Chilliwack - Opus X

Opus X was a pretty big deal here in Canada when this came out in '82. While Chilliwack had been around for over a decade and was Bill Henderson's band, it was as a power trio that the band had its greatest commercial success. Starting with Wanna Be a Star in 1981 that featured the irritating but oddly cool "My Girl (Gone, Gone, Gone)," the band had managed to crack into the lucrative US market. The single would crack the Billboard top 40, peaking at number 22. Opus X a year later was supposed to drive the wedge in even further and break the band wide open.

You know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men. I could tell you more about the rabbits, but I really should try and stay on topic. While the lead single "Whatcha Gonna Do" did really well here at home, it didn't perform as well as hoped in the US market, stalling literally just outside the top 40 at 41.

The album was a big hit here, selling over 100,000 copies, and Bill Henderson and Brian MacLeod would receive the Producer of the Year Juno at the 1983 awards ceremony for their work on the singles "Whatcha Gonna Do" and "Secret Information," which were the first two songs on the album. The songs, all of them - not just the first two, were a nearly perfect balance between hard rock with Brian's drumming and killer guitar work and Bill's voice. Ab Bryant ably (I so wanted to write Ab-ly) filled in the bottom end. The songs were fat. It was a deceptively hard rocking album, and I'm sure there were discussions internally about the direction the music was going. It's not like Bill couldn't sing a rock song, he nails the balls to the wall vocals required to carry a song like "Don't It Make You Feel Good," which almost borders on what would evolve into The Headpins.

I never bought this when it came out (I didn't really know much other than the songs I heard on the radio) and didn't get it until 1984, shortly after Segue came out and just before Bill's underrated Look In Look Out came out. Don't ask how come I remember this, it's just one of those things. Oddly I do remember enjoying this quite a bit when I got it. There weren't any dead spots, and the songs were all so good.

The second side in particular seemed to just blow off the doors. It's like the pretty singles were on side one, and side two all bets were off. Of course with only nine songs on the album you know one side was going to be down a song, so to make up for it they added more volume. More to the point, one could make the argument that with the yin and yang push and pull between Bill and Brian the album more or less was split into Bill on one side, and Brian on the other. It wasn't necessarily oil and water, but the harder elements were falling more into what The Headpins were carving out.

Both Opus X and Headpins' debut were huge hits here, and after picking up their Junos, Brian and Ab would leave to Chilliwack in 1983 to focus on their new venture.

The album still holds up remarkably well. Much more than I remember, and while I'm sure the hardcore fans who'd been along since the beginning may have had a hard time reconciling the harder rocking songs as being from the same band who had released "Rain-O" in the early '70s.

Over the years I have picked up a lot of their albums, not all, and the common thread woven through most of what I have heard is a lack of consistency. The hit and miss nature of the songs on any given album (I'm not saying they weren't enjoyable) kept them from being a really big deal. Heck, even the album that preceded this one was hit and miss and it's the one that had their biggest hit ... Opus X has the distinction, at least for me, as being all killer no filler. Heck, even the band's blatant attempt to replicate "My Girl" by reworking it and presenting it as "She Don't Know" was really good.

Bill Henderson, who was always the nucleus of Chilliwack, would regroup, after a fashion, and release Look In Look Out with studio musicians. It would also be the last album of new material the band would release. Headpins would release three albums between '82 and '85 and then they too were done.

Opus X remains a fantastic album.

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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