Old Enough to Forget

At the risk of sounding like a broken record and repeating myself, I'll bring you up to speed on my love hate relationship with Payolas ($). At best I was a casual fan but I will give credit where credit is due. When they were good they were as good as it got. Seriously, "Eyes of a Stranger" is just about as good as it gets, and over the decades the song has woven itself into the fabric of Canadian classic rock.  When the band followed up their 1982 release No Stranger to Danger a year later with Hammer on a Drum also produced by Mick Ronson, there was anticipation in the air. This was going to break the band wide open. "Where is this Love" was the song that got me in the feels and I would have picked up the album except the other song that got radio play was "Never Said I Loved You" where Paul and Carole Pope took turns singing ... in other words it was a duet. To say I had a visceral reaction to the song understates the meaning of the word visceral....

This was the album that was supposed to make The Payola$ huge ... all that was missing was an excellent album to propel Vancouver's perennial group of punk to pop heroes to the big time. They'd been skirting on the edge of success for a few years, and were so close to being a really big deal. The band first made it onto my radar when they released "Eyes of a Stranger" back in 1982 and the song was huge here in Canada (okay, maybe just Vancouver, but it seemed like it was huge). I remember an entertainment segment on the local news where the band was pretty excited about the prospect of being able to ditch their day jobs. A year later the band dropped Hammer on a Drum and "Where is this Love" was the big hit (all things are relative, it was on the radio and I liked it, so it must have been a hit), and remains one of those songs that'll get me right in the feels when I hear it. Mick Ronson had produced both of those albums, and while they did okay, from ...

I went through a weird phase where I pretty much only bought Christian "rock" music. Kids in our youth group would recount as fact how bands like Rush had altar calls for Satan, and KISS stood for "Kids, or Knights in Satan's Service" or something equally ridiculous, and we ate it up (sometimes I had seconds) gleefully repeating this and other tales of pure bullshit amongst ourselves. Yeah, there's a name for this: Bearing false witness - but as kids we were kind of stupid. While I have a lot CCM (contemporary Christian music) that I am still very fond of, there are a lot of bands that I'd never have given the time of day to if it hadn't been for the inevitable comparisons to their "secular" counterparts. There were even guide books to help. Sort of like substituting meat to make a vegetarian dish. There were some notable exceptions where artists stood out, and their recordings actually had some production value and didn't sound like, ...