Speaking of Stevie . . . he came out with a new one round this time, "Send One Your Love," the only major hit from his Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants album. It would be the beginning of his music becoming more - well, synthetic.
"Babe" is not a favorite but I can stand to hear it from time to time. I love the chorus but I agree that DeYoung's "ready for Broadway" voice overpowers the track.
I put "Babe" in the arena band road angst category - gee, it's hard touring the country in a big party bus, miss ya, sweetheart. Even as a 13-year-old, I had a hard time identifying with such a problem...or even terming it a problem at all.
No More Tears (Enough is Enough) ... or, as I call it, the Johnson's Baby Shampoo song. I remember when this one came out; it was played a LOT on the radio. Like many of Barbra's songs, it seems to have disappeared from the airwaves. Barbra was going through a phase of superstar pairings with no small amount of success (Paul McCartney would pull the same stunt in a few years time). Of course there was You Don't Bring Me Flowers, her #1 with Mr. Diamond that we talked about previously, but there also is another one we'll be getting to shortly featuring a rather higher pitched duet partner. Donna Summer pairing with Barbra Streisand reminds me of that classic commercial where the guy walking down the street eating our of a jar of peanut butter (who does that by the way?) bumps into a guy eating a chocolate bar. The two foods mix, and they huff angrily 'You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!' 'Well, you got your peanut butter on my chocolate!' But then it turns out to be rather tasty. This song? You got your Streisand in my Summer! And yet, surprisingly, it turns out tasty! My mom was a big Streisand fan at the time, and I was into Donna Summer, so this was a perfect match as far as we were concerned. I like the song, although listening to it now, it does get a bit monotonous in the disco portion. The first part is OK, and it nicely gives Donna a chance to do something a bit different, but I always get impatient for the endless note that triggers the dance portion. That's the real meat of this sandwich, even if it drags on a tad too long.
I notice some of you have expressed an intense dislike of high-pitched male voices throughout this thread. Is it because you guys cannot hit those kinds of notes, or do you associate it with females? I just don't understand the hatred.
I can tell you exactly why. Because when some men reach that high for notes, many times is sounds forced and shrill. There's a brittle edge to these singers' voices. Other men, however... sound fabulous hitting those high notes, such as Freddie Mercury. With Barry Gibb... I LOVE that breathy downright effeminate half voice he would use, but the screaming falsetto... just NO. Rick Perry, De Young, et al... just lack nuance and sensitivity, and couple that with a high voice, you get ca-ca. Other male rock vocalists that possess a high voice, but know how to use it in an enjoyable way, I'd point to Marty Balin and Burton Cummings.
For me, I like lots of high male voices like Rob Halford, Jon Anderson, Brad Delp, Freddie Mercury, and Prince (when he does his falsetto, which was a lot in the early years). I don't like Dennis DeYoung's because, as someone else here put it, he doesn't seem to have a lot of nuance to his voice. It's kind of robotic, technically on pitch but with no genuine emotion. But with Styx, to me the bigger problem is just their lack of songs I like, other than out and out rockers like "Renegade" and maybe "Blue Collar Man."
A song I can easily go without ever hearing again, actually anything by Styx falls into this category.
Well, aside from most on this forum you are in good company. They were unbelievably popular, and really, the album with Babe on it (Grand Illusion?) isn’t bad. It just hasn’t aged well at all imo.
Even though, at the time, I was down on mainstream rock, I did enjoy the “Back to the Egg” LP quite a bit. It’s a bit of a mess, and I never understood the “concept” of the album. But it rocks far more than any McCartney album until Run Devil Run. “Getting Closer;” “Arrow Thru Me;” “Old Siam, Sir;” “Winter Rose;” “So Glad to See You Here;” and Denny Laine’s “Again and Again and Again” - good tunes.
I don't hate 'em, but I think they're cheezy as hell. Cheezier than ELO (who I loved, and still like - an upcoming ELO album was my fave in the world for awhile as a kid, and hearing it as an adult I think it holds up incredibly well and is way smarter than I gave it credit for as a 20-40 something). Styx is also far more annoying, and not as smart. Also, more than occasionally pretentious and even ponderous, which I don't think ELO ever were, even with their classical affectations. I like a lot of Styx songs. I laugh at "Come Sail Away", but it's as catchy as it is silly, and the synth break is epic '70s cheeze and I love it. It's all that and more. Much, much more. They're annoying. Especially at high volumes, which rock tends to be played at. I could handle the Bee Gees, although the falsetto harmonies on some of Spirits Having Flown are over the top and annoying even to a fan like me, but this other stuff? Awful. And I think the bigger problem was it was omnipresent on the radio. You could not escape the screeching. I was just a kid and way more accepting of everything musical before 1980, but by 1981 I was definitely getting sick of some of this ****. I don't think I consciously realized why. When Air Supply broke I was down with their big debut hit, but then immediately turned on them and that screeching and all of the other screeching white guys bands. Just over that whole entire sound - pompous overblown vaguely proggy but now light rock cheeze with screaming male vocalists who sounded like their balls were being clamped in a vise. No. No. Hell no. STFU. Commercially, that whole screamin', screechin' choir from hell went from nuclear hot to liquid helium cold in a matter of months. They were cool, multi platinum selling and seemed like they'd be around forever, and then - like disco - over the course of about a year they became pure commercial poison. I don't think they spawned too many #1 singles (they were all over the radio but were more album acts and AOR acts) so we may not really get to them again in this thread (especially once they're on the decline commercially), but hopefully if they crop up again we can revisit and look at their past vs. future commercial success. You'll see a massive dropoff in this whole subgenre right around the time MTV hijacks the airwaves - it's pretty dramatic. It seems like a lot of people had the same reaction I did - when they got sick of this ****, they got good and sick of it. Yeah, Balin did it and I never found him annoying. Then again, he typically wasn't screeching over oceans of bombastic, prog-tinged hard rock (at least not on any singles). He also vanished for good around the same time as his helium-voiced peers, though.
