Heartbreaker

January 12, 2013

BenatarTo your left, you will note Pat Benatar as she appeared in the video for Promises In The Dark, a Top 40 single for her in the autumn of 1981 from the album Precious Time.

I was a thirteen-year old boy that summer when Precious Time was released.

You don’t have to work for NASA to calculate the appeal.

Of course, I dug the music, too.

Everybody dug Pat Benatar.

Even though I was listening to little radio, I was well familiar with Heartbreaker, Hit Me With Your Best Shot and Hell Is For Children.

Pat Benatar was often blaring from the the jukebox at the bowling alley where we kids gathered on winter weekend afternoons.

And it was common to see the high school kids wearing t-shirts commemorating earlier tours for In The Heat Of The Night and Crimes Of Passion.

She’d show up on Solid Gold or in a video on America’s Top Ten, clad in some skin-tight catsuit thingy as she prowled the screen, leaving hormones akimbo as I’d sit slack-jawed in front of the screen.

Precious Time‘s follow-up, Get Nervous, was released at Thanksgiving of 1982. It was my first semester of high school and it had been over the previous six months or so that I had begun to assemble a music collection.

I’d receive a cassette of Get Nervous for Christmas a month later.

Tropico, Benatar’s next studio album arrived two years later and, though I was becoming interested in more alternative fare like U2, R.E.M., and Talking Heads, I remained devoted and purchased a copy.

Though her music would become less and less a part of my personal soundtrack as we both got older, hearing a Pat Benatar song would remain a sonic burst of audio adrenaline and a wormhole straight to the ’80s.

So, in honor of Ms. Benatar’s 60th birthday this past week, here are four songs from the powerful-voiced, spandex-clad singer who inspired several of the girls at Ridgemont High to adopt her look and attitude…

Pat Benatar – Precious Time
from Precious Time (1981)

As MTV – or any other outlet to see music videos – was a couple years from being available to us, seeing the clip for Precious Time on America’s Top Ten was likely one of the first times I was exposed to the medium.

Though it wasn’t a hit, I’ve always dug the title track to Benatar’s best-selling album. The skittering, stutter-step melody makes a fitting companion for the song’s lyric of a relationship careening out of control.

Pat Benatar – Shadows Of The Night
from Get Nervous (1982)

If I was making a crude mix tape from the radio during the winter of ’82/’83, it’s likely that Shadow Of The Night was on it. The dramatic lead single from Get Nervous might not have been Benatar’s biggest radio hit, but the song was a stellar showcase for the singer’s pipes and netted her a Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance.

Pat Benatar – We Belong
from Tropico (1984)

The stop-gap live collection Live From Earth had given Benatar her highest-charting single – as well as producing one of the more memorable videos of the time – with Love Is A Battlefield the previous year.

Tropico failed to be the commercial juggernaut that her previous albums had been, but it did contain another mammoth hit with the crunchy, metallic-tinged power ballad We Belong.

Pat Benatar – All Fired Up
from Wide Awake In Dreamland (1988)

Wide Awake In Dreamland arrived three full years after Benatar’s last album, 1985′s Seven The Hard Way, which, at the time, was an eternity. The latter was released as my senior year of high school was concluding and, despite spawning hits with Invincible and Sex As A Weapon, it failed to garner my interest.

Wide Awake In Dreamland was issued at the mid-point of my college years when the music of Pat Benatar seemed to be a remnant from another life. I was working in a record store where it was more likely that we’d be playing stuff that would be favored on MTV’s 120 Minutes or even Headbanger’s Ball.

However, it was a surprisingly solid album and the staff embraced it, giving it play alongside Jane’s Addiction, Siouxsie & The Banshees, and Guns N’ Roses. All Fired Up provided Benatar with one last hit and one that lives up to its title.

2 Comments | birthday, childhood, Pat Benatar | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by barelyawakeinfrogpajamas

Reconsidering Bob (But I’m Still Not Buying A #@&%! Ford Truck)

January 9, 2013

(reconstituted and reheated from January 2009)

I’ve never really been one of those music fans who take offense to artists who license their songs for use in commercials. I wouldn’t consider myself such a purist, believing Melt With You helping to entice me to want a burger devalues the song.

