Artful Dodger - Artful Dodger

I have mentioned the occupation of Music Critic here before, and I think you may get the idea that I have kind of a love/hate thing going there.  I suppose that would be accurate.  I really like some of them, and I really wanted to be one for a bit, but it must suck to wake up and have to listen to ten new records every day, so no wonder half the time they like stuff that sucks.  They can't all be Lester Bangs, and even Lester liked some really shitty records.  There's got to be some kind of filters for me though, and I still prefer to read about music and then buy it than to just listen to it and then buy it.  I do both (and I also buy records just because I like the cover), but reading a review is still my favorite way.

The first record I ever bought that way was Artful Dodger's first album.  There's a freebie rag in Cleveland called The Scene, and while there have been others, The Scene has been around since I was in elementary school.  It's not anywhere near as cool as I thought it used to be, but it does a pretty good job of keeping up with the arts and local politics from a slightly left (uhh...Rock N' Roll maybe) kind of perspective.  So I still grab them, but I don't think it's the be all and end all of coolness I thought it was when I was 13.  What I'm slowly getting at is that there was a guy named Mark Kmetzko and he wrote a review of the first Artful Dodger album.  I think Mark eventually became the senior editor or something like that at Scene, and that's cool but he was still just a guy writing record reviews so far as I know when he wrote his little 250 word review of just another band's first album.  This came out in the fall of 1975 (I had to look) and that should put me pretty firmly into something like seventh grade.  I read Kmetzko's review and I hadn't heard a single second of their music, but I went out and bought their first album immediately.

Now, I bought it immediately because I had the money right then and there and he said this was a really fantastic record.  I didn't know him from Adam, but it was important to me to use some kind of filter, like a reviewer to help guide me to buying better records than my friends did.  So I bought this.  Little did I know that it would become pretty much Cleveland's favorite album ever.  I'm not kidding.  People from here that are my age think this is about the greatest thing that EVER happened.  I'm included in that group and I have no reservations about being a big Artful Dodger fan.  Mark Kmetzko was right on the money here, and I think for years if he didn't show great enthusiasm for something, then I probably just ignored it.  Because Mark really got it right for me  on this one, and I knew then that I could count on other people to steer me right.  That opinion changed shortly thereafter, but I learned quickly what kinds of music Mark and I agreed on, and his reviews pretty much turned into gold in my pocket.  It didn't matter if he liked something or not.  He was consistent and I could use his opinion as a tool, and I wish that today I still had a guy like that I could turn to.

Now, in 1975 I was a swimmer first, and a kid that wanted to just sit and listen to records second.  Swimming was definitely number one back then whether I  liked it or not.  The one thing about swimming is that practice consists of going back and forth all night long, and man can you get songs stuck in your head perfectly when you do that.  I'd hate waterproof music devices.  It's just better to do it yourself.  I don't know how many records I owned in 1975, but it wasn't that many, so  believe me when I tell you that every song on this record was gold to me (they still are).  Even songs like Waiting Place (which kind of fades in after Think Think).  If you ask me I'll tell you that there isn't even a wrong note on this record.  I mean, it's about as perfect as it gets.  I remember one time my dad was driving us to swimming practice and It's Over came on the radio.  One of the coolest things about that song is the sound that Steve Cooper got on his bass.  He had a sound that still seems kind of acoustic to me, but it's got an electric feel that makes it seem like he's always got it really under control. Billy Paliselli sounded a little like Rod Stewart, but I didn't care.  I thought it was hard to tell a solo Rod Stewart song from a Faces song back then, but I didn't have any trouble telling Artful Dodger apart from anyone.  I'm wandering here - getting back to dad - he kept pissing me off because I wanted to hear It's Over on the radio in the car on the way to practice and really feel it so that I could take it with me in my head to the pool, and dad kept saying, "Did he say it's over, she's breaking my ORT?"

It didn't matter how much I tried to reason with him that it was "heart and certainly not ORT, because that's just stupid."  Dad just kept it up and it messed up the whole thing for me.  I probably still managed to play that song in my head up and down the pool, but I still remember just how frustrated I was with the old man for blabbing during my song.  It's weird how I remember something like a car ride to the YMCA for swimming practice.  I'm sure we did it hundreds of times.  Looking back, Paliselli really does sing "ORT" and not "heart," but that's Rock N' Roll, ya know?