I liked "This Is It". The arrangement and playing on this one is stunning. Are the guys from Toto playing on this one? Because it's crazy tight and that intro is truly inspired. Also, Michael McDonald is on it. If Toto is on it as well this would be like a Yacht Rock singularity.
Yes, it came out in November of '79, and I remember hearing it on the countdown - it got to #4. Love this one, beautiful song. Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants is a truly bizarre record. It's Stevie's Tusk. I finally picked up a copy a few years ago - I had a friend in the early '90s who told me I'd love it - and it definitely clicked with me. Critics and audiences didn't know what to make of it. It's a little pop, a little world music, a little New Age (before that was even a term). Bits of it sound like old Vangelis. Definitely a preview of things to come, although not necessarily on the mainstream pop charts. Stevie was certainly ahead of the curve adopting samplers - we'd be hearing a lot more from those gadgets starting the next year or two.
I have no particular love for "This Is It" by Kenny Loggins, probably do not own a copy, and haven't ever played it if I do, and I haven't listened to AC radio very much in over twenty years. YET, this song pops into my head as an earworm, unannounced and unwelcome, with great regularity.
It most certainly was a bizarre record. Not necessarily bad though, one of Stevie's best albums came out the following year.
Since the year is almost out, here is some of my favorite singles we didn't really talk about (if we did I apologize) that didn't make # 1 or even maybe Top 40 in some instances. Foreigner- Head Games #14 AC/DC- Highway To Hell #47 Kiss- Sure Know Something #47 The Who- 5:15 #45 Elton John- Mama Can't Buy You Love # 9 Bob Dylan- Gotta Serve Somebody #24 Sister Sledge- Got To Love Somebody #64 Neily Young- Hey Hey My My #79 Muppets- Rainbow Connection #25 Rickie Lee Jones- Chuck E's In Love #4 Hall & Oates- Wait For Me #18
Won't say anymore about that particular phase of Dylan's career, except here he seemed to go out of his way to sound vocally like Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler.
Babe (uh, sorry, wrong Babe...) I was aware of Styx at the time Babe came out, and liked Come Sail Away and (especially) Renegade. But I didn't like them enough to buy anything by them. What changed that for me was when Roboto came out a few years later. At that point I snapped up that stupid concept album (did the story actually make sense? If it did, I'm not sure I got the point) as well as several of their past records. I never considered Styx cool, and I don't think anyone I knew did, either, even in an ironic 'so bad they're good' sense. We considered Tommy Shaw to be the Davy Jones of the seventies/eighties (worse dancer, better guitarist than Mr. Jones), and Dennis DeYoung always seemed like the Bill Shatner of prog rock. I sooner admitted loving the Archies than Styx at the time. And yet, and yet... I can't deny that I played Kilroy to death, and Grand Illusion as well (I can't actually recall the third album of theirs I owned, that's how rarely I have played it since 1982). What might have snapped me out of my spell was when DeYoung tried to go solo and released that horrible song Desert Moon. MTV played it over and over, and it was so unapologetically cheesy that I found it hard to forgive him for it. BUT, now back to Babe. I actually think it's a decent ballad. The reason I like it is that it seems to go somewhere, unlike the tripe Lionel R was dishing out contemporaneously. It even rocks a little (OK, very little). It was never one of my favorite songs of theirs, but I would take it over anything Christopher Cross ever did any time (but not over Bang Shang a Lang... hey, you gotta have standards!). Secret confession: a girl I had a massive crush on in high school was a big Styx fan, which just might have contributed to my liking them.
Excellent song! It's one of my favorite Foreigner songs, and the only really good song on the album. I like this one a lot more than "I Was Made For Loving You". He got a lot of mainstream media attention with this song. Then he would later abandon christianity and go to something else. I think you've jumped the gun on this a bit. White wimmin doing jazzy pop was a new thing. Mellow rock, easy listening, adult contemporary, whatever you call it, was still the trend in 1979, and I loved it. Kenny Loggins is part of that. Well, Loggins ain't no woman!
Amazing this wasn't even a Top 40 single. It's still getting referenced by other artists to this day (Lana Del Rey on 2017's Lust For Life), was famously quoted in Kurt Cobain's suicide note, and is probably one of Young's 2 or 3 best-known solo cuts by contemporary audiences. I have friends - most of them children of the '80s and '90s that first encountered the song on VHS - who love this one. I have only the barest memory of it from the time. Loved this one. Was sure she'd be a huge star, but this was pretty much it for Jones on the pop charts.
