Hair Band Friday - 5/5/23

1.  "The Price" by Twisted Sister

2.  "Eye to Eye" by Slaughter

3.  "Waiting" by Vixen

4.  "All or Nothing" by Whitesnake

5.  "Fever" by Judas Priest

6.  "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" by Kix

7.  "Under the Gun" by Lita Ford

8.  "You Really Got Me / Cabo Wabo" (live) by Van Halen

9.  "Still Loving You" by Scorpions

10.  "Girl Crazy" by Y&T

CoronaVinyl Day 456 (C): School Days by Stanley Clarke

For an explanation of CoronaVinyl, click here.

Today's CoronaVinyl category is "C," and I listened to jazz fusion bassist Stanley Clarke's fourth solo album, 1976 album School Days.

Admittedly, I was not familiar with Clarke before listening to the album, but apparently, he's a jazz fusion pioneer and the first jazz fusion bassist to be a headlining artist.  Jazz fusion, if you don't know, is a fusion of rock, jazz, funk, and R&B.

School Days is mostly all instrumental, with a couple vocal chants here and there.  As a (former, terrible) bassist myself, I appreciate a good bass line and bass riff, and there are plenty of both on the album.  It was a good album to listen to while trying to crank out some work today with the windows open.  School Days reached #2 on the Billboard jazz album chart and #34 on the Billboard 200.

Clarke has continued to make music over the last five decades.  Over the years, he has performed as a solo artist and with bands, and he has collaborated with many artists, both inside and outside the jazz world, including Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood of The Rolling Stones, with whom he formed The New Barbarians in 1979 and toured for a few months that year (but didn't release any studio albums).  He has also scored TV shows and movies over the years, including Pee Wee's Playhouse (for which he was nominated for an Emmy), Boyz n the Hood, Passenger 57, and What's Love Got to Do With It.  He also been nominated for 15 Grammys and won five.

Favorite Song on Side 1:  "School Days"
The nearly eight-minute title track is also the opening track on the album, and it's a pretty rocking instrumental, with some great guitar work from Ray Gomez and, as expected, some bass soloing from Clarke.

Favorite Song on Side 2:  "Hot Fun"
At just under three minutes, "Hot Fun" is by far the shortest song on the album.  But what is lacks in length, it makes up for in funk.

Retro Video of the Week: "Nite and Day" by Al B. Sure!

A mere 35 years ago today, new jack swinger Al B. Sure! released his debut album, In Effect Mode.  It was a pretty successful debut effort, reaching #20 on the Billboard album chart and topping the Billboard R&B album chart for seven weeks, eventually going double platinum in the U.S.

The album's success was helped by the debut single, "Nite and Day," which went all the way up to #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on the Billboard R&B singles chart.  In Effect Mode also featured three other Top 3 songs on the Billboard R&B chart:  "Get Off Your Game (Girl)" (#1), "If I'm Not Your Lover" (#2), and "Rescue Me" (#3).

I went with "Nite and Day" for the Retro Video of the Week because it's the song I remember best of all of Al B. Sure!'s songs.  And yes, he has an exclamation mark at the end of his name.  The video prominently features Sure!'s unibrow, all over New York City, both in color and black and white.

CoronaVinyl Day 455 (B): Meet the Beatles! by The Beatles

For an explanation of CoronaVinyl, click here.

Today's CoronaVinyl category is "B," and even though the last time B came around, I posted about a Beatles album, that was over three months ago, and frankly, I still have a fair amount of Beatles albums left.  So, I went with their official American debut album, 1964's Meet the Beatles!

As I previously noted when I posted about Rubber Soul, due to some issues with the Beatles' label, EMI, and their American subsidiary, Capitol Records, until Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band was released in 1967, The Beatles had different albums released in North America and the UK.  Some had different titles, while some had the same title as the UK version, but a different track listing.

Meet the Beatles! was released by Capitol in the U.S. on January 20, 1964.  By this time, The Beatles had already released two albums in the UK, Please Please Me and With the Beatles, released in March and November 1963, respectively.  As you can see, the cover  of Meet the Beatles! boasts that it's "The First Album by England's Phenomenal Pop Combo."  They got the "England's phenomenal pop combo" thing right, but Vee-Jay Records had actually released an album ten days earlier called Introducing . . . The Beatles, which was basically a slightly cut-down version of Please Please Me.

