Don Henley - Building the Perfect Beast

In the fall of '84 two albums dropped that were huge for me. Toto's maligned Isolation, and Don Henley's Building the Perfect Beast. Toto's album will be another day but today I'm sitting in the basement with the music on and pretending I'm twenty one again and discovering the album for the first time. David and Steve from Toto show up here quite a bit which I always thought was cool.

I'd heard "Boys of Summer" on the radio and that song was so good, and the fact I had a Grateful Dead sticker on my car at the time only added to the fun. I always think of the album as being excellent, but honestly the two songs I really associate with the album are the aforementioned "Boys of Summer" and "Sunset Grill" ... I try not to think about "All She Wants to Do Is Dance" because I still think it's a giant musical turd.

I still remember poring over the credits while listening to the album, and "Boys of Summer" drove me nuts at the time because Don's name wasn't there as the drummer. There was a little line about Mike Campbell providing percussion but Mike was a guitar player ... what was going on? Of course as time went on I'd figure out that Mike had programmed the LinnDrum for the song. Mystery solved.

What I'd forgotten was how much of the album was borderline filler ... at least to me. The songs were okay, and they felt like the songs on his debut but they were just sort of "meh" while waiting for the good stuff to come on.

Of course that's about as uncharitable as I get, considering when things got good, they got real good real quick. A song like "You're Not Drinking Enough" still gets me, it feels like the musical bookend to "Long Way Home" from I Can't Stand Still a couple years earlier, which made sense as Danny Kortchmar helped produce both songs. Since I'm on the subject, the entire album was produced by Danny and Greg Ladany which really did help with consistency.

Side two opens with "Building the Perfect Beast" and all of a sudden there's a tonal shift. It's also a song that never clicked for me, and hearing Don sing at the absolute ceiling of his range is more irritating than impressive. It only got worse from there with "All She Wants to Do Is Dance," a song so clunky and awkward it baffles me to this day how this was a top ten hit.

However, it was "Sunset Grill" that erased any ill will. The song was co-written by Ben Tench (you know Benmont Tench, another Tom Petty guy) and while I have to admit some of the programmed sounds are a bit dated here and there, the song itself is still so good. Pino Palladino's fretless bass work elevates the whole song. Even now listening to this, all I can think of is how good this album is ... even the bits I don't care for.

Weird.

"Driving with your Eyes Closed" was another Danny Kortchmar special that sounded like a variation of "All She Wants to Do Is Dance" but it wasn't as irritating. I suppose it was a sound they were going for. After all, the album's closer "Land of the Living" is more of the same so yeah, it was pretty deliberate.

This was the album that truly established Don as a solo artist.

When it was good it was so good, but I was surprised at how much of the album wasn't that enjoyable. He did build a beast, it just wasn't perfect.

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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