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.

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...

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