Michael Damian - Love is a Mystery

Ah, Michael Damian. Well, it was bound to happen at some point. To be honest I've been actually looking forward to this, mainly because I had packed a lot of baggage in advance and was just waiting for a chance to unload on what I was hoping would be a big pile of monkey droppings. I'd have my revenge for "Rock On" and nothing was going to get in my way.

Everybody knows that actors are often just frustrated musicians who were too pretty to be taken seriously. Then again, why is it that musicians want to be actors? Sigh.

The album I found was his 1984 debut Love Is a Mystery on Columbia. Dang, this label was home to some pretty awesome acts. Maybe this was a novelty release. Thankfully the copy I found for my dollar had the liner notes, and the core band was Michael on vocals and keyboards - and chimes (couldn't find a triangle?), Larry Weir on guitars and keyboards, and Tom Weir on drums. A quick peek on the internet revealed that Michael, Larry and Tom were siblings. I'm guessing in the pecking order if they were Osmonds, Michael would be Little Jimmy - you thought I would compare Michael Damian to Donny! For shame. SHAME!

I dropped the needle and waited for the banshees to be unleashed ...

This is what I had feared, but also to be honest had secretly hoped. It didn't suck. This was better than Jack Wagner's 1984 album - although unlike Jack's lone killer (have to give props even if you don't want to) "All I Need" there wasn't a big song here. This was miles away from being as good as "Hard to Hold" - Rick Springfield's album from the same year. However, it's not really fair to lump them all together - although it is fun. Oh, and if you're curious, Rick is Donny if we're still using the Osmonds as a litmus test. Jack Wagner is Tito Jackson.

Love Is a Mystery is for all that a pretty decent pop record. It's steeped a little more in the later '70s power pop and rock than in the '80s techno leaning stuff that was emerging in '84 and frankly this is a good thing. The songs are quite good, even if they're a tad generic. Michael's voice is better than I expected and he services the songs. While there's nothing about his tone that really jumps out as unique I did enjoy myself. The majority of the songs were written or co-written by big brother Larry and he's got a pretty good ear. Although there were a couple of his songs that wore their influences on their sleeves. "Will You Make Up Your Mind" had more than a nod or two to Journey's "Any Way You Want It" and The Cars "Just What I Needed" and "Hard to Find Girl" sounded like a kissing cousin to Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk" but it was more a feeling than anything, and frankly it was more interesting to hear, than it was distracting.

This wasn't the shit show I had anticipated (let's be honest I wanted this to suck, and suck HARD). I was probably more critical of this because I came in wanting to take a dump on a nearly forty year old album for fun. The fact that the album mostly won me over makes me wonder what I'd have thought of this if I hadn't brought so much baggage to the party.

You may have won this round Mr. Damian, but in the immortal words of Dr. Claw, "I'll get you next time, Gadget!"

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...

Old Enough to Forget

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