Robin Lane and The Chartbusters

Robin Lane’s first claim to fame was singing backup vocals on Neil Young’s Round and Round from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.  Now, I certainly didn’t know that when I got this album.  All I knew was that I liked It Will Only Hurt a Little While from her first album.  I heard it one night, late (really late) and I just loved it to death.  I stayed up even really later to hear the college kid that was the DJ say who she was so I could go buy her album.  That dude kept me up a long time, because he played a googob of songs before he got around to talking about what he played.  It was worth it, though.  I’ve got all of Robin Lane and the Chartbusters albums (except some three song ep that came out before this).

I know this guy that was a little older than me, and he hung around some of the girls I knew, and we always talked music when I saw him.  I think we spent a lot of time trying to one up the other guy with a band or record that the other hadn’t heard, but we both liked a lot of the same kinds of guitars and catchy riffs and hooks.  I remember running into him at a party and we were pretty faced, but as usual we started talking music.  It was late – definitely at least 2:00 AM – and he mentions Robin Lane and the Chartbusters.

“Know ‘em?”

“Sure,” says I.  “I’ve got their album.  I think it’s pretty kick ass.”

“Bullshit.  You may have heard one of their songs but there’s no way you actually have that record,” says he (they never really got any airplay outside of Boston).

“No. I really do.  It’s great!  Lot’s of catchy songs and jangly guitars.  She’s got a nice voice, sorta like Linda Ronstadt but no country leanings.”

“Then let’s hear it.”

“It’s 2:00 AM.  It’s at my house.  My parents are asleep and they ain’t gonna go for our drunk asses listening to tunes in the middle of the night.”

“You don’t have it.”

“OK.  Let’s go.  We can’t crank it too much – but we can check it out.”

So we head over to my house.  Did I have it?  Hell yeah, I had it.  I still do.  Was he surprised?  Totally.  Did he want to stay and listen to my records all night?  Definitely.  Not because I have such great records (or even that I had so many when I was 18), but like I said, we really like a lot of the same stuff.  So we sat there and smoked and listened to that first Chartbusters album all the way through, and he said he was gonna go buy it.

I don’t know if he ever did, and I suppose I don’t care.  I don’t even know if he remembers that night.  I’m not sure why I remember it so clearly.  But it happened, and I thought it was pretty cool, because he was over 21 and had been able to see a lot of the bands I liked in the over 18 clubs just a few years prior to me, so I thought that made him cool.

I still think this is a great record.  If you read reviews of it you’ll see the “you just have to see them live, the record strips away all their energy” reviews all over the place.  I disagree, though I never did see them live.  It’s a nice, dry recording.  It doesn’t have a lot of cheesy effects that really date it to 1980 and it still sounds good today.  I think those reviews are goofy because Robin had studio experience, and her producer (Joe Wissert) had experience on all sorts of different things and her band was as good as the East Coast could deliver.  So I think this record sounds just like they wanted it to, and I think it sounds pretty good.

Except for some odd lyrics here and there where Robin seems to just brush off an abusive relationship, this is a tight record and it’s a lot of fun.  I think Don’t Cry has probably become my favorite over the decades (damn, this thing is over 30 years old!).  It’s pretty cute and jangly and poppy, but I really like it a lot.  When Things Go Wrong is a little simplistic lyrically but it’s a real gem of the sort I think Linda Ronstadt was going for on Mad Love.  Robin pulls this stuff off with an ease that I don’t think Linda ever quite matched.  It Will Only Hurt a Little While has a loose guitar sound that’s really effective and while side one is better than side two, side two is still good enough to flip over to every time.

Mine’s got a stain on the cover that looks like coffee, but it’s got to be Coke.  I still don’t drink much coffee, but I like pop.  I think I remember who spilled their Coke at my house on this cover, too.  He’s got green teeth and I was pretty pissed off about it!  The record is in great shape, though.  It really sounds pretty good, but then maybe the clicks on mine just seem like they belong after thirty years.  I remember this was hard to get around here.  I may actually have ordered it.  I know some of you Download Babies can’t imagine waiting more that the few minutes it takes for you to discover and click on the link any piece of music ever recorded that strikes your fancy, but I actually picked and chose most of my records by making compromises between which record I’d take home, and which one I'd leave in the store.  Sometimes, the record I left in the store has still never wound up in my collection, but I’m glad I got this one.