The Knack - Get the Knack

The summer of 1979 belonged to The Knack. Produced by Mike Chapman who was half of the infamous dynamic "Chinnichap" duo with Nicky Chinn. Mr. Chapman had an ear for candy and by gum (bubble gum, baby!) with The Knack he managed to catch lightning in a bottle. The album would go double platinum in the States, and in Canada it would move over 400,000 copies.

The album was a big deal.

Or so you'd think.

The reality is a little more complicated.

Going back to my teenage years, "My Sharona" was the song that propelled the band into the stratosphere. Kids everywhere could play the opening riff, and like "Smoke on the Water" it gave the song a sense of simplicity that belied the song's complex structure and numerous changes. It's a mini masterclass in musical excellence and there are no bum notes or wasted space. You don't even have to hear all of the opening riff to "name that tune." I ate it up until it made me sick, and so did an awful lot of other kids ... the ensuing backlash was swift and unrelenting. From delight to derision "My Sharona" now sucked. Of course I still secretly liked the song, and really liked "Good Girls Don't" a song that should have been huge ... but wasn't.

Of course as a kid with a practically non-existent budget and rather myopic tastes, the number of records I bought with my practically non-existent cash was pretty limited - I suppose I could have just said, "I never heard the album back in the day." It's true, I'm only now just hearing it. Truly hearing it.

From the opening track "Let Me Out," penned by Doug Fieger and Berton Averre, the album races along at a clip, dropping one solid song after another. Doug and Berton penned seven of the twelve tracks, with Doug writing the rest, except for the band's cover of "Heartbeat," written by Bob Montgomery and Norman Petty and most famously recorded by Buddy Holly, the patron saint of power pop.

This isn't what I expected ... I'm not sure what I expected. I suppose I expected a lot of directionless filler ... everything was so good. These guys had something special. The first side closes out with one of my favourite songs ever, "Good Girls Don't" a song that still gets me. Berton's guitar work is stellar on this one, and the riffs here are just perfect. Heck even the simple harmonica part is pure awesomeness.

Flipping the album over, "My Sharona" opens with the big drums and riffs, and over time the song that was once derided and overplayed has come full circle and is once again cool and jaw dropping. The guitar work on this song is so tasty, and frankly Berton doesn't get enough credit for carrying so much of the song. For most of us this was the standalone reference point for The Knack. However having listened to the first side, the songs now take on a deeper feeling in the context of the other tracks. The first side was so good, and then the band found another gear and didn't seem to be letting up.

Of course, the reality is "My Sharona" is the centrepiece here, and rightly so - but it should never have become the tsunami that swamped the band. It should have been the high tide that floated the band ever higher. Which is what should have happened. I mean, there were millions of people who had heard the album, and they must have known how good the band was, even if the single was played to death.

They should have known better.

Success is a fickle thing.

Time though has a way of sometimes healing old wounds and putting things in their proper place, and with The Knack, the band is now recognized for their contribution to power pop and are viewed much more favourably in hindsight than they were in real time.

You could have that after all this time people finally ... Get the Knack.

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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