The Runaways - Queens of Noise

OK, I know The Runaways are a terrible joke foisted upon us by the evil Kim Fowley in order for Kim to make money and be famous. I really don't care. I never did care. I just thought they were cool. They're one of those bands that I tried to follow when I was a kid, but you couldn't just go get their albums. It's not like every record store just had them. They didn't get any airplay, when they came to town they played small places like The Agora, which meant 18 and over, and I wasn't old enough to drive so I couldn't even find a record store that had their records. So I found this at a record show many years later. I used to have the cd, but I got rid of it (and the first one) to get myself to put more effort into having them on vinyl. I found a really nice copy with just a couple of pops in Neon Angels on the Road to Ruin last weekend at a record show, so I'm pretty damned happy.

When The Runaways came out they were just a few years older than me. They looked like girls I knew (for the most part - Cherie dressed a little less than girls I knew), and they played loud Rock N Roll with big guitars and songs about partying and doing things you weren't supposed to do. I still love those things. I generally do what I'm supposed to, but at this point it's because that's what I want to do, not what someone else expects me to do. So I still love the attitude on this record.

I really like that Joan Jett did so many of the vocals. I like Cherie's voice, but Joan really has a great voice for this kind of music. I've always felt that I Love Playin' With Fire was their best song, and I still think it holds up as a great song on its own. I've never seen Joan Jett live, but I hope she still plays this. Lita Ford adds a nice crunch and even though it's a little rough around the edges, I just can't get enough of it.

Speaking of Lita Ford, I like how the album closes, with Johnny Guitar and just Lita blasting away on her own for a minute or two. No one would mistake her for Jeff Beck, but I think it's a pretty memorable solo and it's obvious that the girl had talent. Maybe not the skills yet, but she definitely had talent. I never cared for her solo career, but I'm really glad she made it big on her own because she deserved it. They all deserved it. They got zero respect because of Kim Fowley, but they also got all their attention because of Kim Fowley (at least at the beginning).

I mean, in 1977 Fleetwood Mac's Rumours was definitely the 800 lb. gorilla of the charts, but as much as I still like it (really), it's pretty tame. Especially compared to the other side of 1977's coin, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. I've already said that changed everything for me, and it did. But somewhere between those two massively influential albums, this little record came out. The initial shock factor was gone, and they needed to come up with the songs to back up their look, and I think they did. Neon Angels on the Road to Ruin is kind of a classic Runaways song, and Take It Or Leave It is pretty groundbreaking in that Joan's lyrics about a one night stand aren't like most women of the era would sing. She's the one laying down the law about the whole thing just being a one nighter for her, instead of the usual lament for a guy using a poor girl that was pretty much the accepted form in the 70's. I mean, was Joan loose or something?

But I think that's the whole point of The Runaways. They didn't want to be one of the boys, or treated like the boys. They wanted to be girls (young women, I suppose), and they just wanted to be treated with respect. They mostly got treated like crap, but I'm glad that so many of them managed to make successful careers, often in music. I think that The Runaways are a pretty strong common thread between The Bangles, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and Lita Ford. Their success outside of The Runaways was massive, because they had talent and vision. It's a shame so few people had the vision to see the talent when it was so young and raw. Bravo ladies, what a kick ass album you left us!

Leon Russell - Carney

I think this is one of those albums everyone should own. I'm sure these days a lot of people have only heard George Benson's version of This Masquerade, but Leon Russell wrote it, and he released it on this album a few years before George did. If you have read a few of my posts so far, you may be wondering, "What the hell is he talking about This Masquerade for?" and I'd say that's a legitimate question. It doesn't have screaming guitars, an extra bucket of fuzz, and it's certainly not a fun song. That's like the three things I kind of look for and this song has absolutely none of the above.

Which I'd like to say shows that I have wide and varied tastes, but I really don't. I just like how how utterly hopeless this song seems to be. I mean, I don't like it, but Leon certainly leaves it all on the table here. It just seems like when he finished singing it he knew the next thing he was doing was going home and ending a relationship that seemed like it was good most of the time. Maybe that's why it takes almost a minute and a half to really get started, but once it does it's just about the saddest song of all the sad songs. Mine is a used copy (I believe it's the second pressing, with yellow labels for you nerds keeping score) and it took awhile to find a cover that looks suitably used for my blog post. My cover is a little nicer, but I wouldn't trade my copy for the world because I like the clicks and pops on this song. They just seem to fit and make the whole thing seem so much more hopeless.

