A Streaming Pile of Hit: The Outlaws

A Streaming Pile of Hit: The Outlaws - Los Hombres Malo

Here we have an album I always looked back on fondly. Digging up the Outlaws on this instalment of A Streaming Pile of Hit - where you put the "s" in hit is up to you.

Los Hombres Malo from 1982 would be pretty much the end of the line for The Outlaws. I was pretty late to the party having jumped on with their previous release and really didn't know a whole lot about southern rock, and even less about their countrified hybrid. I knew what I liked, and I liked guitars, and these boys were all about guitars. I know that Hughie Thomasson gets a lot of love for his playing, but Freddie Salem was no slouch. Sadly Billy Jones had left the band, and was dealing with personal issues, and eventually he'd succumb to his demons.

However, here the band was delivering some pretty heavy riffs, while still managing to incorporate the band's blend of rock and country. The opening track, Freddie Salem's "Don't Stop" is still one of my favourite Outlaws songs. It's a bit of a muddy clunky mess but there's something about it that just gets me in the feels, as does the other Freddie penned track "Goodbye" which is actually the better of the two songs he has here, but there's something about that opening riff on "Don't Stop" that I keep going back to.

By '82 though this flavour of rock was getting old, and a lot of bands who were at the top of their game were having a tough time transitioning into the '80s and The Outlaws were not going to be the exception to the rule. I suppose if there's cold comfort in any of this, it's that they went out at the top of their game. Los Hombres Malo is really an overlooked gem in their catalogue. No, I am not kidding. This is really good.

The songs and vocals by Hughie, Rick Cua and Freddie meshed well together and although stylistically they each had their own thing going on - as an album it made for a fun listen. To be honest I'd not listened to this one in a long, long time and frankly it was better than I remembered. Much better.

Standout tracks: "Don't Stop," "Goodbye," the ballad "Running" that should have been a hit. Although there is a cool version of the same song by Chubby Checker from around the same time. The album's closer by Hagar / Peterik "All Roads" was a great song and a fitting goodbye, even if it wasn't intended that way when the album came out.

For an album called "the bad men" they delivered the goods.

Comments

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 , ...

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...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog