Alannah Myles - Alannah Myles

In 1989 rock was alive and well. Seemingly out of nowhere Alannah Myles was suddenly everywhere, and propelled by "Black Velvet" she became an overnight sensation that took over a decade of hard work to achieve.

I may as well get right to the elephant in the room right off the bat. "Black Velvet" is still an amazing song. Considering that musically the song is essentially a generic vamp on a bass-driven 12-bar blues shuffle, the song is immediately identifiable. It was also played to death and while it never got old, it sure did get overplayed. It also became the high water mark that everything else would be measured by.

Fair or not, that's how things go sometimes.

Hair metal and an abundance of musical excess and fret shredding was the flavour of the day, and Alannah Myles managed to be of the times but a step removed at the same time. The guitar work of Bob Bartolucci, who I remembered from the GNP album (also from 1989, I don't remember which came first), and Kurt Schefter were right in the pocket and they had chops.

This was a rock record, but with a sultry twist that didn't come across as cheap and sleazy. The album opens with "Still Got This Thing," a great song that tonally set the stage for the album, and by the third song when things go mid tempo with "Black Velvet," it was sequenced perfectly. By the time the first side concludes with "Lover of Mine," a near perfect slow dance with just enough crunch to feel like a power ballad, you knew you were listening to something special. The second side opens up with "Kick Start My Heart" and we're back in the groove. There isn't a dud on the second side either, and by the time things close with "Hurry Make Love," it's been a hell of a ride.

Now with all of this hyperbole you'd be surprised (or not, how am I to know) to know that while I liked the album back in the day, I also kind of dismissed it a little because Christopher Ward, who was then a veejay on Much Music ... for whatever reason I always thought of him as a musical nebbish, and he was no J.D. Roberts (before he morphed into John Roberts on Fox). It was more than unfair, and honestly when the awards started to come in for the album, Alannah always thanked Christopher. Maybe there was more to this guy ... there was. Of the ten songs, Mr. Ward (see, I'm trying to be respectful) co-wrote nine of them, and he served as executive producer on the album. He eventually earned my respect, although I'm pretty sure he still has no idea he needed it in the first place.

Alannah Myles would go on to sell a million copies in Canada. If you didn't read that in your head as Dr. Evil, go back and read it again. That's ONE MILLION in a country that was just over 27 million at the time, that is a lot of records. It would go platinum in the States as well.

The album still sounds great. David Tyson produced this one, and it was mastered at Sterling Sound by the legendary George Marino.

This would be her defining moment, and while her subsequent albums were still very good, she would never again reach the heights attained on her debut. Heck, even her 1997 release ARIVAL (which didn't have the space to make it read a rival) was good, although when I was reviewing it on my old banophernalia site (long gone, do not google that now, it was usurped by a NSFW site) I thought it would be funny to trash the album. I was wrong, and I'm sorry.

Alannah Myles is still out there, and from what I've read her contract with Atlantic at the time paid everyone but her ... which seems to be a pretty common story which always makes me sad.

Back in 2007 or 2008 (not really clear which) she re-recorded songs and released them as Black Velvet - it is very good.

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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