Glass Tiger - The Thin Red Line

Back in '86 Glass Tiger seemed to come out of nowhere with "Don't Forget Me (When I'm Gone)." The song was infectious and benefited from the Adams effect. Bryan Adams was pretty much the king of the world and it seemed like even a passing association with Mister Adams was like receiving a blessing from the Pope. Bryan sang maybe two harmony lines on the song, but it was enough. The song was huge, and it pulled the album along with it and for over a year the band pulled singles from the album.

I'll admit my reaction to the album initially was a bit more complicated. To me they belonged in the same boat as Duran Duran and Platinum Blonde. That boat needed to be towed out to sea and used for target practice. I was torn though, I liked the songs I heard on the radio. True, "Don't Forget Me" was worn out, but the singles were so strong. Often you're lucky to pull off one or two highlights on an album. This album was chock full of solid songs:

"Thin Red Line" opens the album, and it's a pretty ambitious song that seems to want to channel Big Country and blend it with cannon fire.
I still love the song. "Someday" is a killer mid-tempo rock song. Too fast to slow dance to and too slow to dance to but it didn't matter, it was awesome and Alan Frew had a killer voice.
"You're What I Look For" is probably one of my favourite songs on the album. It's not the best song on the record, but there was something about it that always got me.
"I Will Be There" was the last single pulled from the record and while it featured Bryan on backing vocals, it was one trip too many to the well. As an aside it sure sounds like Keith Scott on lead guitar on this one. It's a great album cut but not quite a single, but it was so who am I to argue with history?

These were the singles, but the album cuts were good. There really wasn't a clunker on the album which honestly surprised me.

I know earlier I lumped Glass Tiger in with the teeny bopper bands the little girls went nuts over, but the reality was Glass Tiger was firmly in the AOR lane, and let's be honest back in '86 the pool was getting pretty crowded and being able to stand out was a pretty nifty trick.

The band was solid and was made up of:

Alan Frew - vocals
Sam Reid - keyboards
Al Connelly - guitars
Wayne Parker - bass
Michael Hanson - drums

Jim Vallance never really got his due as a producer. More often than not, he's lumped in with Bryan Adams as the two were songwriting partners during Bryan's first golden age, but Jim Vallance was no mere sidekick. He'd been around a long time, and many of us remember him as "Rodney Higgs" from Prism's debut album. From what I've read he more or less stopped producing because it took him away from home, and he'd rather write songs. As to the songs he co-wrote on The Thin Red Line, it was two of the album's strongest singles: "Don't Forget Me" and "Someday" that were written with the band.

Glass Tiger's debut still holds up pretty well and it's also a pretty cool time machine. I'd follow the band through their follow up Diamond Sun in 1988 and 1991's Simple Mission. They were both good. Heck, I even got Alan Frew's solo album Hold On and that was good too.

However, it's The Thin Red Line that seems to be one I think of when I think of the band. There's always something special about the first one.

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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