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 released his solo album Survivor. An album I bought, and tried super hard to like. It had a great cover though. In '79 BTO dropped 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 exited to hear what else was buried in the grooves. 

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 played 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 to back Randy and Tom. I suspect it was very much Randy's project and everyone else was just added as necessary to flesh out his vision of the songs.

The first side was all Randy songs, and I have to say that 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 got 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 '80 recordings. Randy had access to great gear.

The second side featured 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 one being a bad experience as he wasn't on the band's follow up.

The second side starts off his "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 while 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 you 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 changing from the foot stompin' boogie woogie of those first BTO albums, and while this was as good or better than that later BTO records, with and without Randy, times were changing. The Tom Sparks songs were actually really solid, but 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 line up that I bought and listened to ... once.