18 posts tagged “aor”

Perhaps you remember listening to Styx's Pieces Of Eight album, scratching your head at "Aku-Aku", the mellow instrumental at the end of the album, and writing it off as filler.  But I posit that young Robin Guthrie took it as divine inspiration, forming the basis of his guitar and composition style that would come to fruition in the Cocteau Twins.  Compare "Aku-Aku" with a representative track from Blue Bell Knoll:

The live album documenting the 1980 Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donnington speedway came out at the same time I was becoming a huge April Wine fan, and since April Wine had a track on the album ("I Like To Rock"), I had to have it.  Sort of; I settled for taping the album off the radio when WAVA featured it on their whole-album-at-11:00 weeknightly program.  It's possible that the tape still exists somewhere in the sedimentary layers of my parents' basement, but for listening purposes it's long gone.  But now the bona fide vinyl is in my possession, thanks once again to Platters That Matter Records.  Spinning it this evening I was struck by one thing, and in yet another installment of I Hear Roxy Music Everywhere, it is that the verse sections of Rainbow's "All Night Long" sound like Eno-era Roxy Music.  Close your eyes, ignore the intro and choruses, and try to imagine Bryan Ferry singing it:

What do you think?  Another game to play is "spot the Deep Purple/Whitesnake formula": Blackmore's main guitar riff shows up in slightly altered form in Whitesnake's "Fool for Your Lovin'", released the year after "All Night Long".  Then there's the modulation up a minor third from the intro to the verse, just like in "Woman From Tokyo" from 1972.

"All Night Long" was the second single from Rainbow's 1979 album Down To Earth; the first one, "Since You Been Gone", was one of those second-tier AOR tracks that I have such a fondness for:

A while back I when I was on a 70s AOR kick I spent a few days listening to the catalog of Head East, and I was surprised to the very same song on their self-titled 1978 album (which was actually their fourth):

Eh... That flanged-drum effect is pretty annoying, but as it turns out, that's a holdover from the song's original recording by the man who wrote it, Russ Ballard:

I think Blackmore and company's version is the definitive one; they took a good song and made it great.

As if the universe of music available via the Internet were not enough, I went to a CD and record fair yesterday, where vendors sell physical artifacts encoded with music that can be decoded by a "CD player" or a "record player" (a.k.a. "turntable").  While perusing the records I came across an album by The Sherbs, which triggered an old memory of yet another of those 1980-ish minor AOR hits that it is my self-appointed task to collect here.  The song in question is "No Turning Back," another one in the "liked-it-on-the-radio-but-never-got-the-record" category.  The album I found was Defying Gravity (1981); the song list on the cover did not include "No Turning Back," but I bought it anyway just in case it was one of those oddly-titled songs, and hey, three bucks is a price I can take a chance on.  Well, it's not on there; the song is indeed called "No Turning Back" and it's on the Sherbs' previous album, The Skill (1980).  I found a rip of that soon enough so that after roughly 28 years I finally heard the song again, which I will now share (if you stick with it to about the two-thirds point there's a nice little Hammond solo):

No great shakes, but it is an early example of a sound that would come to dominate the airwaves later in the 80s when adopted by the likes of Genesis, Van Halen, the Tubes, etc.  The Sherbs were Australian, by the way.

After years of sporadic, fruitless online searches for an mp3 of Gary O's 1980 track "All the Young Heroes," I remembered a more old-fashioned approach: I bought the record!  So now I can add it to my online collection (or in Vox terms, my Audio Library) of minor AOR hits from the few years on either side of 1980:

Gary O' is short for Gary O'Connor, by the way.  "All the Young Heroes" features a popular instrumental fad of its day, namely electric guitar power chords that drop out to allow staccato electric piano chords to carry the beat.  Think Jefferson Starship's "Jane", Toto's "Hold the Line", Aldo Nova's "Fantasy"... any more?

Could "Fantasy" sound any more like "Jane"?

Sure, by 1980 I should have known better, but I was still listening to the backward-looking sounds of AOR juggernaut WAVA.  In my defense, I was fourteen for most of the year.  If you're as old as I am you probably remember most of the songs from that station and era because you've heard them thousands of times, you can still hear them on "classic rock" stations.  But it's the songs that fell through the cracks that have nagged at me all these years, and I've been posting them here as I find them to highlight the contributions of the also-rans.  This time I bring you Love Affair, a five-man Cleveland band from the 70s who finally put out an album in 1980 that had two minor AOR hits on it, "Seventeen (You're a Star)" and "Mama Sez."  I thought they had a great sound, with glam drums and guitars, group vocals, and Rich Spina's high, Steve Perry-like lead vocals.  It's as if punk rock never happened.  Without further ado, here they are:

Your mama says until I say I do you'll say you won't
But I got news for you, until you say I do, I don't

Let me translate that: "Your mother forbids you to have sex with me before we are married, but until we are married I consider myself free to have sex with others."  Romantic, eh?  Love Affair were persuaded to change their name to "L.A." for their second album, resulting in a backlash from their Cleveland fan base and, ultimately, the band's demise.  Spina has kept busy ever since, with a seventeen-year stint in Gary Lewis and the Playboys, a couple years as bandleader at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and his current gig backing up Peter Noone in Herman's Hermits.  A couple of his Love Affair bandmates occasionally reunite with him to perform as the Cleveland Boys (the last track on their debut album, not coincidentally).

