasn't enough, and even the generally receptive Canadians didn't embrace the record as it would just barely crack the top 100 before bottoming out. I wonder if distribution was an issue, I mean I never found it in the racks when I was looking for it.

Despite my previous comments, I still consider myself a fan (of sorts), but I'm drawn to their sparkly bits and in small quantities will enjoy some of their quirkier numbers. After four albums on A&M and a trio of releases on Capitol Love Bomb this would effectively mark the end of the band's run. 

Originally I was just going to write about Love Bomb, but I was feeling a little sad about what I had written. Then I got to wondering if I've been a little too snarky. Well, rather than go back and listen again, I decided to go back even further.

That's right, after basically dropping a huge shit on Love Bomb I figured I would go and pull out their 1979 A&M release Remote Control that was also produced by Todd Rundgren. It was an album I had seen a few times back in the day, and I had recently found a picture disc, but didn't want to play it so I bought a regular copy. It had a really cool cover and the back cover was really clever. Too bad they didn't get Peter Marshall to sit in the bottom right. That would have been wicked.

So here I am with my Todd Rundgren book ends, out of order, and I'm about to listen with new ears to an album that dropped just shy of 45 years ago. I have no idea what a sixteen year old me would have thought of this stuff ... I had enough trouble trying to process what the hell was going on with "Rock Lobster" and I suspect The Tubes would have just broken my brain back then.

Right off, "Turn Me On" was a juicy bit of power pop. Then again, many of the band's big songs came right out of the gate, from "Talk to Ya Later" to "She's a Beauty" and Love Bomb's "Piece By Piece" were all opening aural salvos.  The band keeps things pretty straight ahead with the next track, and "Prime Time" is an interesting pseudo-funky pop number that features Re Styles and Fee Waybill trading vocals. It's decent enough, but just felt a little flat. I suspect I'm sitting here trying too hard to find things to write, rather just just sitting back and taking it in. Sometimes pulling things apart layer by layer does a disservice to the actual experience. The rest of the side one is still very much The Tubes and is actually more straight ahead than I expected it to be. 

The instrumental "Getoverture" opens the second side and then the music continues with "No Mercy" another quirky song, but I'm finding myself starting to get into this more than I expected. "Be Mine Tonight" was really good. This to me is when The Tubes were their best. Great music mixed with clever lyrics. The band then pulls off a killer ballad on "Love's a Mystery (I Don't Understand)" that feels like a precursor to "Don't Want to Wait Anymore" that would come out a couple years later. It's always a bit discombobulating discovering music out of sequence as trying to fit things together becomes a little problematic. Regardless it's really good.

The albums closes out their conceptual conceit with "Telecide" and the whole thing just re-enforces the old nugget "The more things change, the more they stay the same." We're still bitching about the impacts of too much T.V. on society, although it's now screens and all the garbage in and garbage out - it's the same principle. "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" it was true in 1976 when this became the soundbite immortalized by Peter Finch in the move Network.

I suspect a few more times up on the turntable will help things settle in. After all, I still remember listening to The Completion Backward Principle and being rather dismissive of the whole thing after the opening track - and that album is friggin' awesome.