Ironhorse - Ironhorse

Ironhorse was Randy's first band project since leaving Bachman-Turner Overdrive in 1977. It was released in '79, coming a year after Randy Bachman had dropped his solo album Survivor. An album I bought, and tried super hard to like. It had a great cover though. Coincidentally in '79, BTO (their second album without Randy) put out their last album, Rock n' Roll Nights, an album I saw many times over the years and never bothered to pick up. I'm looking for it now, sigh.

I opted to pick up Ironhorse because I had heard "Sweet Lui-Luise" a grand total of one time on the radio, and I was hooked. This was classic Randy, and I was excited to hear what else was buried in the grooves. Yes, I knew the song was a deliberate attempt to recreate "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" complete with the stutter ... but so what? 

I loved that one song, but mostly I was disappointed.

That's how I remember it.

Let's spin this and see what shakes out.

The band here was Randy on vocals and guitar, with Tom Sparks on vocals and guitar. The rhythm section was ace session player Mike Baird and bassist John Pierce. It's hard to get a read on whether this was a "real" band, or just a collection of session players backing Randy and Tom. I suspect it was very much Randy's project and everyone else was added as necessary to flesh out his vision of the songs.

The first side was all Randy songs, and I have to say this was better than I remembered. Oh, it's not a classic album, but it is an album worth giving a spin. I'd forgotten how good some of the songs were. It was "You Gotta Let Go" that stirred some deep memories. This was a song I'd put on some mix tapes, and it's a really good song. Heck, even the boogie-woogie "Tumbleweed" is worth repeated plays—mainly because Randy's guitar work is smokin'.

Randy's playing still gets the little hairs to stand up, and when he pulled out a solo he would slide the fader up and make it stand out—his tone was FAT. Heck, he even plays an early iteration of Roland's synthesizer guitar and uses it to great effect on some of the songs, particularly "Jump Back in the Light." It's hard to think that was 1979, as it would have been at home on a lot of '80s recordings. Randy had access to great gear.

The second side features three songs written by Tom Sparks. I can't find much out there on him, which is too bad. There was one site, but there was no mention of Ironhorse, so either it was a terrible experience, or it was a different guy. I'm 50/50 on this being a bad experience, as he wasn't on the band's follow-up.

The second side starts off with "Stateline Blues," written and fronted by Tom Sparks, and the song is a tonal and stylistic shift. For the time, this was right in the mix with a lot of the other AOR stuff, and Randy's guitar synth would have been bleeding edge. The follow-up, also written and sung by Tom, "Watch Me Fly," is decent and has a solid groove, but there's an overall feeling, at least for me, that I've been suckered and this is a bait and switch. Yeah, that's totally unfair, but I had a specific box where I'd put all things Bachman, and this was pushing the boundaries of what I was willing to accept from a Randy Bachman-helmed project.

Randy mines the Not Fragile era with "Old Fashioned," a song dedicated to Slowhand. For all that this tip of the hat to the early '70s is a lot of fun, especially given the passage of time, it just felt like a desperate attempt to capture past glory. The album's closer, "There Ain't No Cure," is in a similar vein, with Randy chugging along with the bass and rhythm guitar doubling the song's main riff. It's got all of the ingredients, and if you close your eyes you can imagine this being huge, but here it just feels like nostalgia.

Name recognition is a double-edged sword. With Ironhorse, I suspect it was a deliberate attempt to carve out a new direction while still utilizing the band's greatest weapon: Randy. The music world was changing, and while there was room for rock, it was moving away from the foot-stompin' boogie-woogie of those first BTO albums. While this was as good as, or better than, the later BTO records with and without Randy, times were changing.

The Tom Sparks songs were actually really solid, but they were overshadowed here. I actually like this a lot more now than I did back then.

Despite "Sweet Lui-Luise" cracking the Top 40 in the US and Canada, it didn't translate to sales, and by all accounts Scotti Brothers never recouped their advance. Although they did green-light a follow-up album in 1980 with a revamped lineup—an album I bought and listened to ... once.