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, the consistency of the band's output is nothing short of spectacular. This was a band who deserved to be in the hall of fame one day.

Seriously.

By 1984 the rock and roll of the late '70s was moving toward big hair, and the early new wave had already crashed on 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," more or less cementing the turn away from her vixen of rock and roll image 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 songs on Tropico were a mixed bag. "We Belong," was 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 is such a great callback 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.

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.

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 , ...

David Baerwald - Bedtime Stories

The little sticker on the shrinkwrap says, "You may remember David Baerwald from David & David's Boomtown ..." You bet, I remembered David Baerwald. Back in 1986 Boomtown was an album with moments of sheer brilliance. The whole album may not have been as top shelf as the first few tracks, but that didn't matter - it is an excellent album. I waited for a follow-up ... and waited, and then in 1990 it was a solo David, David Baerwald, who dropped Bedtime Stories . I snapped it up. "All For You," the opening cut, is still my favourite song on the album. It was mesmerizing. I'm not sure if the song got any airplay, it may have, but that may have been wishful thinking on my part as it was on a lot of mix tapes at the time and I heard it a lot in the car. The CD had a great booklet with all of the musician credits and lyrics. Oddly, when I found a sealed copy of the record (a great score), it just had a plain paper insert - the picture of David walking wit...

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 continued 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 b...

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