Meet the Beatles! has 12 tracks:  "I Want to Hold Your Hand," which was only released as a single in the UK; "I Saw Her Standing There," which was the B-side to the "I Want to Hold Your Hand" single in the U.S. and also the first track from Please Please Me; "This Boy," which was the B-side of the "I Want to Hold Your Hand" single in the UK; and then the nine original, non-cover songs from With the Beatles in the same order, save for the inclusion of their cover of "Till There Was You" from The Music Man.  And the album cover is the same as the With the Beatles, but just with a slight blue tint.

Regardless of what songs were on this album and whether Introducing . . . The Beatles came out ten days before, Meet the Beatles! was, for many Americans, the introduction to the group that would change popular music forever.  It was released a few weeks before the band's legendary stint on The Ed Sullivan Show, which made the band international sensations.

I love all phases of The Beatles' work.  A lot of times, people shove aside their earlier work in favor of their later work, dismissing the earlier stuff as just regular pop music, forgetting how much of a sea change their music was in an era desperately wanting for music made by someone whose first name wasn't Bobby.

Meet the Beatles! topped the Billboard album chart for 11 consecutive weeks -- the first of their 14 #1 studio albums in the U.S. over the following six years -- only to be displaced by the aptly titled The Beatles Second Album.  Between those two albums and A Hard Day's Night, in 1964, the Beatles held the top spot on the Billboard 200 for 30 of the 52 weeks.  It eventually went 5x platinum in the U.S. and was ranked #187 on the all-time Billboard 200 chart in 2015.

The album isn't on Spotify, but someone made a playlist with the album's tracks, so I embedded that below.

Favorite Song on Side 1:  "This Boy"
Only available as the B-side to the "I Want to Hold Your Hand" single in the UK, American fans got a treat when "This Boy" was an album track on Meet the Beatles!  It's one of my favorite early Beatles songs -- an unabashed ode to doo wop, with John's impassioned double-tracked vocals in the chorus showing the band had as much soul as they had pop chops.

Favorite Song on Side 2:  "Not a Second Time"
I went with another John song for Side 2.  "Not a Second Time" was another step in John's progression as a songwriter, with lyrics about being hurt, but not wanting to get hurt again.  It also has some interesting minor/major musical shifts that give it both a brooding mood and a happy mood.

CoronaVinyl Day 454 (A): Now and Forever by Air Supply

For an explanation of CoronaVinyl, click here.

After another hiatus prompted by vacation and insane work hours, CoronaVinyl is back.  And with the beginning of May, we start anew at "A."  As with many other letters, I don't have any "A" artists left who I haven't already featured, so I went with British-Australian soft rock duo Air Supply's seventh studio album, 1982's Now and Forever.

By 1982, soft rock was on the decline, and whether they new it or not, Air Supply was just starting to descend from their peak.  In the previous two years, the group had six Top 5 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 (including on #1, 1981's "The One That You Love").

Now and Forever wasn't poor performing by any means.  It reached #25 on the Billboard album chart and went platinum in the U.S.  It also featured the group's seventh Top 5 hit in the U.S. -- "Even the Nights Are Better" -- as well as two other Top 40 songs, both of which topped out at #38:  "Young Love" and "Two Less Lonely People in the World."  

However, as musical tastes were shifting, Air Supply was only left with two more Top 40 hits over the next two years.

Favorite Song on Side 1:  "Young Love"
Side 1 features all three of the hits from this album.  I went with "Young Love" because I think it's a pleasant reminder of what made Air Supply so popular.  It's a sappy love song with a big hook, almost a power ballad.  Graham Russell sings the choruses, and then Russell Hitchcock comes in for the soaring choruses.  It's the kind of song you expect to hear at the end of an early '80s teen romantic comedy, as the two star-crossed lovers run to each other for an enduring embrace in the rain.

Favorite Song on Side 2:  "One Step Closer"
This one is a little peppier than much of the album.  And if "Young Love" could have been the love theme to a teen rom com, this one could be the theme song to an early '80s sitcom called One Step Closer, where an earnest and likeable single mom tries to make ends meet when she moves her family back to where she grew up in suburban Minneapolis.  Sure, her kids can be a pain sometimes, but they have good hearts, and of course, her busybody best friend Tina is always stopping by for some comic relief and all the neighborhood gossip.