The whole record isn't a total downer. In fact, it starts off with Tightrope, which has always seemed to me to be the kind of song that's kind of a relationship song, but there's more Leon in the song than his partner, so it doesn't seem so serious. Maybe it's the weird, bouncy piano, but nothing seems fatalistic here. It kind of seems like the kind of thing Tom Waits would be able to do well. Keeping things a little lighter is Roller Derby, about the Queen of the Roller Derby. I love Roller Derby. I think it's one of the coolest things ever, and you can't say anything bad about it. Maybe you can say you don't know how they score, but I do, and it's certainly less complicated than baseball. And singing about Roller Derby in 1972, when I was 11, just means that you were tapped into my Saturday morning world, and how could I not "get" this song?

I kind of worried a bit when I put this on last night to listen to it for this article and side one started off with ocean noises, but Leon gets right to the songs and then kind of gets to the weird for the rest of the ride. That's a good description for this album. It's weird. Leon looks weird on the cover, the Rolls Royce pulling the little pull behind trailer on the back is weird and the recurring carnival organs are weird. I like it.

The Slickee Boys - Uh Oh...No Breaks!

OK, so one look at this and you can tell The Slickee Boys are a deadly serious band. You know how serious they are because of song titles like The Brain That Refused to Die and Jailbait Janet. You know Bob Dylan wishes he had come up with a line like, Jailbait Janet, she's the best girl on the planet. It's too bad for Bob, people may have been able to get behind him if he had. Well, maybe not, but I'll be damned if The Slickee Boys aren't at least a hell of a lot of fun!

I found this at Music Saves, probably last year or early this year. I knew that these guys were an 80's band, and with the hilarious song titles and their sort of mid 80's Rockabilly-ish garb, I figured this had to be a winner. I was so right, too. Almost my whole life I've just bought albums because they looked cool to me, and the Jr. High comic book feel of this just appealed to me. I figured it had to have at the bare minimum a great sense of humor behind it, and it really does. If I had had cable back in the early 80's I'd have probably seen a Slickee Boys video, but I didn't, so I had to kind of go by memory of old college radio shows. I was sure I'd heard them and then when I put this on and the big riff from Disconnected kicked in, I remembered right away.

Man, there used to be some really great college radio shows in Cleveland. I bet Wainstead All Night played this once in awhile. You never knew what you would hear him play. Police blotters, hardcore punk, Zappa, goofy shit. Just the kind of place for a band like The Slickee Boys to fit in. I'm gonna go listen to Dream Lovers again. Did you know dream lovers live in a dream? They do. Just ask The Slickee Boys.

The Who - Quadrophenia

I have an internet friend (whom I've met in person) that will post "Quadrophenia blows doors!" on message boards and other such places every now and then. I suppose you can take it any way you like, but I'm pretty sure he means it kicks ass and blows the doors off the house when you do it right. I always used to pick it up at the record store, and I never bought it because I had heard it at an older friend's house, and reading the track listing in the store always makes it look like this could easily be a single record.

I suppose that line of thinking isn't too far off, but awhile back I found a really nice copy, but not with the booklet, it's a later MCA copy with blue rainbow labels, but it's a gatefold cover. The records are nice and shiny and flat and if I recall correctly it was less than five bucks. That's a hell of a deal, if you ask me.

I always thought it was kind of funny that when Jimmy goes to the concert in the album, he hears The Who playing The Kids Are Alright, which to my ears is better than anything on this album. But I'm not going to go so far as to say this album isn't really good, because it is a really good album. I just have to be in the mood for it, because there are a few things I can find irritating about it. The first thing is that this is one of those double albums where one record is sides one and four, and the other record is sided two and three. I've had a turntable that only plays one record at a time since I was in high school, so this kind of layout means I have to get both records out of their sleeves twice to listen to the whole thing. It just bugs me.

The contents of the records is generally awesome, but after the first listen or two, I really don't need the ocean sounds, and Love, Reign O'er Me tends to show up in little snippets too often for me. I also tend to think that the whole Rock Opera thing adds some cachet that's supposed to make me feel like I'm listening to something that's much more as a whole entity than it is when I'm listening to the individual parts of it. Pete Townshend is a true legend in the land of Rock N' Roll, deservedly so, but Pete's not one of his generation's Great Thinkers. Sometimes, when he's working on his Great Thoughts, I squirm a little. The story behind the Opera here could literally be told in a single song.