For years the only way to get this was on vinyl.  If you had heard it back in Cleveland in 75 you'd have thought these guys were about as big as anyone, but as soon as you left the WMMS and M105 reaches, you didn't hear Artful Dodger at all.  Which is a shame, because songs like Wayside, It's Over and Think, Think are just the kinds of songs that could have made the charts and still maintained their cool to be played on the cooler Rock stations.    The love of Clevelanders managed to get this pressed on CD by Sony for a short time.  I just happened to walk into a store I never shopped at and just noticed the first album on CD.  When I bought it, the guy said he ordered ten of them and mine was the last one and he had sold them all in two days and already couldn't get anymore.  Mine's got some weird defect that looks strange but doesn't affect the play at all.  So I've got the CD and the record.  The record has a textured cover that's flat and not glossy, and you can tell Sony didn't have the original art and copied a vinyl cover and shrunk it down.  Between the texture and the crappy copy you can't read anything on the cover.  But just the fact that it exists at all makes a lot of people really happy.

My record is in great shape and I probably bought a new one after high school.  I think there's a click or two on side two, but it's a record and shit like that happens.  If you ever come across one of these, it's kind of considered and under the radar Power Pop classic these days.  I don't know why they call it Power Pop (I hate that term) because we just called it Rock N' Roll back then, but whatever you want to call it, this first Artful Dodger album is a terrific record.

Artful Dodger - Babes on Broadway

Artful Dodger is one of those bands that people that grew up in Cleveland in the 1970's often have ingrained in their Rock N Roll DNA. It's not a bad thing to have ingrained in your Rock DNA, either. They were a good band that just never caught a break, even with the backing of what seemed like every teenager in Cleveland, and the biggest radio station on the planet, WMMS. I guess some things end up working out, and some things don't. What's great to me, is that this band in particular sort of belongs not just to a time, but to a place. That time and that place are both long gone, but this little band from Fairfax, Virginia can kind of help you get back there if you were from there, and they were good enough that even if you weren't from that time and place, the music is pretty damned good.

Babes on Broadway isn't Artful Dodger's best album. In fact, it's probably their worst, but it's still a good record. I gave it to a girl named Sue for her fifteenth birthday, and I'd bet she doesn't have it anymore. But at the time, she seemed genuinely happy that I'd try to give her a record I liked a lot in the hopes that she'd like it. Remember when I said "every teenager in Cleveland" was into these guys? Maybe it was just some of us. But damn it if we weren't loyal! I remember a series of shows over a weekend they called the Dodger Blitz (WMMS was as subtle as a drunken bull), and Artful Dodger played Spanky's out West, The new CSU Arena downtown, and I think some bar out East, unless it was the Agora. I saw all three of those shows, and I think I still have a button. One of their other records I'll tell you about some of the things that happened that weekend.

But not right now. Right now I want to tell you that even though this wasn't the most beloved Artful Dodger album of them all, I belove it quite a bit. I gave away my copy to friend, thinking I could just go get another one, and they were out of print. Here in the Cleveland area, that meant that if you find one, you were gonna pay $25.00 for it. I remember just hoping I'd run across it at an out of town used record store for a dollar, but that never happened. All you people out of town were keeping your copies, I guess! So I saw this one at a Record Exchange on the west side, and they wanted 25 bucks for it. Back then I used to buy jewel cases from them all the time, and when they decided to get out of the vinyl business and start carrying video games, I noticed they were selling any record for a dollar. Babes On Broadway was still up on the record shelf that went around the store, and I asked the kid behind the counter if it was a buck, and he says "Yeah. You want me to get it down?"

Hell yes, I did. I had checked it out before and it was clean enough that if I had paid $25.00 for it, I wouldn't have hated myself, but for a dollar, I knew I was in all the way. I couldn't wait to get home and hear Who in the World and Can't Stop Pretending. I'm not always a big ballad guy, but Who in the World is one of the great make out songs of all time. Can't Stop Pretending was a catchy little rocker that everyone seemed to like, and the title track was just one of those songs that I couldn't understand why it wasn't the biggest thing on the planet. I still don't know. I'd be a lousy program director I guess, but Babes on Broadway is just one of those mid tempo rockers with just enough guitars and effects that it just fits right in my wheelhouse and I just completely love. Where this may not be their best album, Babes on Broadway may very well be their best song. At least to me.

And I think that's what's important about my records. They might not mean anything to you, and some of them don't mean anything to me (eventually those get tossed out), but on a rainy day like today, I was really glad I have a copy of Babes on Broadway.