06.11.09
The Thin Line Between Great and Sub-mediocre
The meat of DD’s rock music library consists primarily of the latter from the title.
Of course, you didn’t know this was the essence of your taste when you were a kid going to record storea through the Seventies and Eighties. You bought something on spec, took it home and invested time in getting to like it. And if it wasn’t horrendous and too far outside your taste, it found a home, even as the artist was summarily dropped from his or her label.
And if you’d told me then that my mother would eventually throw out all these old records in a revenge fit brought on by dementia, and that fifteen years later guys my age with the same taste in records (but who’s moms weren’t nuts) would commence to ripping their collections of nobodies and also-rans to a global network, where I could listen to them again one more time, I would have given you the stink eye.
But that’s how it worked out.
And today’s offerings fall into this category, my favorite genre of well past expiry hard rock.
They were all momentary pieces of lawn furniture in the world of rock ‘n’ roll, made by journeymen and women, often musos who thought they were going on to much greater things, as thought, too. But who — (insert flopping noise) — didn’t.
Take Karen Lawrence and 1994.
That’s the cover of Please Stand By — and it’s a great one. Just the cover, though. It was their second stab at it, after a tremendous debut, which had gone mostly ignored because it’s cover looked like this. (Scroll down.)
Record label and managements squandered Lawrence’s striking visual appeal — her hair, legs, ass and 1,000 buck lavender skin-tight leather duds for a cover that said “meh!” with great vigor, looking like the top of your stereo amp with a tiny polaroid of the band on it.
By the time the second record arrived, the pic was great, but the magic was gone. No more full-bore screaming hard rock and mystical eastern Led Zep steals. Instead, an embarrasingly un-wild cover of “Wild in the Streets,” something the listener can tell wasn’t 1994’s or Lawrence’s idea.
In DD’s old bedroom, you could hear the air whistling out of the punctured tire.
Please Stand By… is still a far cry from awful. The title cut is fair hard rock and pop. But the band doesn’t work up a lather until the album’s last two songs — “Nerves of Steel,” which digs up the ground using some slide with a blues stomp, and “Keep Ravin’ Up,” with the best lyric on the entire record: “You’re a real man, I can tell it by your shoe size.”
With Trigger, one could tell the label’s (Casablanca) art department wasn’t up to doing them any favors, either. It’s 1979 and the boys were wearing what looks like pink lipstick and rouge.
As you can guess, that went well. And it’s unfortunate, because Trigger sounded a lot like Slade. The band featured two singers — one for the ravers, who sounded like Noddy Holder, and one for the singles, who sounded a bit like Jackson Browne. There’s not a dud song on the LP and if one ignores the predictably stupid lyrics on “We’re Gonna Make It” and “Rockin’ Cross the USA,” the band delivered all the yobbishness one had come to love from Slade.
Now, instead of the lipstick and rouge, if Casablanca had delivered a group picture with mutton chops, some worn denim, and the name Trigger tattoo’d on their fists …
Anyway, Trigger furnished the goods live. DD stumbled upon them by accident at the Jersey shore in ’79 with his old Albright College girlfriend, a nineteen year-old med tech major whose small size belied a capacity for strong drink. She had recommended we stop before withdrawal made her bellicose. Playing in the basement of an old resort before an audience of about fifty, Trigger delivered their entire album with speed and great elan. At least half the crowd cheered.
Who’s that? Looks like Pat Benatar!
Another record company promotional idea gone wrong — posing
Laurie Beechman like Pat Benatar on the cover of Laurie and the Sighs in 1980. After Benatar already had “Heartbreaker” and “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” all over FM radio.
What were they thinking? That some fans’ hands would slip and they’d grab it by mistake on the way to the checkout counter?
Laurie and the Sighs didn’t sound much like Pat Benatar. First, and most obviously, there’s nothing like “Heartbreaker” here, no Michael Chapman steering the singer into covering Sweet’s “No You Don’t” or Johnny Cougar’s “I Need a Lover.”
On the other hand, the Sighs rocked a lot harder than Benatar’s backing band, and their relatively tuneless delivery in comparison with the songs and playing on Benatar’s first two albums, worked better in the context of what this LP achieved.
It’s a thirty minute pounding, a wall of Laurie’s blaring voice and Marshall stack guitar. At its center, Laurie and the Sighs is a heavy metal record way before women who were in metal bands all had to look something like Doro Pesch.
In fact, Laurie looked a lot like my old girlfriend, the one who liked inexpensive spirits. Maybe that’s why I bought it.
But DD still enjoys her record a lot, as the last two songs on this LP kill, their themes still resonant, even after the passage of decades.
“Stop Telling Me No!” Laurie yells. Plus, she’s “Burning Up!” in front of an “indecisive” wussy who needs “shaking up!” “Hot, hot, hot!” Shriek and roll! Watch out! She’ll strike your cock with a hammer!