But if you discount all that (Pete's not the one that said he was a genius, it was Rock critics that said it), and just listen to the music, it really works a lot more than it doesn't. The record starts off with ocean noises and a brief look at the music that's to come (no great shakes to me), but then The Real Me fires up, and Pete just has that tone, and John Entwistle and Keith Moon just have that groove and you know there's something special even before Roger Daltrey almost steals the whole show. The song starts strong, and just builds a momentum that helps Cut My Hair and The Punk and the Godfather be better than they'd be on a side without The Real Me.

But then I have to put my record away and get out my other one so I can listen to side two. And side two is mostly disappointing. It goes a long time before it gets good, and it never really gets great. At least for side three I can just flip the record over. And side three is kicked off by 5.15, which is the best song on the album, but then at the end there's more ocean noises and Sea and Sand starts off promising but kind of bums out the high of 5.15. Drowned saves the day, though. It's everything The Who does right, and maybe that no one else ever really even seems to have figured out. You hear people saying a band "did a Stones song," or "rewrote a Beatles song," and even "had the garage feel of early Kinks," but no one seems to quite capture The Who at their best.

Side four is just epic, though. I wouldn't change a thing. It's huge in its approach and in its sound. It touches a little too much on Love Reign O'er Me, but we also finally hear that song as a whole, and it's one of the absolute best songs to ever close an album out with. Dr. Jimmy has always been one of my favorite Roger Daltrey performances, and that's saying something.

Could it be a single album? Probably. But it's fun to listen to the whole thing once in awhile. Side four may be the best side of music The Who ever made, so I think it's probably the kind of record everyone should own. I'm glad I grabbed it. It really does blow doors.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Damn the Torpedoes

I'm not a huge Tom Petty fan, but this is a hell of an album. You never had to buy it back in 79 when it came out, because they literally played every song on it, all the time, for a year. That says a lot. I know, some of you are saying, "They played all of Frampton Comes Alive, too" but that's different just cuz I says so. Damn the Torpedoes is the record that fully established Petty as a Big Star in a Big Way. It may seem like he was all over the place in the late 70's in retrospect, but his first album had a couple of pretty popular AOR songs on it, and then You're Gonna Get It! had a completely forgettable first side, but a second side that was really something. On Damn the Torpedoes it all gelled together into a complete album that just grabbed the whole country's attention and didn't let go.

They played this on all the AOR stations (like WMMS and WWWM here in Cleveland), and they also played at least four songs on the Top 40 stations. Which kind of took Tom "away" from his teenage fan base and spread him out to everyone, but songs like Century City, Shadow of a Doubt and Louisiana Rain were so good that even the over saturation of the hits on this record could still get it played at parties with no complaints.

I can still remember my friend singing Here Comes My Girl, and I swear, he always cranked it way up and just belted out the line "I can tell the whole wide world, shove it!"

Man were we rebellious. But I know I felt the same way he did back then, though I have to admit I always liked Even the Losers the best. Just the opening lines made me a fan, and while I said I'm not a huge fan, that song is so good that I'll always give Tom the benefit of the doubt and see what he's up to. He's never grabbed my attention like he did with this album, but it's just so good that maybe I just can't get past some of his filler like I used to be able to.

I know I also said you didn't have to buy this one, and I meant it. If you want to hear Century City these days though, you'll probably need to get a copy. The used record stores always have a copy or two, but finding one that isn't partied out is the hard part. I think I found mine in a rummage sale for pocket change, and I may have got one from the kid that didn't like Tom Petty in 1979. So I appreciate that kid never playing this so I can enjoy it now!

Suzi Quatro

This album kills. It really does. For some reason, quite possibly because when I was a lot younger my biggest rock n' roll musical guides seemed to be older sisters of friends, I have a pretty good selection of records by and/or featuring women. Suzi is one of my favorites from way back when I was just a little kid. I mean Masonic Summer Camp, 12 and 13 year olds at their first dances kind of kid. That was a good summer! I'm pretty sure 48 Crash and Fancy's Wild Thing were my idea of the greatest things ever recorded back then. I had this album at some point in my youth, but it disappeared.

But the great thing about flea markets is that sometimes you can find a guy selling a pristine copy of Suzi's first album for around thirty cents. That was a few years back these days, but it was a pretty good day, too. I forgot how much my mom disliked the cover of this one. Look at that dude drinking a beer with his hand in his pants! What a reprobate! The other two guys looked obviously high and that girl couldn't be anything but trouble. I still think it's a great cover, and I even like that it's textured. It was probably a pretty expensive cover for Bell Records.

