Steel Breeze - Steel Breeze

You may not be able to judge a book by its cover ... but you can often get an idea of what's going to be inside. I mean, a shirtless pirate with huge pectoral muscles and an eye patch sweeping a scantily clad damsel in a dress? You know you're going to read about penis euphemisms for a hundred and fifty pages.

Just because the internet is full of pointless jibber-jabber, here are a few of my favourites:

Man-Root
Thorn of Lust
Engorged Wand
Pillar of Marble
Scepter of Desire
Monstrous Invader
Wedding Tackle

What does all of this bodice-removing slang have to do with Steel Breeze? I'm working on it. Like a book, the first thing to catch one's eye is the album cover. For a new band in particular, this is a do-or-die first impression. Once you have a bit of cachet, you can release a cover with nothing on it. Ask The Beatles, or AC/DC, or Spinal Tap, but for everyone else, covers matter.

The cover to Steel Breeze's debut was about as eye-catching as the cover of The Yellow Pages, minus the walking fingers. The back was marginally better. The cursive writing on the back cover was slanted and seemed to be done freehand. Trying to decipher it against the vertical lines over a pink and blue background made it tricky. However, the picture of the six guys seemed to scream AOR. Not new wave or punk or disco ... good old-fashioned album-oriented rock, baby. Hard enough to have some crunch without resorting to all the distortion and noise.

So I went out on a limb and bought the record because it looked like it could be something. At the time, I didn't recognize any of the names, but I did know who the producer, Kim Fowley, was from his association with The Runaways. I honestly didn't think he'd done anything else.

Anyways, I bought the record, dropped the needle, and right off the album got my attention. "You Don't Want Me Anymore" was glorious AOR with a lot of keyboards and searing guitars. This was awesome. It is possible I'd heard the song back in '82, as it cracked the top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100, going as high as 16. Which made sense. It felt like a hit. Another really solid songs is "Dreamin' Is Easy" which also cracked the Billboard Hot 100, cresting in the Top 40 at 30. Nice. Weird I'd never heard them before.

The album seemed to get up to speed with the first track and carried all the way through to the last track, where the band ran out of gas. "Street Talkin'" was a pseudo-reggae song, with what sounded like a keyboard solo emulating steel drums. Aside from one wee hiccough, this is an album I'd have eaten up back in the day. Hearing it now is still a treat, but it'll never sink in the way it would have if I was still in my teens. It's still pushing the same happy buttons, but it's enjoyment in the moment.

Still not a bad thing. Happiness is still a penis. Dang, sorry, got distracted when my eye caught the bullet list above. My bad.

Since I need to wash that image out, let's get back to Steel Breeze. There were six guys on the back cover, and I'm going to take a wild-ass guess and just assume the credits listed lined up with the picture. So from left to right:

Rick Jacobs - Vocals / Rod Toner - Keyboards / Waylin Carpenter - Lead guitars / Ken Goorabian - Guitar, Vocals / Vinnie Pantaleoni - Bass, Vocals / Barry Lowenthal - Drums

Credit to Kim Fowley. Who knows how much he brought to the table, but based on the songs here, the band was killing it. There's just enough polish to make this sparkle, but enough rough edges to allow the rawness of the performances to come through. Kudos to Waylin Carpenter. Dude lit it up.

Steel Breeze is an album that feels like the start of something. For whatever reason, this would be the band's lone major-label release, which was a shame. Who'd a thought a Steel Breeze would be so refreshing ... it was nice while it lasted. Such is the way the wind blows, steel or otherwise.

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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