Pat Benatar - Tropico

Funny I thought I'd written about Pat Benatar before ... apparently not. Well, let's make up for lost time and start with her 1984 album Tropico. This was a gear change and an attempt to sort of stay ahead of the curve. Now to be fair, despite always liking some of the songs I heard on the radio - especially those early hits, I'd never picked anything up by her.

Over the last couple of years I've found most of her early efforts, and for the most part they were good albums. It was the combination of Pat's vocals, and Neil's music that really worked - even when it was a cover, like "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" written by Eddie Schwartz. Considering the treadmill the band was on, cranking out an album a year like sausages from 1979 to 1985 and the consistency of the band's output is nothing short of spectacular.

Seriously.

By 1984 the rock and roll of the late '70s was moving toward big hair, and the early new wave had already crashed to the beach and the tide was going out. Rock was changing and a year earlier Pat Benatar scored pretty big with the studio track "Love is a Battlefield" from her Live from Earth release. With Tropico that song served as a blueprint of sorts and served as a lead in to "We Belong" and more or less cemented the turn away from her vixen of rock and roll to being an adult contemporary artist - with a bit more edge than most of her contemporaries.

One thing about Pat's releases her band was pretty consistent during her glory years. Heck, drummer Myron Grombacher had played with Neil going back to his days with Rick Derringer. This consistency carried through to the music, or at least I like to think so.

The results were a mixed bag. Listening now, there are some pretty great moments on the album. "We Belong" being the best of the bunch and honestly one of her most memorable songs, but there were others like the haunting "The Outlaw Blues" and the solid "Painted Desert" that were also really good. The "Ooh Ooh Song" is a hard one for me. This a such a great call back to the skinny tie new wave from a few years earlier I really wanted to like it ... but even with the benefit of almost forty years I'm still ambivalent at best to this one.

With the added benefit of hindsight this was nearing the end of Pat Benatar as a commercial concern. Tropico would be her last platinum studio album. Still those early albums had some great tunes.

There's no doubting her place in rock and roll and she and Neil were inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2022. Too bad they didn't call themselves The Pat Benatar Band, then her longtime collaborators and band mates likely would have gotten the nod too. Although trying to sift through who would be eligible would have been tricky ... do you go for the original guys or the later members?
Can of worms.

Sadly, not everyone belongs.

Yeah, I did that.

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 BTOs 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) 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 to the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough the vocals reminded me of Mi

Hoodoo Gurus - Mars Needs Guitars!

The first time I got this album it was a gift from my old roommate Otto. For a goofy little nebbish he would occasionally surprise me with some left of field musical treasures. Although, I still think he was reaching a little when he brought home the new "Led Zeppelin" album by Kingdom Come and forced me to listen to "Get it On" over and over again. I'd not listened to Mars Needs Guitars in a long, long, long time. The first thing that I jumped out at me was how David Faulkner's vocals reminded me of his fellow countryman Peter Garrett from Midnight Oil. I think the reason this never occurred to me was at the time I didn't have any Midnight Oil until Diesel and Dust in 1987. I'm not saying it was all the time, but there were a couple of songs where it stood out. Not a bad thing, just a thing. Even at the time this felt slightly out of step with what was going on in 1985. It seemed like everyone was using drum machines and synthesizers and having t

Saturday Night Fever - The Original Movie Soundtrack

It was going to happen sooner or later. Nostalgia is a cruel Mistress...she can dull the sharpest edges and over time can even soften the hardest of opinions. I found this in the dollar bin, and frankly at a dollar I was worried about what this would cost me. Not only from a monetary perspective, but my time, and more important my credibility. Fourteen year old me was screaming "Don't you dare. DON'T DO IT! Put it down. Walk away!" Then there was grey bearded me holding it and looking at it, thinking, "How bad could it be? I actually kind of like "Staying Alive" and me buying this record won't bring disco back, and no one will have to know I bought this." I pulled the album out of the bin, and carefully took out the records. They'd seen better days, and there were a couple of decent scratches that would no doubt make their presence known later. The jacket was in decent condition, and both of the albums had the original sleeves. I dusted the

Old Enough to Forget

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