I can't call these "deferred listening" because I actually had the records at one point, but I don't think I do anymore.  Still, they are of a piece with the songs in my last Deferred Listening post: AOR also-rans, songs that got played on the rock stations in the years around 1980, just not very much.  The Marc Tanner Band's "Hot and Cold," from the 1981 Temptation album, is underpinned by a particularly sweet acoustic guitar riff (sorry, the YouTube fan video is the only file I can find):

"DB Cooper"'s 1980 album Buy American included the minor hit "Heart Freeze" with a nice chunky electric guitar sound.  He/they is/are sometimes classified as "power pop" (a.k.a. stealth new wave), but I think the music is closer to the standard album-rock of the time:

It's 1979: I'm in the eighth grade, I've finally figured out how to listen to popular music, settling into my own niche at DC AOR powerhouse WAVA; I've started buying records but I don't have enough money to make a habit of it; how do I collect all the songs I want, twenty years before instant downloads?  Tape 'em off the radio, baby!  I had persuaded my parents to get me a TEAC cassette deck for [my birthday/Christmas], so I plugged it into Dad's receiver, tuned in WAVA FM 105, and waited with my finger on the pause button until I recognized the opening chord of one of my must-have songs.  Those tapes disappeared long ago, and I've spent the intervening years (not including the 80s, when I was too cool to listen to AOR) seeking those songs again.  I think I got them all on the original Napster; I got six hundred of my favorite oldies on Napster, stored them online on myplay.com (back when that's what the site was for), then lost my account due to inactivity!  AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!  And by that time, of course, Napster was shut down.  But today I have finally completed my trifecta of most-wanted 1979 AOR (now known as "melodic hard rock") songs; I'll start with the most elusive, "I Do Believe In You" by Pages:

Pages were formed by Richard Page and Steve George, who would go on to form... Mr. Mister!  (Whose drummer, Pat Mastelotto, would later join... King Crimson!  A natural progression from Mr. Mister, yes?)  (8/28: Listening to this again, it strikes me that it has an extremely proggy guitar solo for such a mainstream song; you never know where prog is going to turn up.)

Then there was "All Us Boys" from Toto's second album, Hydra, chock-full of great riffs and leads:

At the time I had no way of knowing that lyrics like "Mothers tell your daughters to stay away from rock and roll" were (a) ridiculous, and (b) especially ridiculous coming from Toto.  (There are some live clips of Toto performing this song on YouTube, but actually seeing them kind of ruins it for me.)

Back in March I alluded to a future return of keyboardist Michael Fonfara to these pages; well, the future is now!  After backing up Lou Reed for a few albums, Fonfara joined AOR band Tycoon, whose minor hit "Such A Woman" (Billboard #26) was one of my sought-after songs that I didn't manage to capture.  Tycoon's sound has been much maligned (sample comment from Adamannapolis: "This is unintentionally funny studio rock. Very intense in its pussytude."), but I am powerless to resist that hook in the chorus:

So that wraps up the trifecta, and no matter what you think of these songs I'm sure you will agree that they all belong together.  (And so do several other songs I've posted, accessible via the handy-dandy AOR tag.)

Now, on to the footnotes: Michael Fonfara's history is even more colorful than playing with Lou Reed and an also-ran AOR band: manning the organ for Rhinoceros, he was one of the purveyors of one of the all-time great rock instrumentals, 1968's "Apricot Brandy"--

"I Do Believe In You" did not make superstars of Pages, but it was good enough for America, who covered it on their 1980 album Alibi:

That's pretty lame, I think; they stripped from the song the little bit of bite the Pages gave it, and it just doesn't make it.  As for that album cover: WTF?

Why oh why has Whitesnake's "Fool For Your Loving" been running through my head for the last week?  It's not that I have any affinity for the lyrics: "A hard-lovin' woman like you just makes a hard-lovin' man."  What the hell does that even mean, anyway?  I think it's just that it's such a well-put-together song, with two great guitar riffs, David Coverdale's better-than-most blues-rock vocals, the way he plunges right into the second verse after the chorus, the guitar solo section, a good bridge; everything just clicks.  Coverdale must think so too, since he's recorded it so many times.  I spent Sunday evening listening to five different versions.  The original studio version in on Ready an' Willing from 1980; it has the high-hat mixed really loud so that it sounds like a choo-choo train, or Squeeze's music-hall number "Cool For Cats," which kind of undermines the rock-and-roll swagger.  On the other hand, Neil Murray's bass is very crisp in the mix and it really moves the song along; he has a punchy style like Boz Burrell but with more flourishes and note-bending.  The definitive version is still the first one I ever heard, the live version (also from 1980) with the same band, which at that time was the classic line-up: half of Deep Purple (Coverdale, Jon Lord, and Ian Paice), Murray, and guitarists Mick Moody and Bernie Marsden:

