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 giggle 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, and the rest even the two songs of legend seemed sort of dull. Still, those two killers were killers and that was enough for me, and 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. I found a few of their albums, Give us a Wink the album that had "Action" and then Off the Record that seemed devoid of any killer songs but was enjoyable (it didn't suck) and their 1978 album Level Headed that 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, that 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" anymore than I can imagine Sweet pulling off "Tiger Feet" that 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 that included "Sweet F.A." and "Fox on the Run" were 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 to 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 it's parts. 

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