8 posts tagged “aor”

For a couple years, roughly 1978-80, "new wave" music could be heard on rock (or AOR, "album-oriented rock") radio stations.  Either new wave had yet to forge a distinct identity, or rock fans had yet to notice anything different and voice their displeasure, but several of my favorite WAVA songs from that era were, in retrospect, definitely of new wave pedigree.  The first such song was "Yachting Type" by the Yachts, from Liverpool.  I remember the first time I heard it, the DJ said "Plug your ears into this!" before playing it:

I was a fan from that very first exposure.  I bought the album and listened to it over and over, and it bore the repetition: there are a lot of good songs on it.  I had no idea that it was New Wave, I just liked the hooks and the organ.  After that first album the Yachts changed bass players, put out a lackluster second album, and broke up.  The core of the group would later resurface as It's Immaterial, whom I also liked, without even knowing about the Yachts connection, which I only learned recently.  But back to the topic at hand, which is new wave music sneaking onto AOR airwaves, another favorite from those days is the anthemic "The Shape of Things To Come" by the Headboys*:

I never did get around to buying that album, but I taped the song off the radio, and that was good enough.  I've now heard the whole album (thanks to the Power Pop Criminals blog), and the rest of it is more pub-rock than new wave, but still fun, and I might have gotten into it back then anyway.  Belatedly, I learned that "power pop" is the category assigned to these under-the-radar new wave bands, and I have several more examples of their infiltration of AOR airwaves, but I'll start with just these two.

After hearing about it for close to twenty years, I finally saw Heavy Metal Parking Lot over the weekend.  It's a low-budget documentary of the parking-lot party activities before a 1986 Judas Priest concert at the Capital Centre in Largo, Maryland.  What a scene.  The Cap Centre was my local arena, and I went to a whole bunch of rock'n'roll shows there when I was in ninth and tenth grade (1979-81).  While I never took part in any parking-lot debauchery (I was either too young, too scared, or too sensible), I sure did rock out.  Seeing the now-demolished* Cap Centre made me try to remember all the shows I saw there, and for posterity I've put together a Seeqpod playlist that contains most of the bands I saw there.  I've tried to select songs that represent the albums they were promoting at the time, but it wasn't always possible: there just aren't any tracks from Foghat's Tight Shoes, Blackfoot's Tomcattin', or Yes's Drama on seeqable sites.  Some of the opening bands I couldn't find at all (Marseilles, FM) and some I've forgotten altogether.  If I could find again my wooden box with all my ticket stubs in it that would help a lot, but I'm afraid it's lost forever.  But now I will always have this playlist to remind me, because the Internet is forever, right?

*

I'm not the first one to notice that "Goliath" from the new Mars Volta album sounds like King Crimson's 1969 prog-rock classic, "21st Century Schizoid Man," but I did arrive at that conclusion independently.  At just after the 4-minute mark they abandon all pretense that they're doing an original song (compare to "Schizoid" at 2:08):

Okay, so Cedric's lyrics and vocal melodies are different.  Still, I think "21st Century Schizoid Dude" would have been a better song title.

As happens so often, King Crimson's original song was another I learned about in reverse.  In ninth grade I was completely taken by Canadian AOR band April Wine.  "Roller" was one of my radio favorites, especially the part in the instrumental break where the three guitarists trade off the descending six-note motif.  That was on the First Glance album, their first after adding third guitarist Brian Greenway.  I rushed out to buy the next album, Harder...Faster (a little double entendre there, get it?), when it came out in 1979, and played it over and over and over.  The last song on the album is "21st Century Schizoid Man," sung by Greenway (instead of bandleader Myles Goodwyn); the jamming and stop-start unison playing on it is far beyond anything else they ever attempted.  It took about a year for me to connect the song to King Crimson, which then opened up a whole new world of music to me.  Here, then, is April Wine's version:

There were four of us in the same grade growing up: Kevin at the top of the street, me in the next house down, Mario across the street from me, and Robert two houses down.  When we started buying records in junior high we planned for maximum variety, coordinating our purchases so as not to duplicate each others' collections, taping the records that the others bought.  Add in taping off the radio (the new album in its entirety every night at 11:00 on WAVA) and we amassed pretty sizable cassette collections.  But of course the cassettes are long gone, and I never got around to replacing most of them with records or CDs.  In 1980 Kevin bought Michael Schenker's first album after leaving the Scorpions (again) and helming the new Michael Schenker Group.  I've been longing to hear "Feels Like a Good Thing," so I snapped up a copy of the album at last weekend's record show, and here it is, aw, yeah!

Like the Piper track I posted a while ago, the drums at the beginning are some tempting sample fodder.  And Schenker has always been a great soloist; he may have the most fluid playing style in all of hard rockdom.  Deep Purple's Roger Glover produced the album, I really like the balance here, just before turning the snare up to twenty-two became all the rage.  The four of us saw MSG at the late, lamented Capital Centre, where we saw so many concerts during our teenage years.  They would run a summer series of B-level acts with tickets for just eight bucks!  I think that was the deal with MSG.  They may even have been the opening act, but I can't remember who the other band was.  Was it Foghat?  No, I think they were paired up with Molly Hatchet.  Anyway, I don't remember the show at all, but I do remember the concert jersey I bought: black with white sleeves, with the MSG logo and Schenker's trademark white Flying V on the front, tour dates listed on the back.  I wore that one a lot.

Here's the further post on Chris Thompson, guitarist and singer with Night, that I alluded to a few days ago.  Some months ago, while reading Russian linguist George Starostin's record reviews on Only Solitaire (warning: do not start reading Only Solitaire unless you can afford to get sucked in for hours on end; Starostin is an unabashed fan of what would become codified as Album-Oriented Rock, and has written the most thoughtful, comprehensive, and engaging reviews of AOR albums that I have ever come across), something stirred a distant memory.  I was reading his page on Manfred Mann's Earth Band, and in his review of the 1979 album Angel Station (sung by Chris Thompson), he writes:

Another positive highlight is the weird, near-mystical ode 'Angels At My Gate', in this reviewer's humble opinion, one of the best songs in Manfred Mann's entire catalog. The AMG review had an interesting idea about how Peter Gabriel's 'Games Without Frontieres' might have been influenced by this composition, and hey well you know, they just might have something there; in any case, it's hardly any worse, and sports pretty much the same thrilling otherworldly atmosphere, with echoey ominous drums, misty vocals and heavenly synths somewhere high up in the sky. And the only thing that can keep that threatening chorus out of your head - '58, 56, 54, good angels at my door...' is the fact that you can easily mess up the numbers.

I dimly remember lying in bed late one night in eighth grade (1979) listening to the radio and hearing a weird song with descending numbers in the lyrics.  This was back in the heyday of rock radio, when WAVA would play a new album in its entirety every weeknight at 11:00.  Could this be the song that left an imprint on my mind nearly twenty-five years later after hearing it just once?  I've finally gotten a copy of Angel Station, and yes, that's the song!

The fact that I found the album cover so weird and unsettling probably helped burned the song into my memory.  The All-Music Guide review, which is reproduced on about a zillion other websites, makes mention of the "John Shaw-photographed album cover."  I can't track down this John Shaw, but I think it's fair to say he was influenced by Storm Thorgerson's work with Hignosis, who made "weird and unsettling" the order of the day for 70s rock album covers.  Thorgerson is still doing it, too, most recently for Muse and The Mars Volta, and his designs are just as weird and unsettling as ever.

Hey, this song would make a good mashup with Duran Duran's "The Chauffeur":

Maybe the universe really will give you what you want: just the other day I posted a song by Night and mentioned that I really wanted their song "Hot Summer Nights" but couldn't find it.  And voilá, my old record-selling partner Platters That Matter Records sends me an mp3 of it!  Here it is:

Incidentally, Mr. Platters now has his own blog on Vox, which I expect him to fill with long-forgotten gems from his vinyl vault.  He also reminded me of something I forgot to mention last time, which is that Night's keyboard player is frequent Rolling Stones keyboardist Nicky Hopkins.  I did mention last time that "Hot Summer Nights" is similar to "Gold" by John Stewart and Stevie Nicks, both thematically ("making it" in the rock music business) and musically (the same beat, almost the same descending melody in "Gold"'s electric piano riff and Night's "woo-ooh-ooh"s in the chorus).  But don't just take my word for it, listen "Gold" and compare:

"Gold" came out in 1979, and Night's song in 1980, but it was a version of a Walter Egan song from 1978.  I don't mean to imply any copying on anyone's part, I just wanted to point out the coincidences and say "isn't that cool?"  One thing I have always wondered since 1979 is who the heck is John Stewart?  If you've ever wondered that too, this page will tell you all you need to know.  But to sum it up: John Stewart is an old folkie and songwriter.  He joined the Kingston Trio in 1961, replacing founding member Dave Guard.  He briefly partnered with John Denver later in the 60s, when he wrote "Daydream Believer," which would become a hit for the Monkees.  He spent the 70s as a singer/songwriter (I think); "Gold" was by far his biggest success, from his album Bombs Away Dream Babies.  His own website says he has recorded over 40 solo albums!  And continues to do so.  Now that's persistence!

Another of my guilty pleasures is the horror fiction of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, "Britain's Prince of Chill."  He put out a huge amount of short horror fiction through the 70s and 80s, and I will qualify "horror fiction" by noting that his stories are just as scary as a carnival haunted house, and in the same way.  He actually could write a chilling tale, but he was obviously a humorous sort, and his humor took the edge off of most of his work.  Still, he made a living at it, and had two portmanteau movies made from his stories, From Beyond the Grave and The Monster Club.  A little Chetwynd-Hayes goes a long way, so it had been about a year since I last read him when I discovered a Chetwynd-Hayes fansite, Loughville.  That rekindled my interest and inspired me to get copies of the films, which I had never seen before.  Now here comes the music part: in The Monster Club, vampire Erasmus (Vincent Price) takes his latest victim, horror writer R. Chetwynd-Hayes (John Carradine) into the eponymous club, where he introduces tales of various "breeds" of monsters in between band performances.  The bands are a motley mix of new wave and AOR; but the band after the second story is... Night!  Yet another of my weaknesses is minor AOR hits from my teenage years, and Night's "Hot Summer Nights" is about as minor as they get.  I managed to get an mp3 of it during the Napster era, but I lost it (along with about 600 others) when I inadvertently let my MyPlay account lapse.  Damn and blast!  So I don't have it anymore, and I'm having trouble finding one (it's not very Googleable).  But now at least I have "The Stripper," with lead singer Stevie Vann Lange absolutely belting out the lyrics!  I couldn't tell from "Hot Summer Nights" what a powerhouse singer she is; Chris Thompson, the band's other singer (who was the lead singer on Manfred Mann's big hits of the 70s, e.g. "Blinded By the Light") is relegated to guitar and backing vocals on this track.  The movie clip is on YouTube, but it's not embeddable, so instead of just posting a link, here's an audio rip.  (But watch the YouTube clip to see the stripper take it all off--insert Cryptkeeper laughter here.)

Stevie has provided backing vocals on tons of other artists' records and concerts.  She's credited on Gang of Four's Songs of the Free, so that must be her singing the iconic "I Love a Man in Uniform" chorus.  Wow!  (And she got the last name Lange by marrying rock producer extraordinaire Mutt Lange!)  Now, back to Night: "Hot Summer Nights" was actually a cover; the song was written and originally recorded by Walter Egan on his 1978 album Not Shy.  Hey, whaddyaknow, here's Walter singing it on YouTube!

I think I prefer the Night version, if only for Stevie's vocals, but it's great to hear the song again anyway. (Coincidentally, the song is thematically similar to a song by another Stevie: "Gold" by Stevie Nicks and John Stewart.  It's musically similar too, for that matter.)  Walter Egan is best known for his bigger hit from Not Shy, "Magnet and Steel":

Oh my gosh, it's all connected, and if I don't stop now I may never stop, so that's it for now.  But Chris Thompson will figure in another post soon.

Have you ever heard a song on the radio, liked it, and meant to buy it, but didn't get around to it until much later?  So it is with me and "Nothing to Lose" by UK.  During the heyday of Album Oriented Rock (the late 70s), many of the second-tier, less-played songs were better than the rock staples.  I would often tune in WAVA on the family stereo and sit by the tape deck to listen for key tunes and record them, but I never caught "Nothing to Lose."  And I never managed to buy the album, either, though I did secure a copy of UK's eponymous first album from 1978.  That was the album that got UK accorded "supergroup" status (being comprised of John Wetton, Eddie Jobson, Bill Bruford, and Allan Holdsworth;  between them they had played in just about every progressive rock band that mattered), but it didn't contain anything like a single.  By the second album, Danger Money, Bruford and Holdsworth had left, with Terry Bozzio taking over on drums and Eddie Jobson doing more keyboard and violin overdubs to compensate for the lack of a guitarist.  Unlike the first album, the second got some radio play with "Nothing to Lose," which was moderately catchy and, unlike most other UK songs, short enough for radio.  This past weekend, 28 years after deciding I wanted "Nothing to Lose," I finally got it.  And it sounds exactly like I remembered it.