That Murray's style is similar to Burrell's was probably no accident, as Whitesnake was often accused of being a Bad Company copycat band.  In 1987 Coverdale retooled Whitesnake into a Led Zeppelin copycat band, prompting Robert Plant to call him "David Coverversion."  Or maybe he was already calling him that, I don't know.  The move paid off, though, as the Whitesnake album went multiplatinum thanks to the Zeppelinesque "Still of the Night" and a remake of the power ballad "Here I Go Again" from the 1982 Saints and Sinners album.  (And did you ever notice that in the original version, he sings "Like a hobo I was born to walk alone," while on subsequent versions "hobo" has been changed to "drifter"?  Sounds like the hobo lobby got to him.  John Hodgman is onto something.)  Coverdale loves remaking his own songs, and on the followup to Whitesnake, Slip of the Tongue, he remade "Fool For Your Loving", giving it the full 80s mushy-synth-and-sledgehammer-snare sound for what is easily the worst version of the song.*  Now by this time Coverdale had disbanded the original Whitesnake band and would build a band around himself in response to what he saw as the dictates of the market.  Moody, Marsden, and Murray would regroup in the 90s as Company of Snakes.  In 2001 Company of Snakes put out a live album, Here They Go Again, with a new version of both "Fool For Your Loving" (and "Here I Go Again," of course) sung by Norwegian singer Jørn Lande.  It's good, but a little too fast; Murray's bass still sounds great.  Finally, David Coverdale and his Whitesnake-of-the-moment released a live album in 2006, Live in the Shadow of the Blues, and the update of "Fool For Your Loving" cranks up the rock even above the original, obliterating that lame 1989 version.  The guitarists this time are Doug Aldrich and Reb Beach, and I've never heard of them before but they sure do energize "Fool"--

It's interesting to note that the singers Coverdale is usually compared with (usually unfavorably), Paul Rodgers and Robert Plant, have broadened their musical horizons in the post-AOR age.  Plant had his retro Honeydrippers and now he's doing blues/country/bluegrass with Alison Krauss; Rodgers went back to the blues with an album of Muddy Waters covers, then did a stint fronting Queen.  Coverdale, though, is still doing the same cock-rock he's always done, and it sounds like he's still doing it well.  If it ain't broke...

There was one more minor AOR hit I wanted to include in my last post, but there was no audio file to go into the Seeqpod player.  "Don't Ever Want To Lose You Ya" by New England was one of many songs I taped off the radio in 1979, but never got the album.  Their marketing angle was being "Produced by Paul Stanley of KISS," and they were a hairy bunch who looked like they might have been Kiss without the makeup.  But if power pop was stealth new wave, as I contend, then New England was stealth power pop behind the hard-rock facade:

Wow, it sure was windy in that studio!  Don't you love how earnestly the keyboardist Jimmy Waldo sings along on the chorus?  And how about drummer Hirsh Gardner's hair?!  He should've been in Journey with Neal Schon and Gregg Rolie, that would have been the ultimate hair band.  But getting back to the music, it's not far from bona fide power pop anthems such as "Tomorrow Night" by The Shoes:

But the visuals from New England's video remind me of something else... Hmmm.....

The pinnacle of my used-record-store-owning career came when a guy from the next county called and said there was a song he'd been looking for for ten years, but nobody knows what it is, and the chorus goes "don't you know what love is," and-- and I stopped him right there and said, "That's by Touch, and I have their album that it's on, and the Castle Donnington Monsters of Rock album that has the live version."  He showed up, eventually, and bought both records for $5.99 each.  $5.99?!  I could have charged more than that!  That's one reason I'm out of the record-selling business.  Anyway, the guy was so grateful to have the song after so many years of fruitless searching.  The reason I knew the song was it was one of my favorites from the WAVA AOR years.  In 1980 I taped the Monsters of Rock album off the radio when it was the 11:00 album of the night (because April Wine was on it, and I was really into them), and it was the Touch song I ended up playing over and over.  I haven't heard it myself since I sold those records in 1993, but I've just found a copy to listen to again:

Those power chords and keyboards and chorused vocals sure sound great; I've always been a sucker for lavish production and arrangements.  However, they can mask the fact that there's not much of song there; Touch's songwriter Mark Mangold would go on to write "I Found Someone," which Cher made a hit via the "if you shout it loud enough nobody will notice the melody is crap" method, a.k.a. "the power ballad" method.  What a cultural bane.  Oh well, I still like "Don't You Know What Love Is," and it makes me want to hear some coeval AOR hits and near-misses: