Roxy Music - Avalon

Roxy Music released their first album simply titled, Roxy Music in 1972, and a decade later released their final studio album and arguably their best known (and best) album Avalon in 1982. Avalon was my introduction to the band, and frankly was also my exit. I did end up with Siren at some point, and did like "Love is the Drug" but honestly I never really let the album breathe ... I think it got a cursory spin and I took off the one song for a mix tape and then shelved it. I was young and didn't know any better ... that's what I'm going with. I also suspect that at some point I'm going to end up with more Roxy Music albums in my collection.

It was Avalon though that was the perfect combo of restrained smokey cool and the songs and performances felt effortless. Brian Ferry himself was the epitome of cool, and was joined by Phil Manzanera on guitar and Andy Mackay on saxophone, both of whom were masters of their craft. Others were brought in as needed. Alan Spenner and Neil Jason more or less split the bass duties, and Andy Newmark played drums on the majority of the tracks.

The song "Avalon" was on the verge of being scrapped. The guide vocal wasn't doing much to service the song. There must have been something there though and the guys kept picking at it. They brought in Yanick, who didn't speak any English to provide backing vocals other than the one word "Avalon" and then much like what Clare Torry brought to Pink Floyd's "The Great Gig in the Sky" Yanick Etienne brought to "Avalon" with her soaring wordless accompaniment. Apparently it was what was missing, and suddenly it was a song that needed to be taken seriously. Brian went back and recorded his vocals to match the intensity and emotion the track was now evoking. Throughout the album the backing vocalists were the secret sauce. While Fonzi Thornton appears on most tracks, it was Yanick Etienne's soaring adornments to "Avalon" that gave both the song and the album their emotional core. There's a reason the album is called Avalon.

When I first got the album I was particularly drawn to the album's opening cut "More Than This" as Phil Manzanera's guitar work was just otherworldly to me. Of course the title track was a big deal, but for whatever I sort of slept on the rest of the record ... or at least I thought I did.

When I found the record the other day I was pretty stoked, and looking forward to hearing it again for the first time in decades. Right off the bat the album was like meeting up with an old friend. What I didn't expect was the rest of the tracks to resonate so deeply. I found myself thinking, "I don't remember it being this good." It was more than this though (indulge me or it's likely to get worse) the album was ethereal and each song seemed to be sequenced to provide the most impact.

I've always considered this a classic album, but frankly there are a lot of albums I consider classics that only contain one or two highlights ... this though, this was honestly a surprise to me. Was it always this good, or was I just not paying attention when I was a young man. Probably the latter.

Avalon is a strange album that seemed a step out of time with what was going on musically at the time, but it didn't seem to matter. The album would go platinum in the States, move 100,000 copies in Canada, and triple that in the U.K., by all accounts a pretty good way to go out. Although at the time we had no idea this was it for the band. What a way to go out, carried off into The Mists of Avalon (a nod to Marion Zimmer Bradley) to become something of legend.

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 , ...

David Baerwald - Bedtime Stories

The little sticker on the shrinkwrap says, "You may remember David Baerwald from David & David's Boomtown ..." You bet, I remembered David Baerwald. Back in 1986 Boomtown was an album with moments of sheer brilliance. The whole album may not have been as top shelf as the first few tracks, but that didn't matter - it is an excellent album. I waited for a follow-up ... and waited, and then in 1990 it was a solo David, David Baerwald, who dropped Bedtime Stories . I snapped it up. "All For You," the opening cut, is still my favourite song on the album. It was mesmerizing. I'm not sure if the song got any airplay, it may have, but that may have been wishful thinking on my part as it was on a lot of mix tapes at the time and I heard it a lot in the car. The CD had a great booklet with all of the musician credits and lyrics. Oddly, when I found a sealed copy of the record (a great score), it just had a plain paper insert - the picture of David walking wit...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continued to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self-titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner, who had been with Gary from the b...

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