Sweet - Desolation Boulevard

This was the shit when I was a kid. The album was legendary, and the two killers "Ballroom Blitz" and "Fox on the Run" were so good they were essentially career defining. I could stop right now and that would be enough. Mic drop and walk off.

... I'm back.

I wanted to just jot down a few things because it's sort of my thing. It may be worth it. Maybe not, you never know ... this isn't a cheese shop, I could be deliberately wasting your time. Regardless, pull up a chair, or at least watch where you're walking if you're on your phone.

I have vague memories of the cool kids talking about the song "A.C.D.C." and "Sweet F.A." and then giggling knowingly. I didn't have the album and I never heard them, so I wasn't in on the joke. I knew what the album looked like. I would see it when I would browse through records, dreaming about what I'd like to buy. Even then it was a long list ... it seemed long to me at the time. That Sweet album just screamed cool.

I would finally get a copy many, many years later, and I loved the two songs from my childhood, but the rest, even the two songs of legend, seemed sort of dull. Still, those two killers were killers, and that was enough for me. I finally had it ... until I didn't, but that was a long time ago.

Over the last couple of years, though, I started getting that itch again. I wanted Desolation Boulevard. Instead I found a few of their albums, Give Us a Wink, the album that had "Action," and then Off the Record, which seemed devoid of any killer songs but was enjoyable (it didn't suck), and their 1978 album Level Headed, which contained the unedited and awesome version of "Love Is Like Oxygen." Still, Desolation Boulevard eluded me ... not to spoil it, but I did eventually find it, and it wasn't priced out of my budget.

I suppose behind the scenes this was a hell of a story. The North American version of the album hardly bears any resemblance (not true, it's about 50%) to what the band had released a year earlier in the UK as Desolation Boulevard. What we got in North America were a handful of songs from their earlier 1974 release Sweet Fanny Adams, which included "Sweet F.A." and "A.C.D.C.," as well as their 1973 single "Ballroom Blitz," which is one of the greatest pop songs of all time.

Much has been made of Sweet being a bubblegum glam band, and I'm sure there was a case to be made, especially with the Chinnichap songs and production by Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn. To the uninitiated, one could be excused if there was a tendency to think the vehicle didn't matter as much as the songs and production. Sweet made the songs their own, and frankly, it's impossible for me to think Mud could have pulled off "Ballroom Blitz" any more than I can imagine Sweet pulling off "Tiger Feet," which Mud had success with ... even if Sweet passed on it. Three Dog Night made a career out of recording covers that only Three Dog Night could have pulled off. As to Sweet, they were a rock ... and ... roll ... band, full stop (but please keep reading).

Desolation Boulevard is nearly carved into two halves. Mike and Nicky produced and wrote the songs on side one, and the second side, which included "Sweet F.A." and "Fox on the Run," was written by the band. Heck, the band even self-produced "Fox on the Run," so it's not like they didn't have an ear for a hit. Despite the sort of Frankenstein's monster composition of the album, if you didn't know any better, you'd be hard pressed to tell who wrote or produced which song. This is sort of a roundabout way of me trying to say the album feels remarkably cohesive for a cobbled-together collection of songs.

The album's two-punch combination (no, I'm not going to type out the song titles again) is as devastating now as it was when I was a kid. Heck, the rest of the album is more than filler, but I'm also trying to process this against the weight of decades of bias. Even the one-time bias where I thought it had two classic moments but otherwise sucked. Let me set the record straight: this is an awesome record, but I get that to some, like younger me, it's the kind of awesome where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

If nothing else we can agree on the parts where it's awesome.

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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