Henry Lee Summer - Henry Lee Summer

Henry Lee Summer hit it big in '88 with "I Wish I Had a Girl" from his third album and first major label release. Of course I knew none of this back in the day. I just knew the song, and for whatever reason I associate this with summertime and rolled down windows with the radio blaring. This was an album I almost bought more than once, but never did. Over the years the song and Mister Summer faded from memory but when I saw the album in the four dollar bin I couldn't resist.

This is a bit of a conundrum as my initial reaction was pretty negative. All I could hear were the inevitable comparisons to other artists, the complete lack of a solid bottom end to the recording coupled with some really questionable drum sounds that seemed to belong on a different album. The most irritating moment coming on side two when "Wing Tip Shoes" tries to infuse some energy into the album as Henry repeatedly yells, "Git it goin'" as the band borrows from John Lee Hooker and ZZ Top and somehow the guitar player manages to suck the life out of the opening riff (buzzy, thin tone with no teeth). There was no denying that Mister Henry Lee Summer had a great set of chops, even if they were decidedly generic. It made me glad that I hadn't shelled out my money all those years ago ... I was also beginning to question whether this was worth my four bucks.

I'm not usually one to piss on my own cornflakes and I usually find a fair amount of positive things to write about the albums I'm listening to. Even now the little angel that sometimes takes up residence on my right shoulder is really trying to get me to be a little more charitable. It's not helping matters at all that the other little devil has dropped the trousers on his school boy outfit (he fancies Angus Young) and he's spreading his cheeks to give my poor angel an unobstructed view of his cow eye.

So I'm going to try and not make fun of his Billy Vera and the Beaters clone "I'll Hurt For You" that is currently playing, if it had been a few minutes earlier I'd still be bitching about "Wing Tip Shoes" and the anemic riff.

Are there any redeeming qualities here at all?

Absolutely.

The first side opens with a one, two, three combination of pretty decent rock songs starting with "I Wish I Had a Girl" that still sounds really great. It would be too easy to just call it a reworked version of Mellencamp's "Hurts So Good" as it has more going for it. There's a reason this was a hit. Besides, this was '88 and it was a real treat to not have yet another glam hair metal band shoved down my throat - and I liked a lot of the "melodic" rock stuff. I know I said there were two more that stood out, but at the moment I can't remember the titles ... they were okay though. Dang now I want to know. Hold on. I have the cover right here, they were "Hands On The Radio" and "Darlin' Danielle Don't." I guess that's not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Heck despite not having a lot that stood out on the second side despite a strong start with "Still Bein' Seventeen" there is redemption with "I Ain't Comin' Home" where Henry dials back the big voice and delivers an almost tender love song. The guitar work which I assume was by Jimmy Rip was really tasty, and the clean tones shimmer and his use of vibrato is spot on and predates James Calvin Wilsey's stunning work on Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" that came out a year later. Sort of makes up for the drubbing he gave my ears on "Wing Tip Shoes."

While there were more than a few moments here that were pretty good the album mostly feels like something crafted by committee and while I'm sure that's not true at all, the album just never seems to know what it wants to be and in the end was nothing special.

Still "I Wish I Had a Girl" was pretty dang good. It was why I shelled out the four bucks in the first place, and honestly it was worth it.

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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