Straight Lines - Run for Cover

Straight Lines put out two pretty good albums and then folded. Run for Cover was the band's second album and was full of tightly polished light rock songs. It's kind of foggy now but there was a time this was the shit. Coming out of the '70s, Straight Lines wasn't ashamed of the past, but it was embracing the future. The songs were tight, Peter Clarke's vocals were really good and the harmonies were on point. David Sinclair's guitar playing was that perfect mix of tasty with a bit of edge. I suspect if he wanted to, he could cut loose with the best of them. Listening now it would be easy to dismiss this as faceless corporate rock of the most generic variety. Which is not only unfair, it's plain wrong.

It may have been my mood but I was really getting into this one. It was really good. Most of the songs were mid tempo, but the band had a killer ballad with "Letting Go" which is probably their best known song, although personally I am partial to "Heads Are Gonna Roll" from their debut which honestly sounded like something from Harlequin (not a bad thing). The debut was sort of all over the place, in a good way and David's guitar tone was very different than what he'd employ on Run for Cover. Considering it was only a year between releases the differences are rather striking. Run for Cover, for better or worse, was more cohesive and didn't flit around as much.

The band got some traction on their first release and I suppose the expectations were pretty high for the followup. Run for Cover delivered the goods and with Bruce Allen managing the band it seemed like all the pieces were in place. The band went so far as to thank all our Friends at Epic records ... which in hindsight is always awkward. Sort of like a general manager expressing his support for a coach just before getting punted. Except here it's a grateful band thanking the boss for support that was about to evaporate.

I didn't realize the band released three singles from the album. The first was "Letting Go" which is really one of the best songs on the album. It would end up being nominated for a Juno award for Single of the Year, and David Sinclair and Bob Buckley were up for Composer of the Year. The band then released another ballad, "There Are No Secrets" which honestly is an okay song and it managed to crack the top 40 and when they released "Illusions" a more uptempo song it didn't even make a ripple. Shortly after their "friends" at Epic dropped them.

It's a shame as there were better songs that to me would have gotten more traction. One of the best songs on the album was the title track "Run for Cover" which had the riffs and groove. Heck even the slightly off kilter new wave tinged "Easy to Run" would have been better. This was at the height of the skinny tie new wave era and was an interesting blend of genres for the band.

Ah. What could have been.

The back cover art is one of those weird head scratching what were they thinking? I wonder if Billy Squier saw this one (doubtful) and used this as a starting point for his infamous "Rock Me Tonite" video? Palmer Jarvis was one of the bigger advertising agencies in British Columbia back in the day, and they looked after the cover but not every pitch is a winner. Don Draper would not have approved.

It's what inside that counts though, and this was a really great collection of songs. This would be the last album by the band. They left behind two solid albums of fantastic album oriented rock. David and Bob would go on to play with Body Electric before taking different paths in the music industry. Geoff Eyre who had previously played with The Hometown Band would continue to work. As to bassist and vocalist Peter Clarke who knows, I couldn't find much which is a shame. Guy had a set of pipes.

I was saddened to read that David Sinclair who played for a lot of notable artists passed away back in 2018.

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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