City Boy - Dinner at the Ritz

I've picked up an awful lot of stuff over the last few months, probably more than I should have, but dagnabbit, a deal is a deal. The shelf where my incoming pile is stored is getting pretty full, which means I get to spend more time in the basement listening to tunes and avoiding other chores.

Win win.

Of all the guys in City Boy, it was Mike Slamer's name I was familiar with from his work with Steve Walsh, both solo and as a member of Streets. The guy was a super tasty player and could really rip it up too. I found out he'd been in a band called City Boy, and ever since I've sort of kept an eye out for them.

Fast forward, and I picked up a really nice-looking copy of Dinner at the Ritz. I scan the back cover and there are six dapper-looking lads wearing tuxedos. Also on the back cover, Mutt Lange was listed as producer and co-engineer. I was already sold, this just made it more solder. I have yet to hear anything associated with Mutt that was a stinker ... that includes Shania Twain. I know, I know.

I generally try not to form an opinion before hearing things ... although I had already pegged this as a rock record that was likely going to melt my face. The album opened with "Mama's Boy," which was just rock enough to put a little grin on my face. I was thinking, "Man, this was 1977, but this would sound right at home into the early '80s." To be fair, there were a few years between 1978 and 1983 that were pretty interchangeable until they weren't. Then it was a pretty hard stop that cratered a lot of bands who couldn't adapt or grow out their hair.

However, I'm only a song in, let's not get too far ahead of myself. The guys didn't make a batch of cookies from the same recipe. Musically, City Boy was meandering all over, from near progressive with bits of Yes, to bordering on Sweet-favoured glam. In short, it was a lot of fun and the guys had chops. Heck, the boys even went deep into the '70s schlock with a string-infused ballad, "The Violin," a song that I can imagine a sea of lighters flickering along with a host of burned thumbs.

It's actually a very good song. That features a lot of, well, violin. It felt long, but I didn't realize it was seven minutes long. Yeah, I'm pretty sure no one was going to hold a lighter up for seven minutes. Still, a pretty ambitious song. It's no more out of place than any other rock ballad that's sandwiched between a couple of rock songs. Although if I'm to play along with the album conceit, each selection was a table, not a song, or a serving, which would have worked better, but then again I wasn't asked my opinion.

The album closes with table No. 7, "State Secrets - a Thriller," which is spread over three parts and clocks in at seven and a half minutes. It's a fitting close to the album.

Interesting now that I've had a chance to go through it, the opening track really is the most straight-ahead rocker on the album. Don't get me wrong, the whole album is really good. It's not like a bait and switch, the guys are just covering more ground musically than a lot of other rock bands from the same time. This is what album-oriented rock should be: an album that is fitted together and takes the listener on a journey. I'm still having a dickens of a time trying to process this as an album that came out in the mid '70s.

The title track, "Dinner at the Ritz," didn't really catch me the first time through. I thought it was good ... but having played this through a couple of times now, this song is amazing. It feels like Queen and Supertramp with a dash of Floyd all at the same time ... yeah, that's not quite right, but it's really cool. They didn't sound like a lot of other bands. They were doing their own thing.

After giving this a couple spins, I figured it was worth looking up the band, and apparently Dinner at the Ritz was originally released in 1976, but in North America it came out on Mercury Records in 1977. As to Mutt Lange, the first full album he produced was City Boy's debut, and Dinner at the Ritz was their second album together. All in all, he'd produced five of the band's seven records. By 1981, the band would release their final album, and despite their best efforts they seem to have been mostly forgotten.

Which is a shame. This one is really a lost classic, and frankly I'm now on the lookout for more of their stuff.

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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