SKIP INTRO
When Heavy Metal came out in the summer of '81 it was jaw dropping. I really didn't have many of the magazines because they were a little too out there and were more expensive than the comics I normally bought. The movie though - that was another thing altogether. Besides most of the guys from SCTV seemed to be in there somewhere, and there were cartoon titties. Den would have approved ... and he did (if you know, you know).
It was the music though. The first scene opens with a space shuttle with the bay doors open, and an astronaut driving a Corvette makes it's way through the atmosphere - and blaring through the speakers is Rigg's "Radar Rider" and from that moment I was hooked.
This.Was.Cool.
Oh make no mistake the movie was an uneven mess and a pastiche of styles and stories thinly braided together to try and adhere to an overall plot ... it's thin ... real thin, but man was it cool at the time. The soundtrack was awesome all the way through ... well almost all the way through, "Blue Light" by Stevie Nicks I could take or leave ... mostly leave, but hey - nothing is perfect.
Two of the best songs were by Riggs who had not one, but two killer songs on the soundtrack - the other being "Heartbeat" both songs being produced by the legendary Roy Thomas Baker. Man I wanted to hear more.
Then one day I found it, and I scanned the songs to see if the two songs from the soundtrack were listed. They weren't. I hemmed and hawed and then put it back. I'd do this many times and came close more than once. After a while I stopped listening to the soundtrack, and my curiosity about Rigg more or less faded.
Then in the mid '90s when Heavy Metal it came out on VHS, and of course it rekindled my interested and the soundtrack was finally available on CD. I'll admit that as much as I wanted to get the Rigg's tracks, I wanted to hear Don Felder's "Heavy Metal (Takin' a Ride)" a song that Don felt the need to leave off of his '83 solo album. Hearing "Radar Rider" peaked my interest again in the band, and I went looking for a CD ... and came up empty, and after a while I stopped looking.
When I started listening to records again and scouring used shops, I had a list of white whales and among the items I wanted to spear through the centre with my turntables' spindle was Riggs. When I was out I'd often find stuff I hadn't been looking. Every so often when I'd about Riggs the name would ring a bell, especially to fellow geeks who knew of the movie. I kept coming up empty.
I knew Discogs had a market place, and I'd seen the album there and it wasn't stupid expensive but the shipping was generally more than the album. It was late at night and I looked through the listings and found a seller who had a mint sealed copy that didn't have a punch out from the remainder bins. It was a small shop in Norway of all places, but I was determined and decided to suck it up and just go for it.
When it arrived it was just as advertised. I was stoked to hear it ... but I wanted to relish the experience so I put it on a pile for a day or two when I could just sit back and really take it in. Then it just sat there ... and time went by ... first a week, then a month, then another month ...
Until today, today was the day I'd get to the record. Well honestly I got to it a couple of days ago, and I've been spinning this one over and over and am now sitting at my keyboard while it plays again.
Riggs debut should have been a pretty big deal, even without the two Roy Thomas Baker produced songs. Andy Johns, yes the legendary Andy Johns not only helped produce, but he engineered this one, and it goes without saying, this is a killer sounding record. It may have been 1982 but this was recorded as organically as possible. The bass (David Ridarick) is fat, the guitars (Jerry Riggs and Jeremy Graf) are crunchy and not overly processed, and the drums (Stephen Roy Carlisle) are crisp and you can feel the thump of the kick through your chest. In short this is what a rock and roll record is supposed to sound and feel like.
The songs on the album have a swagger, and Jerry Riggs is a pretty solid guitar player who has one of those almost generic hard rock voices that at times sounded a bit like Sammy Hagar mixed with Steve Walsh (Streets era, not so much Kansas) but that's not entirely fair ... it's just a point of comparison, and frankly I prefer liked Jerry's voice. He's a really good singer.
I came into this primed to enjoy the album, so I'd kind of set a low bar. It was either that or have over forty years of anticipation raise my expectations to impossible heights. The album clears the bar pretty easily. The album was full of late '70s riff rock with a nod to new wave structures here and there. It was really good. It pushed my happy buttons. Heck the ballad "Don't Walk Away" is as good as any of the hard rock slow songs of the era, but it's the rockers that make this worthwhile, and there are a lot of them.
Of course the other way of looking at this is that it was another band putting out yet another AOR album full of cookie cutter rock songs that sounded great but didn't have any staying power. Which is most likely how it was viewed when it came out. That's if it was heard at all. Who knows what kind of push this got from Full Moon / Warner at the time. It really is too bad I didn't snag this back in '82 when this came out. I wouldn't have been disappointed. It would have fitted right alongside the albums that were turning my musical crank. The album in some circles (mine at any rate) is a lost classic and I'm glad I finally managed to find a copy like the one I eschewed all those years ago.
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