Argent - All Together Now

This is the album that has "Hold Your Head Up," probably one of the greatest classic rock songs ever. It's been a staple on rock radio for as long as I can remember. Well, that's not entirely true, but it is the one song I associated with Argent, and then in later years they were the band who originally recorded "God Gave Rock and Roll to You," a song that I associate more with Petra than Argent or KISS. To be clear, the versions by Petra sucked, and sucked hard, BUT the reprise that closed out the second side of Come and Join Us with the kids singing was awesome. Seriously, it's still surprising to me how good it was.

A couple of years ago I found Argent's In Deep from 1973, and found that I really enjoyed the early '70s rock vibe and the interplay between guitarist Russ Ballard and keyboardist Rod Argent. The two were so good together. I'll have to pull that down again at some point.

Today, though, I'm spinning All Together Now, and the album opens with "Hold Your Head Up" and it holds up so well. The band was firing on all cylinders and everything was near perfect.

It was such a high that the next song, "Keep On Rollin'," gets kind of lost. However, the opening guitar riff to the Russ Ballard-penned "Tragedy" caught my attention, and this was a different sound, almost dance-oriented but with a heavy groove, and Rod's organ work is just so good. The band keeps things chugging along with the head-bobbing groove that accompanies "I am the Dance of Ages," which lyrically is a hippy dippy post-psychedelic collection of nonsense words, but the music is grandiose and the storm sound effects and guitar feedback are so good. That first side was pretty cool and honestly was better than I had expected, considering the impossibly high bar the band set with the album's opener.

The second side opens with more of the same jam-band kind of stuff. The second of Russ Ballard's contributions, "Be My Lover, Be My Friend," is a pretty game rock and roll song that almost veers into glam territory and is pretty decent.

The album closes out with "Pure Love," a thirteen-minute opus that unfolds in four parts:

i Fantasia
ii Prelude
iii Pure Love
iv Finale

This is what was so cool about the early '70s. Now, this is a few years before Rollerball truly introduced the great unwashed (me, I'm talking about me) to Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor," but here, with the first part of "Pure Love," Rod Argent is doing a pretty solid job of channelling the spirit of the classics. Man, could he ever play. As the song moves into what I assume is the title sequence, things move into trippy psychedelic territory. The song meanders and feels like another extended jam. I have no idea what the song is about, and really, it doesn't seem to matter. Things end with an extended wind-up aptly titled "Finale," and then it's over.

Most of the songs on the album were written by Rod Argent and Chris White, with Russ Ballard contributing a song a side, and both were really good. Rod and Chris were in The Zombies together, and then kept working together as songwriters and producers.

The band was made up of

Rod Argent - organ, vocals
Russ Ballard - guitar, vocals
Jim Rodford - bass guitar
Robert Henrit - drums

I did enjoy this, but extended wandering jams aren't always my thing. I sort of need to be in the mood. On All Together Now, Argent does manage to maintain a decent balance between art and self-indulgence. I'm partial to "Hold Your Head Up"; it is, after all, the song that to me defines the band. However, I was really quite taken with the two Ballard compositions, and while the rest was cool to listen to while it played, it didn't exactly stick to me ribs like a nice bowl of oatmeal.

This would represent the commercial peak for the band. They would release four more records, but after In Deep in '73 they wouldn't chart again in Canada or the UK. They would manage to crack the top 200 in the US with a couple of the later releases, and their final album more or less went unheralded.

Still, for a glorious moment in time they were able to (you know it's coming, how could I resist?) hold their heads up.

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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