Pretty Rough - Got the Fire

I actually don't remember picking this up. I was sorting through the rather intimidating pile of albums waiting for a spin and this looked interesting in a nondescript and inoffensive way. The cover reminded me a little of Bruce Cockburn's '84 album Stealing Fire. I said reminded, if you're going to do an A/B comparison they aren't that similar at all.

Anyway, I was farting around in the basement cleaning records, and I figured I'd put it on. I didn't look at the credits on the back, I just plopped it on the platter and let it spin. Right off the bat, the first track "Hold On" had the band getting my attention. This was the kind of polished rock and roll that still gets the little hairs on my arm to stand up.

As the first side played through I kept trying to figure out who the band sounded like. Vocally there's a little Stephen Pearcy from RATT, mixed with Kenny Shields from Streetheart, and musically this is pretty standard early '80s AOR, and sounds a bit like Headpins / Chilliwack with a little Aldo Nova thrown in for fun. The guitar work really sounded like Brian "Too Loud" MacLeod, which I found a bit disconcerting but cool too. In short, this was pretty awesome.

Of course, after playing it through a couple of times I had to satisfy my curiosity and I didn't recognize any of the names of the guys in the band (who I will list because you can applaud a little when I mention their names).

Vocals, Tim Peterson
Guitar, Terry Reeves
Guitar and vocals, Jack Murray
Drums and vocals, Dave Hiebert
Bass and vocals, Randy Lloyd

I know it's unlikely anyone will see this as my page is still google averse to being indexed. That's what you get for using a google product to blog ... it can't figure out what to do with something it created. Still, the guys really swung for the fences and it's a shame this didn't catch on.

Now the credit I did recognize and the one that made things make sense musically was the producer. Brian MacLeod. The songs have his fingerprints all over this thing from start to finish. Brian is thanked for providing keyboards, but man, the guitar tone is pure MacLeod and I just can't see him dialing in his sound and then letting Terry and Jack try and copy his style.

Who knows, but my goodness it is uncanny.

Regardless, the album works more than it doesn't. The rock tunes are where things stand out. The opening track "Hold On" is really good, and "Tearin' in Up" is pretty awesome. The second side just kept things burning along. One of my favourites was "Action," as well as the album's closer, the mid tempo attempt at a radio friendly single that was never a single, "You Got the Fire," that has the big vocals and guitars. The only track that I didn't care for as much was "Trouble Boys," which for all that was still good fun ... it's just the voice over sort of stuck a stick in the bike spokes. Yeah, I'm shitting on a decision the band made forty years ago.

It's strange that this has been buried. I tried to find it to stream, and like so many albums on RCA (A&M is another label who seems to bury old albums by Canadian artists) hasn't bothered to put it up.

1984 was a great year for rock, but it was also right around the time rock and roll was transitioning from rock, to glam rock ... or hair metal, or whatever you want to call it and for whatever reason these guys were neither fish nor foul and got left behind.

The band made two albums, with Got the Fire being their second, and I've had no luck tracking down a copy of their debut. I tried to find out more about the band, but there's not much out there which is a shame.

I really liked this. They wanted fire, they got the fire ... and then it went out.

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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