The music is all slashing guitars and sex. I'm pretty sure I hardly played this one when my parents were around. I think All Shook Up was okay, because it got some airplay, I think. So my parents could live with that because they had heard it. Primitive Love was another story. I knew that was a non starter in the living room the minute I heard it. I bet this is one of the first albums that lit a fire in me to get a stereo for my room.

I was pretty surprised to see that this was like a top 150 album in the US. I really thought 48 Crash and All Shook Up got a lot of airplay. Maybe they did around Cleveland and just not as much in other places, but I can remember turning 48 Crash up every time I heard it on the radio (I'll come clean - I still do). I thought All Shook Up was a top 10 kind of hit, because I heard that one all the time. But the Internets don't seem to back up my memory on those.

My favorite songs are still Skin Tight Skin and Can the Can. Skin Tight Skin is just one of the great late night/early morning songs. I remember playing it really quietly before going out to do my paper route so I'd have it in my head. Back then portable music wasn't nearly what it is today. You pretty much had to play what you wanted right before you left so it would stick in your head real good. I could get that one stuck in there real good. Can the Can was another one that I could get stuck in my head, but it's kind of similar to 48 Crash so I'd get them mixed up.

So I suppose this one sounds like a nostalgia trip for me, but it's really not. I guess it's just the kind of simple, straight to the point rock that still really appeals to me. I liked that bit in The Runaways movie where the vampire girl that plays Joan Jett gushes about "Suzi Fuckin' Quatro!" and I think if anyone from 1974 deserves to be remembered for kicking ass and taking names, it's Suzi Quatro and her reprobate band. I could listen to Len Tuckey strangle his guitar on Shakin' All Over every day.

Iron City Houserockers - Love's So Tough

I've got a promo copy of this record. I would bet just about everyone outside of Pittsburgh has only ever seen a promo copy of this. I actually ran across it in a Half Price Books recently and they wanted $8.00 for it. No way! It's a decent enough late 70's blast of midwestern Rawk, it's not super collectible or anything. You can find them at record shows for two or three bucks all the time. I must have liked mine at the time, because it's a little noisy here and there, but I'm gonna stick with it.

The Houserocker with the biggest claim to fame is Joe Grushecky. He's still out there plugging away in Pittsburgh and I know a guy that still goes to see him. The drummer was Art Nardini, and I'm sure his brother was Norman, he of the Tigers. When push comes to shove, my being a Clevelander probably means I should like my local guys better than these guys, but that's just silly. I have more Iron City Houserockers albums than I do Michael Stanley Band albums, for good reason.

That good reason is that while these guys can be a little heavy handed and plodding, when they're good, they're a lean and tight Rock N' Roll band. The band was managed by Cleveland International, so that means Steve Popovich, and I have to say that I'm surprised how dense this record sounds. It's not like these guys were studio pro's, but Popovich always seemed to know what he was doing. So my bitch about this album is pretty much related to sound. These guys were obviously a bar band, and this record quite solidly reinforces that. The production has no subtlety whatsoever, and the piano and harmonica could have used a little more air around them so they could shine a little more.

But that may have been part of the style of that midwestern sound back then. If there's anything that's similar I'd think it's the Pub Rock scene of which I'm so fond of. The bands in both scenes are singing about things that really happen to real people and the biggest difference seems to be that the midwestern scene had this huge specter of Bruce Springsteen hanging over them. Fortunately, The Iron City Houserockers played up their guitars more than Springsteen did. If you like guitars, there's plenty of them on this album, and the production favors them over all else.

The songs hold up pretty well, even after all these years. Maybe it's because they weren't shooting for that arena sound (except maybe on Hideaway, which is still pretty good), and they generally kept the arrangements the same as they probably sounded at the bars around Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Youngstown four nights a week. I've really got to hand it to them on Turn It Up. It's a quintessential midwestern blues rocker, carrying all the heavy lyrical weight of turning up the rock n' roll and forgetting about your boss for awhile. It's also the best recorded song on the record.

I think it's funny that these days it's like this music never happened (sometimes). But it was there, and it was fun. A lot of people that listened to this kind of stuff liked Punk, but might just as easily be found at a blues festival the next weekend. It was a funny music scene around here then, and people seemed to pride themselves in being eclectic (though how eclectic are you really when you listen to guitar based rock n' roll?). It's too bad more people never got a chance to hear these guys, because their next album was terrific.