Sammy Hagar - Standing Hampton

Good old Sammy. I knew of Sammy at least a year or two before I ever heard the opening riff to "Heavy Metal" from the soundtrack album. It was a song I should have loved, but it always sort of stuck in my craw like a spoonful of cinnamon. It should have been tasty ...

I'd seen Sammy's name in the credits of a couple of albums I had back in the day. I think the first time I saw his name was in the credits on a Servant record. Servant had incorrectly attributed "Rich Man" to Sammy on their debut album Shallow Water ... I was this many days old when I learned Dan Hartman wrote the song, not Sammy. His name also popped up on Working Class Dog. Rick Springfield covered "I've Done Everything for You" and absolutely made it his own. A few years later, when Sammy replaced Dave in Van Halen, everyone knew who the Red Rocker was.

Sammy is cool.

Absolutely and unequivocally cool.

For whatever reason, I never really clicked with Sammy's stuff. I had all of the Van Halen albums, and the Sammy-era albums were good, sometimes awesome, but it wasn't because of Sammy. I tried, dagnabbit, I have both Chickenfoot albums. I mean, I really tried.

Now that I've been a douche, allow me to backpedal a wee bit to the point where I'm contradicting myself. Standing Hampton isn't my first Sammy solo record. That honour went to his '87 release, I Never Said Goodbye, the one with Eddie on bass. I don't really remember much about that one ... I think there was a song I liked.

Standing Hampton is really the first time I've spent time with Sammy in a long, long time. There are times when Sammy absolutely hits it out of the park. Standing Hampton was an album I found pretty cheap, and by golly, it had "I'll Fall in Love Again," which was worth it for me right there. It also had "Heavy Metal," a song that, over the years, I have actually come to like a fair bit ... see, time heals all wounds. I also figured Standing Hampton was a dirty euphemism, and sure enough, it's a penis joke.

Score one for Sammy. Sammy is cool. Unequivocally cool.

The album, produced by Keith Olsen, who also co-engineered things with Chris Minto, sounds great. Good gravy, when Sammy played a riff, he put some balls into his playing. "There's Only One Way to Rock" is a face-melting song, and one I'd forgotten about. It's one of the album's highlights. This is the kind of Sammy I love. So why am I so disparaging to a guy who clearly has chops and the ability to deliver? The whole thing is slick.

Didgeridoo.

I suppose the reason for my ambivalence is present on many of the songs on Standing Hampton. The album opens with a killer one-two punch, "I'll Fall in Love Again" and "There's Only One Way to Rock," and by the time I got to side two, the album had settled into a paint-by-numbers collection of songs. He used the same ingredients, but the songs just seem sort of phoned in. They're decent, but there's no pulse. It's strange. I have to remind myself this was 1981, and frankly, a lot of the songs here hold up better than you'd expect ... even with my pissy comments.

There's often a lot of smoke, but no spark or fire. The first side is stacked with all of the killers and closes with "Heavy Metal," which is so close to the version on the soundtrack that I don't know why he needed to re-record the song. They're both good (I did say I like it now), but I'll give the edge to the other version. It has MORE guitar.

The "Meh" side was decent enough but not particularly memorable. I can say it was smokin' and not have it be a compliment. The song that stood out was his cover of "Piece of My Heart," which I'm not sure is cool or shit.

Standing Hampton was a pretty big deal, though, for Sammy and would end up going platinum. I think a lot of people felt the way I did. No, that is not contradictory ... I said from the onset that I was happy to get "I'll Fall in Love Again" and ended up getting a few really great rock songs. Which was actually more than I was expecting.

For all that, I still think Sammy is cool. Unequivocally cool.

P.S. I know I show the release year as 1981, as that's what is printed on the jacket and stuff. However, for the purists, this was indeed released early in 1982. I guess Geffen wanted to avoid the Christmas rush, after all, who wants to get records at Christmastime ... better to wait until January when everyone is broke.

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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