Silhouette

Agreed

Caught a pretty great Foreigner concert a few years ago and got the privilege to watch Lou Gramm climb up the side of a metal tower and dangle off while singing. Even though he is getting older he still put his heart into it and made it entirely a great time to watch.


Keep up the great work in your journal, I like it!

Unknown Soldier

A 60 year old dangling off a tower that was worth the entry ticket alone

Glad to see that you're enjoying the journal and keep reading, we should be starting our first full year soon which will be 1978.

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

Anteater

Is there anyone who isn't at least peripherally aware of this album? The road to Boston and that definitive magical self-titled which would define AOR in the final years of the 70's was not an easy one. Vocalist Brad Delp and producer/mastermind Tom Scholz met each other way back in 1970, but it would take multiple lineup changes, several band turnovers, hundreds of demo submissions and six freakin' years of hard work before anyone even agreed to sign them. The label in question that actually agreed to the signing was Epic Records, who at that point had multiple success stories under their belt and were open to new possibilities and innovation.

The recording process for Boston's self-titled is considered to be a major event in the overall evolution of music recording. For one thing, Scholz insisted on using his own custom basement studio setup instead of a major L.A. location to do the recording, and ended up splitting the producer's royalty as a result. However, the implications were interesting: Scholz's approach opened the door for particularly savvy bands with a DIY approach in later years to take the initiative in their music's recording process.

Boston was completed and released on August 8th, 1976 to an unprecedented level of acclaim, going on to sell 17 million copies in the U.S. and becoming one of the fastest selling debut records ever. Although three key singles were released over a twelve month period, the entire album became a staple of the burgeoning AOR radio format and helped popularize the slick arena-rock sound in a way no other album has before or since.

Ironically, most of the key songs here had existed in demo form going all the way back to the earliest part of the 70's, including the timeless opener 'More Than A Feeling' and the progressive rock influenced 'Foreplay/Long Time'. Highly polished in a way few other albums were at the time, Delp's double-tracked layered vocals in conjunction with Scholz's home grown studio wizardry was insanely innovative, incorporating Classical-music influenced chord transitions and multiple-part harmonized guitar solos. On top of that, none of the equipment was overly expensive: 'More Than A Feeling' was recorded on a $100 acoustic Yamaha and the overall production only cost a few thousand dollars at a time when studios were charging tens of thousands for overpriced equipment and hours billed.

Personally though, my favorite songs on the album aren't the ones you hear all that much. For me, its the closing triumvirate of 'Hitch A Ride', 'Something About You' and the Kinks-ish 'Let Me Take You Home Tonight' where the magic is fully realized. The first of these three is special because of the acoustic/electric dynamics, but the last has a furious energy to it that might surprise critics of the "corporate rock" ideal that Boston popularized.

From my perspective, Boston was one of those albums that had a million implications both good and bad for the music industry. For AOR, it set a high bar both sonically and sales-wise that would drive record companies to groom bands such as Journey and Foreigner into the arena stompers they would become. It also validated AOR as a genre and hooked millions of people across the planet years before Michael Jackson's Thiller would pull a similar hat trick in 1983.

Negatively however, it set an unrealistic standard and template that would drive many groups into a sort of "sameness". Like any success, repeating 'the Boston formula" became many a record label's wish as the 70's turned into the 80's, and echoes of this can still be felt today.

All that aside, a classic album is still a classic. #1 indeed!

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Anteater's 21 Fav Albums Of 2020

Anteater's Daily Tune Roulette

Chula Vista

Think I've posted this here before. That album was released while I was still in high school (just north of Boston) and it really exploded during that winter, which happened to be a really bad one for New England. Tons of snow and bitter cold. Can't remember how many times we sat out in the school parking lot before school blasting this 8 track while smoking the first doob of the day.

The album was great either way, but be able to consider the band a home team made it that much better.

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Unknown Soldier

The perfect example of how a certain album reflects something that you'll always remember throughout your life. Nearly all my favourite albums operate as important timelines for me as well.

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

Unknown Soldier

We're more or less about to start our 1978 list in the next week or two, which of course will be just 10 albums exclusive to that year and how the rest of the journal will continue. But at the end of each year we might include the odd album that we think is worth a mention as well. The brief album review below was previously written for my other journal.


