April Wine - Power Play

It was 1982 and April Wine was striking while the iron was hot, or in this case platinum. The band had finally cracked the US market a year earlier with The Nature of the Beast, and at home the band had released consecutive gold or platinum albums since 1975's breakthrough Stand Back. Power Play managed to ride the band's momentum to platinum status in Canada, but despite the album cracking the top 40 on the US album charts, it didn't translate into sales.

The album was produced by Mike Stone and Myles Goodwin, and the classic line up was still intact.

Brian Greenway - guitar, vocals
Myles Goodwyn - vocals, guitars, keyboards
Gary Moffet - guitar, background vocals
Steve Lang - bass, background vocals
Jerry Mercer - drums

Heck, the album cover was awesome. There was Myles with his three pickup Les Paul slung over his shoulder, arms splayed out, basking in the moment. I loved that guitar. Two pickups good. THREE BETTERER! Take that, Peter Frampton!

The only problem was the songs.

The band had been cranking out hit records like they were sausages, and I suppose it was only a matter of time before they started shovelling the waste off the floor to make wieners. The album opens with "Everything You Want, You Got It," a song that had all the ingredients, but felt like a rejected song from their previous album. I mean, it rocks and all, but it's missing something. The whole album for the most part just felt like the band was trying to replicate their past success and it just wasn't working. The songs sounded okay, but they weren't anything special.

The one and only redeeming track on the album was "Enough is Enough," a killer April Wine track that is quirky and awesome. It was the only song I really liked back in '82, and time hasn't done anything to make the other tracks any better.

"If You See Kay" ... F...U...C...K, get it? Har de har har har. Yeah, it was pure cringe. Which still surprises me, as when I was a teenager I was the self-appointed prince of the double entendre and this wasn't clever ... it was stupid. I don't think the rest of the band was all that enamoured with it either, but April Wine was never a democracy, it was Myles' band.

Now just so you don't think I've just unbuttoned my trousers just so I can take a dump on the record, I have to say that this was still APRIL WINE and as such there was a degree of respect and repeated plays that had to accompany an April Wine record. I did play this quite a bit, and to be honest the album is enjoyable for all that. Even the ill advised cover of The Powder Blues' "Doin' It Right" is okay. It's the same song, just rocked up with more crunchy guitars.

April Wine was at heart a '70s band, and the times were a changing. Power Play was already feeling out of touch with what was going on in rock. The classic line up would release their final album Animal Grace a couple of years later. It was a retooled band trying to adapt, and frankly I loved it, but it marked the end of the band's commercial run.

Power Play was so disappointing, especially when you consider the string of great albums that came before. "Enough is Enough" almost made up for it ... almost.

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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