Pat Benatar - Live from Earth

After four albums it was time for the mandatory live record. Coming on the heels of Pat Benatar's Get Nervous Tour she released an odd hybrid album titled Live from Earth. The album was 80% live and two new studio tracks: the awesome "Love is a Battlefield" and the throwaway "Lipstick Lies" that is perplexingly bland.

The band here was tight, Neil Geraldo on guitar, Myron Grombacher on drums, Roger Capps on bass and Charlie Giordano on keyboards. Neil runs the band through its paces, and for the most part the results are pretty decent, and in a couple of instances spectacular. His guitar tone at times was questionable and overly processed, but heck it was the early '80s and that was a thing. At the time it was cool.

The album as you'd expect mines a little more from her latest album, but that's not a bad thing, it was top of mind to her audience. What was weird though was the omission of "Shadows of the Night" one of the best songs from that album. Another rather glaring miss was the exclusion of "Treat Me Right" from Crimes of Passion. It's not like there wasn't room. My goodness a live album with eight songs? Come on man, that is kind of skinny.

However rather than focus on what isn't, I'll play the hand that was dealt (I'll try at least). Live from Earth is a decent snapshot and for the most part the songs don't stray that far from the source material, which is a good thing. The lone exception was the decision to mess around with "Heartbreaker" especially the guitar parts. Neil's guitar work on the studio version was tailor made to be milked and amplified in a live setting, and instead we get a song that has the same framework but no real spark.

The live tracks are a nice okay, but there's really nothing here that demands or warrants repeated trips to the turntable. I've listened to it a few times and while I appreciate the songs, and a couple are really good (I did say spectacular earlier, they are). "We Live for Love" and "Promises in the Dark" are highlights I really enjoyed in the context of the album. If you ever wondered if Pat had the pipes to recreate her studio takes in a live setting your proof is in the grooves. She's the real deal.

Perhaps Neil made the right call in not going into the deep cuts and keeping things short and tight. You know, "Shut up and sing the hits!" Still, what we're presented with is essentially hardly a 30 minute set, something that would be allocated to an opening act trying to make a name for themselves. I know I said I wasn't going to focus on what Live from Earth isn't but for goodness sake, but for goodness sake she was an A List headliner.

Live albums are generally little love letters that only fans tend to appreciate. Neil decided to tack on a couple of new studio tracks likely in the hopes that at least one of them would stick and be an enticement to buy the record. History is on Neil's side here, the inclusion of "Love Is a Battlefield" written by Mike Chapman and Holly Knight was a monster hit around the world that dragged the album along with it. The album would go platinum in Canada and the US.

One of the more entertaining things about the passage of time is reading about the pissing contest between "Love is a Battlefield" and "The Boys of Summer" and the pretty overt similarities in the LinnDrum patterns. Forty years on and the arm chair warriors are still going at it. Groove and feel aside, they're very different songs, but we can agree that The LinnDrum was cool as shit.

The album may have been Live from Earth but it was pushed to the masses by a studio track.

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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