If the Angel debut showed just how thin the line was around this time between heavy metal/hard rock and AOR, then The Baby’s debut would show it at its thinnest. The Babys were a British band that consisted of John Waite-Bass/Vocals, Wally Stocker-Guitar, Michael Corby-Rhythm/Keyboards and Tony Brock-drums. From the word go the band were seemingly being groomed for stardom and were on the Chrysalis label and had Bob Ezrin on production (even though there is little of his production touches on show here) and the band looked the part as well especially the cool looking Michael Corby.

Their debut album would be the best album that the band put out and despite being their best, it’s still an album with a number of flaws. Quite quickly the quality of their work dried up and the band would soon garner the label of being a band of potential and nothing more and in 1981 they would eventually fold. In hindsight the band were nothing more than vehicles for some of its members most notably frontman John Waite, who of course would go onto find success as a solo artist and future member Jonathan Cain-Keyboards would of course find stardom with Journey. The debut album is a combination of melodic rock, with a heavy backdrop and an emphasis on commercialism, even though there is no obvious single here. Standout tracks are “If You’ve Got the Time” “Over and Over” and the epic “Dying Man” a song I can listen to anytime, in fact it’s one of my favourite video montages on You Tube.

Frontman John Waite would become a central figure in American commercial rock of the early to mid 1980s and thanks to him and future member Jonathan Cain, The Baby's are still fondly remembered.

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

The Batlord

lol8track

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Chula Vista

lol@lackofperspectiveandmp3dullard

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

The Batlord

lol@probableoldmanrantaboutvinyl

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Unknown Soldier

Firstly let's get this ridiculous album title out of the way, as it has to be probably one of the silliest album titles ever, but then again it's not really an album title easily forgotten. In fact the album cover and title have been voted amongst the worst of all time and luckily with the exception of their 1990 album The Earth, a Small Man, His Dog and a Chicken! the band never ventured into this kind of foolhardiness again.

REO Speedwagon at this time were one of the numerous 'working and faceless' American rock bands of the 1970s and this terminology is something mostly promoted by me, despite the fact that this negative terminology was reguarly aimed at bands like Kansas. REO were a 'working' band in the respect that they were constantly issuing out albums that were often mediocre and were constantly touring year after year, but they were still commercially viable because the American listening collective of the 1970s were buying albums from bands like The Eagles, Doobie Brothers, Boston, Kansas and Styx by the bucketload, therefore bands like REO Speedwagon fitted nicely into this 'niche market' despite lacking the quality of these above bands. They were 'faceless' as most people had little idea of what the band looked like outside their immediate fanbase, they had no pin-up boy a la Robert Plant or a rock icon like Freddie Mercury, they were in essence just another rock band looking for that big break. Now what REO Speedwagon did have was the ability to really play as a rock band should and if they could get the material right they would be in with a shout of stepping up a league.

You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can't Tuna Fish would finally be the album where the band started to gel and the playing ability of the band was now finally complemented by consistently quality material and the band would reap the rewards of this accomplishment. The album would crack the US Billboard top 40 and go onto sell over 2 million copies in the in the USA, which would gradually help to build the band into an AOR pillar mid-western style. The album opens with its lead singles "Roll with the Changes" and this vibrant track is enhanced with female backing vocalists. The following "Time for Me to Fly" with its acoustic guitar courtesy of Kevin Cronin, would along with the opening track lay down the REO template in terms of style and the band over ensuing albums would improve on this template. The fiery energy of the album kicks in with songs like "Runnin' Blind" along with album closer "Say You Love Me or Say Good Night". The album's other tracks like "Blazin' Your Own Trail Again" and "Do You Know Where Your Woman Is Tonight" sound like Staple REO tracks and in fact there are no really weak tracks on the whole album.

Besides the band finally gelling on the above tracks, what this album does have is that vital component of vibrant energy that is provided by both frontmen Kevin Cronin and guitarist Gary Richrath, the former with his fresh sounding voice and the latter with some really catchy hooks. This was a combination that certain other AOR bands would soon flourish with, make no mistake about it You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can't Tuna Fish is one of the most consistent releases in this year's diary and sounds like perfect lazy afternoon American cruising music.

It had been a long road for REO Speedwagon in reaching their seventh studio album and it would effectively be their lauchpad into becoming one of the biggest bands in the whole AOR genre as the band would themselves be selling by the bucketload in the 1980s. The negative 'working and faceless' adjectives that I applied to them earlier would literally evaporate, as frontman Kevin Cronin with the right material would become one of the the most invigorating frontmen within the whole AOR genre, whilst the rest of the band looked like prime playing AOR material at the same time.

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History