I’ve also been blessed with a superhuman ability to, for the most part, tune out commercials.

(working in record stores during one’s formative years will nurture skills in selective listening).

And, recently, I’ve been strangely, unexpectedly compelled to snag half a dozen albums by Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band. They were in excellent condition and none was more than a dollar – not even the double, live album Nine Tonight.

Purchasing them was surprising (or maybe not) as I’ve never owned anything by Seger in my life on any format despite growing up in the Midwest where he was staple. I knew his hits and even some album tracks from radio and the bowling alley jukebox.

(you know, I wonder if in some parallel universe I was a better bowler and ended up The Dude)

So, I was familiar with a chunk of Seger’s work. My best friend in junior high played his older brother’s eight tracks of the stuff relentlessly. There were songs of Seger’s which I thought were good, but I kind of shelved him with Johnny Hoosier as likable and workman-like but not having the spiritual, transcendent kick of Springsteen.

As I’ve listened to my trove of Seger the past few weeks, I’ve been surprised to realize how much of it I do like. I’m still not elevating him to Springsteen status, but he does now occupy a zone for me as slightly more than erstwhile heartland rocker.

And I was puzzled as to why I’d been rather ambivalent toward him.

Then, I remembered that damned truck commercial with Like A Rock playing and the incalculable number of times I must have been subjected to it, particularly during football season. I had to wonder if, somehow, subconsciously, the use of that song had caused me to dismiss Seger’s entire catalog.

I still have no issue with an artist making some coin through licensing their songs but maybe such a move is a bit more insidious that I’ve believed.

Here are four songs by Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, all of which I heard on the radio plenty in the early ’80s when I was first discovering music…

Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band – Fire Lake
from Against The Wind (1980)

Fire Lake was Bob Seger & The Bullet Band’s current hit during the spring of 1980 when I was first becoming interested enough in music to turn on the radio. It was one of half a dozen songs from Against The Wind that I’d hear on one station or another over the next year.

And, as we were in the Midwest, there were another half dozen Seger hits from the ’70s that were radio staples – a decade or more before true classic rock stations – that you would hear more days than not.

But the one song from the band that I’ve never tired of is Fire Lake. I was in junior high when the song was a Top Ten hit and the whole “bronze beauties/lying in the sun” slant brought to life some kind of Midwestern Valhalla for bikers in my head.

Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band – You’ll Accomp’ny Me
from Against The Wind (1980)

One of the most popular places for kids to hang out in our small town was the bowling alley. On weekend afternoons during the winter, the place was packed.

My buddy and neighbor Will was quite smitten with Kim that winter and every time I’d hear You’ll Accomp’ny Me coming from the jukebox, I was fairly certain his quarter was the one that had conjured it.

Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band – Shame On The Moon
from The Distance (1983)

Even though our town was fewer than four-thousand people, we did have a radio station. By the time Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band released The Distance, the station had flipped from soft rock and light Top 40 to country.

I would hear the rootsy Shame On The Moon, written by Rodney Crowell, during breakfast on the kitchen radio which would be tuned to the local station. And I wanted nothing to do with country music at the time.

So, by association, I wanted nothing to do with the wistful Shame On The Moon when it came on the rock stations I favored at the time. Over the years, though, I’ve grown to appreciate the song’s loping melody and introspective lyric.

Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band – Understanding
from Teachers soundtrack (1984)

Understanding wasn’t from a new Seger album when it was a hit in late 1984. Instead, the song appeared on the soundtrack for the movie Teachers. My friends and I caught the flick while skipping school one day.

Ironically, the movie was about the poor state of the American educational system. Of course, the fictional school in Teachers did hire Nick Nolte as a teacher and enroll Ralph Macchio and Crispin Glover as students, so what did they expect?

2 Comments | Bob Seger, Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, childhood, childhood friends, commercialism, heartland rock, radio, vinyl | Permalink
Posted by barelyawakeinfrogpajamas

The Dead Of Winter

January 5, 2013

winterI have no idea when I became aware that new albums and cassettes didn’t simply sprout randomly in the bins and racks of record stores but, rather, arrived on a (theoretically) predetermined date – the street date.

