Boney M. - Night Flight to Venus

Boney M. was a very confusing band for me. Disco sucked. By extension Boney M. sucked too. "Rasputin" was cool and didn't count, or at least it was exempt from the obligatory suckage disco was supposed to encapsulate. Then again, looking back I had a special compartment for quite a few disco songs I sort of liked, but publicly shit on.

Boney M. was the brainchild of German producer Frank Farian who wrote many of the songs, produced the records, and also sang. For years, many years, I had no idea that the folks on the cover weren't the ones on the grooves. The official lineup of the band was Liz Mitchell and Marcia Barrett who shared lead vocals. Although it's Liz who is often associated as being the "lead" singer. They were both from Jamaica. Vocalist and dancer Maizie Williams was from Montserrat, and dancer and vocalist Bobby Farrell hailed from Aruba. Incidentally, neither Maizie nor Bobby appeared on the records. If people knew, no one really cared. It was all about the image, and the image was cool.

Night Flight to Venus was their third album, and opens with the largely instrumental title track that features a robotic voice that was pretty groundbreaking for the time, with the distinctive drum beat seguing into "Rasputin," a song that still makes me happy when I hear it. I can still see my wife's grandmother dancing up a storm at our family Christmas parties, while my brother-in-law did his version of a Russian folk dance. The rest of us clapped and sang "hey hey hey" in unison. The song is pure unadulterated cheese.

The other big song was "The Rivers of Babylon," a song I'd always liked. I appreciated how it was played straight and treated the source material with respect. It really is a pretty awesome song. It's interesting to sort of compare and contrast Boney M. and ABBA - while they're really nothing alike, there are some similarities. Where Anna and Frida had the power and range and harmonies, Liz and Marcia often approached the songs in unison but didn't have the same impact. Not to say they weren't good - when they stayed in their lane they were pretty great. I'm starting to think this whole ABBA angle is a non-starter, it was really only the song "Painter Man" that made me think it sounded a little like a weak ABBA song. Best to move on. If nothing else, both bands were considered safe - maybe that's the takeaway.

The album is pretty good, and at times the songs sort of devolve into a generic disco funk beat that just sort of plays without going anywhere. What caught my attention were the cover songs. Side one closes out with a mind-boggling disco interpretation of Roger Miller's classic "King of the Road" and then they wind up the record with Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" that was really quite good. Different, but good. I was expecting it to be another disco fiasco but have to admit they pulled it off.

Night Flight to Venus was better than I expected, and while there were some odd moments it was catchy, and the big songs have held up remarkably well. It's not an exceptional album, but when it was good it was very good.

There's a lot out there about Boney M. and it's an interesting and rather melancholy tale. All of the members of Boney M. have laid claim to the name, with each re-recording songs and releasing material, even those who didn't have anything to do with the records in the first place. It must have felt weird to be a member but not be on the recordings, but be on the cover.

Meanwhile Frank Farian would continue doing his thing, and created Milli Vanilli much like he did Boney M. They were a studio creation, and he fronted it with the image he wanted the band to have. Except this time people weren't in on it, and when they found out felt betrayed ... funny, the music was the same, except now it wasn't.

Go figure.

I guess Frank said summed it up best in his lyrics to "Rasputin"

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey

I didn't count them but I think you get it. It was a shame how he carried on.

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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