Hooters - One Way Home

Hooters released their follow-up to Nervous Night in the summer of 1987. It hadn't seemed like two years between albums. When the album dropped, I picked it up right away. I really don't recall my reaction at the time. I do know I immediately pulled "Satellite" off the album as my favourite track, and it ended up on a lot of mix tapes. There were a couple of other songs that I liked too, but I'll admit to having shelved the album pretty quickly after hearing the highlights and giving it a few spins. It was a damning judgment, but this was 1987 and I was getting so much music that my attention span was pretty short. However, there was always something about the band I liked, and I would pick up their next album, Zig Zag, in '89, and then I would more or less lose track of the band.

Getting back to One Way Home, I will say that it's been a hoot (sorry) getting to hear this again. Now, I do have this on CD, but finding a pretty mint copy of the record was too much to pass up. I have always found it really, really irritating when the jacket doesn't list the songs in order, and the band does one better by including a lyric sheet that has the songs in a different order as well. Nothing like making you work to follow along.

Musically, the band was top shelf, and they were a rock band who incorporated a lot of different influences that have helped keep this sounding pretty fresh after all these years. "Satellite" is still, to me, the centre of the album, but really there are no duds here, and the folk elements blend so well with the harder elements that were sometimes infused with a reggae swagger.

In many ways, this is to me the best of their trilogy of major-label releases in the '80s. It's their most cohesive and the one that should have been huge. True, as I sit here all I can remember of Zig Zag was their cover of "500 Miles" and "Brother, Don't You Walk Away," so I'm just making a blanket judgment based on an admittedly faulty memory. After all, before I sat down and revisited One Way Home, I didn't remember much aside from the big songs - although I'd always thought of this as a stronger album than Nervous Night despite not having the killer hits. I know, right? That makes no sense. Feelings, sigh.

There was something special about these guys, and sadly One Way Home didn't perform nearly as well as its double-platinum predecessor. It would go gold, which was something, but from there it was a steady spiral downward, at least from a commercial perspective.

Too bad. This was a smokin' album. I don't know if it was Eric Bazilian or John Lilly who handled the lead guitar duties on the album, but I've always loved the guitar work on those first few albums - so tasty. It wouldn't surprise me if it was Eric; the guy played pretty much everything but drums on the album. This isn't to sleep on the other creative in the band, Rob Hyman - Rob and Eric shared lead vocals, splitting the duties more or less down the middle. Their voices were remarkably similar (at least to me), and they often sang counter-harmony to each other, creating a blended vocal that gave them a lot of their sound.

One Way Home is a really solid album.

I think I'm going to have to pull out Zig Zag now and see what else I've missed.

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...

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