In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up

(Part Two)



The all-time list of rock solo artists, 1978-1983 (immediate pre-hair metal era) goes like this: 1) Eddie Money 2) Billy Squier 3) Donnie Iris, and I'm not even trying to open this up for debate (knowing that most of you guys don't even care anyway), I'm just throwing it out there. You guys got to turn on the radio when you were 16 and listen to Rage Against The Machine or the "Judgement Night" soundtrack. When I was 16, I got to hear "Ah! Leah!", if I was lucky. Wait, I probably had it better, now that I think about it.

"Ah! Leah!" was Donnie Iris' big hit, of course -- look it up on YouTube if you think you've never heard it, it's great -- but I've always liked "Love is Like a Rock" even more. It was sort of like a Mad Magazine version of a rock song, with an AC/DC type riff plus a lyric that seemed to saying that girls are dumb and you shouldn't listen to adults at all... which is pretty cool stuff when you're 15 years old, I guess. The back of the jacket and the record label credits this album to "Donnie Iris and The Cruisers", but I never heard anyone call it that back then, they just called it Donnie Iris. Even though I'm not fifteen anymore this song still fucken rules, especially for a guy who seemed to be pretty regional as far as his appeal goes (finding anyone outside of the Northeast who's ever heard of Donnie Iris is a bit of a lost cause).

Donnie Iris -

"Love is Like a Rock"








Billy Squier was almost inescapable in '81, with "The Stroke", "Lonely Is The Night", "My Kinda Lover" and all that. "In The Dark", the leadoff track to this album, is definitely the one Billy Squier song that I used to crank the most, since the way the chorus just takes off (followed by the bridge) is massive, and also because it's so fucken weird. For such a commercial AOR type guy, Billy used to cram a lot of odd stuff into his songs: ridiculous overdubbed "gunshot" snare hits, a lot of strangely dull keyboard parts, and some screwy vocal effects. It's as if he was being produced by a committee. There's even a blip during the middle of the guitar solo that almost sounds as if someone put their elbows down on the keyboards by accident. The chattering 'n shit at the end of the guitar solo is pretty great, though.



Billy Squier's fully-functional early '80s rock star effect

Billy Squier -

"In The Dark"








The front jacket photo might look like a set-up for some lame Eagles/Pablo Cruise soft rock shit (almost all of his other album covers are much better, at least the "I just woke up in some chick's apartment and I better find a pay phone fast" ones are), but there's no doubt that Eddie Money was the man, and "Think I'm In Love" is probably my favorite Eddie Money song. I think Sinkhole even covered this song; I wish I still had that record.

Eddie Money -

"Think I'm In Love"




(End notes: When I first posted "Part One" of this series a year ago, "In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up" was just something that I googled (it's the title of a live Ministry DVD or something). I figured that it fit, because everybody would see that I wrote a post about Aerosmith and Cheap Trick and just keep on moving without bothering to read it. Maybe a month or two afterwards, "Beware of The Blog" started using the same title for their live show recaps, which I guess makes more sense. So, apologies to WFMU for stealing their post title before they even started using it.)

In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up

(Part One)



I came up through the mid-80's hardcore scene, which is partly why the people around the music scene that I respect the most are the ones who cut their teeth on '80s hardcore like I did. This can't be applied to every generation, obviously; heck, kids who started out a decade or so after me say things like, "I saw an Offspring video on TV when I was fifteen and that's how I got into punk", which is strange for me to even think about because punk wasn't even on TV when I was fifteen, or even twenty for that matter. Still, nobody falls out of the crib fully formed and listening to Void or The Abused from day one-- we all gotta start somewhere... and for me, prior to indie, punk, and hardcore, it was a bunch of late-70's/early-80's FM rock shit. When I was 16 or 17 and turned on the radio I didn't get Offspring and Nirvana, I got Eddie Money and Billy Squier, which in a way is good because Offspring and Nirvana suck way more than Eddie Money and Billy Squier ever did.




I think when the Walkman first came out they were 20 bucks, and I would walk to my summer job and listen to tapes like XTC's "The Black Sea", and Simple Minds... I was just starting to figure out that anything that had a big drum sound sounded cool to me. Cheap Trick's "Next Position Please" was another one of the tapes I'd listen to constantly. Supposedly, "I Can't Take It" is the only Cheap Trick song written by Robin Zander, but whatever the case, Todd Rundgren's mix for this song is just about perfect, with the drums on top of almost everything else. It might even be my favorite Cheap Trick song ever. One of things I thought was funny about this record is that the title track ("Next Position Please") includes the line, "I want to be the biggest gun in the world/I want to see the tits on every girl", which seems like a pretty bold line for a band striving for commercial radio airplay back in the early '80s. I didn't realize it at the time, but the cover art apparently makes fun of Bruce Springsteen's "Born To Run"; by the time I figured it out years later, it seemed like a pretty boring idea.

Cheap Trick -

"I Can't Take It"







The best Billy Squier record is actually "Don't Say No", but since I don't have that one handy right now, I'm going with this one instead-- hence, Part Two. "Emotions In Motions" is pretty good in itself, although even at his best Billy was a little fey at times, meaning you get the stupid "Hot Space"/"Drums and Wires"-looking album cover and tons of dopey '80s studio trickery-- like the ridiculous overdubbed snare sound-- to go along with everything else. Still, we're talking Billy Squier here, one of the Top 3 Male Solo Artists, Immediate Pre-Hair Metal Era ('78-'82) (1. Eddie Money, 2. Billy Squier, 3. Donnie Iris, as first noted here some years ago). Plus there's an almost funny story about a DJ in Pennslyvania or somewhere locking himself inside the studio and playing "Everybody Wants You" a hundred times in a row, which could almost be a Spinal Tap moment if they ever want to make another one of those.

Billy Squier -

"Everybody Wants You"







Just in case anyone thinks my saying that I liked this record is a bunch of bullshit, I've posted a "best-of" list at the top of the page, taken from one one of my old zines printed exactly 24 years ago this month. Of course, I'd change the list around a bit if I had to re-write it-- like, the Cro-Mags and Slow would most likely switch places-- but it's too late now. "Done With Mirrors" was Aerosmith's first post-rehab comeback album, and even though it's on par (read: non-horn-filled) with a lot of their earlier stuff, it still flopped pretty hard, partly because everything on the record is written in backwards letters, including the production credits on the inner sleeve and even on the record label itself. They wised up afterwards and brought in a bunch of song doctors to write garbage like "Dude (Looks Like A Lady)" for their next record, and the rest is history. The best track on here ("Let The Music Do The Talking") was already five years old when they swiped it from the first Joe Perry Project album and had Steven Tyler write new lyrics for it, but that one along with "My Fist Your Face" and "Shame On You" make about as good a 1-2-3 punch to start off an '80s rock record as you'll ever find.

Aerosmith -

"My Fist Your Face"

"Let The Music Do The Talking"



As an added bonus, here's that old newsletter from 1986, which a friend of mine scanned and sent to me a little while ago; I don't even have an original copy anymore. When you read it you'll see that I'm still writing the same way 24 years later (even though the two best jokes-- the Jack Rabid/Penis Landscapes joke and the Joeski Love joke-- are too old for people to get them anymore). This isn't an easy habit to get rid of, obviously.