As I became a music consumer in the early ’80s, this information wasn’t at your fingertips and was as much rumor and speculation as actionable intel.

At the time, I was frequenting record stores like mall staples like Camelot and Record Bar, cooler chains like Peaches, and a few smaller independent stores like Globe. All of them made some attempt to provide release dates.

Most of the time there was something posted on the counter top by the registers. It might be a list clipped from Billboard. If it was, it would be, maybe, a scant dozen titles and usually limited to major releases.

Other stores would have a handwritten list taped to the counter, often riddled with corrections and dates crossed out or changed. And, still others made use of chalk or dry erase boards.

Often I simply got release dates from DJs on the radio.

Regardless of how the information was disseminated, it was hardly gospel.

And, by the time I reached college, I had definitely learned to expect little in the way of new music in January. It was a barren stretch of a month when the labels often dumped titles for which they had little commitment.

A January release was often the precursor to the act being dropped.

A college roommate called me after we’d parted ways with news of a band whose failed debut we had loved. We had graduated as we were expecting the follow-up and, belatedly, it was finally slated for release.

“It comes out in January,” he told me and we both knew what it meant.

(six months later, Epic dropped them)

1982 was the year that I truly began to devote the few dollars I had to purchasing music. Here are four songs from albums that arrived in January that year…

The Waitresses – I Know What Boys Like
from Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? (1982)

The Waitresses brief career – two albums and one EP – was launched when their debut, Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful?, arrived with the new year in 1982. The New Wave band from Akron would have a minor hit that summer with the sassy, saxophone-driven I Know What Boys Like which I was introduced to when the band performed the song on Solid Gold.

Though I Know What Boys Like failed to make the Top 40, the song has appeared on every New Wave compilation issued over the past three decades. Their career might have been slight, but The Waitresses managed two classics with I Know What Boys Like and the seasonal perennial Christmas Wrapping.

XTC – Senses Working Overtime
from English Settlement (1982)

I was certainly unfamiliar with XTC at the beginning of 1982, though I would at least know the name of the English trio by that spring when I took note of the listing for English Settlement and the unusual band name in a catalog for the Columbia Record & Tape Club.

I wouldn’t actually hear XTC until the autumn of the following year when 97X went on the air. The band would be a staple on the station as they would be a favorite amongst the college rock crowd into the next decade.

Hanoi Rocks – Don’t Never Leave Me
from Bangkok Shocks, Saigon Shakes, Hanoi Rocks (1982)

Hanoi Rocks was a band that I knew from leafing through the pages of Circus - one of the few music magazines on the rack at the drug store in my hometown. That the Finnish band was in Circus, whose emphasis was on hard rock and metal bands, did little to pique my interest.

(I did dig the band’s name and I still think that Bangkok Shocks, Saigon Shakes, Hanoi Rocks is one of the coolest album titles of all time)

After Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction broke, I recall the opinion that it might have been Hanoi Rocks having such success had the band’s career not been derailed by the death of their drummer.

Years later, I finally checked out Hanoi Rocks after snagging several CDs in a cut-out bin and it was indeed like hearing some proto-Guns N’ Roses.

Huey Lewis & The News – Do You Believe In Love
from Picture This (1982)

Huey Lewis & The News’ Picture This was actually released at the tail end of January, so, even though the band’s debut had gotten little attention, maybe the label hadn’t totally given up on the band. Maybe they weren’t surprised at the success of Picture This and Do You Believe In Love.

Of course, no one would have predicted how inescapable Huey Lewis & The News would be during the rest of the decade. Reviled by many, the band had stuff I still dig – Workin’ For A Livin’, Heart And Soul, If This Is It, The Power Of Love – and stuff I never did – I Want A New Drug, The Heart Of Rock And Roll, Hip To Be Square…

The bouyant earworm Do You Believe In Love ends up among the former group.

2 Comments | 1982, Hanoi Rocks, Huey Lewis & The News, release date, The Waitresses, XTC | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by barelyawakeinfrogpajamas

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