Utopia - Deface the Music

Utopia is one of those bands I was always curious as this was the band Todd Rundgren was in. I'd seen his name pop up on various albums over the years. After a fairly long dry spell (at least two or three weeks) where I could only find obscure show tunes and old Disney records in the dollar bin, up popped what looked to be a decent copy of Deface the Music. There was a slight wobble but I figured it was worth a chance so I brought it home and gave it a little TLC and put it in the queue.

Well, the slight wobble was more than slight and effectively made the first tracks on both sides unplayable, which was a shame. But not all was lost. I'm not sure what I was expecting musically as I hadn't looked it up prior to dropping the needle. I suppose the cover should have given it away, but come on, everyone seemed to have a cover like this at some point. Of course as soon as the music started I found myself listening to a long lost Beatles record ... or The Rutles, depending on your preferences. Personally after a couple of times through the album, I'm leaning to The Rutles - but played straight. Over the baker's dozen of tunes on Deface the Music Utopia replicates the various eras with uncanny precision. It is an odd love letter that I'm not sure I actually like or am just more impressed they carried the conceit through an entire album. I'll call it 50/50 and admit there are some pretty impressive moments scattered throughout the album.

As my album didn't have any credits I actually wanted to see who was doing what. Sadly I couldn't really find a track by track who's who - but from what I can see the band during this period was pretty stable and was comprised of

Roger Powell - synthesizers, keyboards, backing and lead vocals
Todd Rundgren - lead guitar, lead and backing vocals
Kasim Sulton - bass, lead and backing vocals
John "Willie" Wilcox - drums, percussion, backing and lead vocals

This would sort of explain the band's ability to cover a lot of ground as the band had four lead vocalists ... just like The Beatles, that is assuming you count Ringo - me, I love Ringo, he counts.

For me the album really starts to come alive near the end of side one starting with "Take It Home" that more or less puts "Day Tripper" in a blender. Then the second side is all gravy. I'm going to have to revisit my 50/50 assessment ... but maybe not, as I think much of my reaction is my response to hearing the bits and pieces the band is paying homage to - as a stand alone piece of music I'm still split.

Whatever, this was 1980 and I find it amazingly cool that a band like Utopia figured it was a good idea to dedicate an entire album to paying homage to The Beatles.

I know it may seem like I was more or less "meh" to the whole thing, but it did have a certain charm. Enough so that I went back to the store to look for a copy in their regular section. I found a few, and for about seven bucks I picked what I thought was the best of the lot.

I'm hoping to find more of their stuff one day in the discount bin to see what else they had up their collective sleeves. Besides, if I can't wait there's always the regular section that regular people use.

As to Utopia on this one, based solely on the back cover - they were indeed out standing in their field.

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 , ...

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...

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 BTO's 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) - so 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 toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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