Teaze - Tour of Japan

Teaze Tour of Japan. This is the one that got away from me back when I was in high school. There was a great little second hand store I frequented all the time. It was where I got my used comics, and picked up a seemingly inexhaustible number of Robert A. Heinlein paperbacks. Occasionally I'd get a Clarke, or Asimov but Heinlein was my jam. They also had a small section with some records. I picked up the first couple of PRISM albums there, and my once coveted copy of The Beatles White Album on white vinyl. There in the piles where I found April Wine's Live! was a copy of Tour of Japan. 

I'd never heard of these guys, but it was a cool looking cover, and the inside of the gatefold was really cool too as it had an extra panel with band photographs. They looked like they were killing it. I'd pick up, and put back that album many times and then one day it was gone. 

Dang.

Fast forward more than a few years (fine ... decades), and I'm digging through a bunch of records and there's Teaze. Oh man. I didn't even look at the price (it wasn't bad)brought it home and gave it a good clean and a once through. My first impression was goodness these guys were bordering on metal and they rocked hard. A number of the songs were really long but they weren't proggy, just long but they were delivered with gusto. The band's timing was pretty good, but you could tell here and there the guys were excited to be playing to an enthusiastic audience. The songs weren't really all that memorable, but the band put everything they had into the performance and as a piece it all worked.

The album was fun, and it felt like a live album and you could tell the band was feeding off of the crowd, and obviously loved Tokyo, because they kept saying it. I suspect when they went to Japan they weren't really sure of what kind of reception they'd get and I suspect they were more than pleasantly surprised.

The album does get better each time I spin it, and I've had it off and on a few times over the past few days, and the boys really did have an extra edge to their rock. Brian Danter the band's bassist and lead vocalist had a great voice, and at times reminded me here and there of Derek St. Holmes mixed with a little Bruce Dickinson. If that sounds good to you, it sounded good to me too. The band's guitar players were solid, and heck there's even a talk box solo which was pretty cool. I absolutely love the white Ovation Deacon that Mark Bradac is playing in the photographs. Ovation really did try to make a go of their electrics in the '70s. It's funny how they were the "it" guitars for about 5 minutes, and now they're hardly a footnote. Still, the fact the Mark is still playing it today is a pretty awesome.

The album is a fun ride, and while I'll admit that as much fun as it was, it really wasn't quite my thing. I never really went from hard riff rock to metal. The guys certainly had more of a melodic sensibility and there's a nice balance between the pop elements and the hard rock side of the band. 1979 was the band's big year with Myles Goodwin producing One Night Stands - except for whatever reason the band wasn't able to build on their momentum, and with the changing musical landscape the band would release one more album in 1980 and call it quits. They'd release a studio album a year between 1977 and 1980.

Still for all that, the band left behind Tour of Japan as the crowning jewel in their short discography. There was something special about the recording that made the total experience greater than the sum of the parts when taken individually. Not a shot, it's a compliment - through sheer force of will the guys were captured at their best and it's there in the grooves for all to hear.

Post Script. Interesting that when I streamed this on apple the songs were all mislabelled and were out of sequence. Not sure who was responsible, but someone needs to get that fixed.