Hair Band Friday - 4/28/23

1.  "Operation:  Mindcrime" by Queensrÿche

2.  "Heaven is Waiting" by Lynch Mob

3.  "God Gave Rock and Roll to You II" by KISS

4.  "Is This Love" by Whitesnake

5.  "Higher Ground" by Thunder

6.  "Back Off Bitch" by Guns N' Roses

7.  "Foolin'" by Def Leppard

8.  "Longroad" by Britny Fox

9.  "Rainbow in the Rose" by Winger

10.  "City Boy Blues" by Mötley Crüe

Retro Video of the Week: "Screaming in the Night" by Krokus

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the release of Swiss hard rockers Krokus's seventh studio album, Headhunter.  While the band never had what I would consider a "hit" in the U.S., they were well-known in hard rock and metal circles, and Headhunter was their biggest album in the U.S., reaching #25 on the Billboard album chart and going gold in the U.S.

"Screaming in the Night" is not as "hard" as most of the band's output.  It's kind of a plodding rock song, teetering on the brink of power ballad territory.  The video was in decent rotation on MTV, and having never been to Switzerland, I assume it depicts a normal, contemporary Genevan story.  A Bluto-esque warlord in a modern-yet-medieval lakeside mountain village terrorizes and imprisons people who presumably aren't neutral enough.  Lead singer Marc Storace makes out with some new wave Jazzercise chick through prison bars, but Bluto catches her and stabs her in the chest.  Marc then gets chained up and thrown into a small stone pyramid that has a lightning rod on the top.  Good thing, too, because lightning strikes, evaporates the chains, and provides Marc a Canadian tuxedo and some fresh sneakers.  It proves to be the perfect outfit to wear when he discovers a hatch in the pyramid with a ladder that leads to -- you guessed it -- a diner, where Bluto is a line cook and someone resembling Ana Gasteyer is a waitress.  He then sees himself on TV and walks across people's meals on the diner counter toward the TV, where he sings the very song in the video.  Does it get any Swisser than that?

Hair Band Friday - 4/21/23

1.  "Lipstick and Leather" by Y&T

2.  "Shame Shame Shame" by Sleeze Beez

3.  "Helter Skelter" by Mötley Crüe

4.  "Welcome to the Jungle" by Guns N' Roses

5.  "Don't Close Your Eyes" by Dokken

6.  "Bloodbath in Paradise" by Ozzy Osbourne

7.  "Kick 'N' Fight" by Britny Fox

8.  "What You Give Is What You Get" by Ratt

9.  "Love On the Run" by Scorpions

10.  "Train Train" by Warrant

Retro Video of the Week: "You Don't Know How It Feels" by Tom Petty

Well folks, it's 4/20, so in honor of those who partake in the sweet leaf, I figured I'd give you an apropos Retro Video of the Week.  Wildflowers was Tom Petty's triple-platinum 1994 non-Heartbreakers album (even though the Heartbreakers are the backing musicians on much of the album), and it proved that Petty was just as popular and relevant in the grunge and alt-rock era as ever before.  

"You Don't Know How It Feels" was the first single release from Wildflowers, and it was a big hit, reaching #13 on the Billboard Hot 100 (Petty's last Top 40 hit in the U.S.) and #1 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.  The first line of the chorus is "So let's get to the point / Let's roll another joint."  Of course, on radio, they inserted some weird sounding gibberish word that sounded like "noojh" (which was actually "joint" backwards).  So, smoke those noojhes if you got 'em today.

Hair Band Friday - 4/14/23

1.  "Paradise City" by Guns N' Roses

2.  "Bringin' On The Heartbreak" (1984 remix) by Def Leppard

3.  "Out of Love" by Blue Murder

4.  "Suicidal Shakedown" by Jetboy

5.  "Cold Sweat" by Warrant

6.  "Waiting for the Night" by Vandenberg

7.  "Drive Me Crazy" by Ratt

8.  "Line of Fire" by Trixter

9.  "Bedside Radio" by Krokus

10.  "Carr Jam 1981" by KISS