4 posts tagged “wava”

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:

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.

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.