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| In which, clouds, carpets and lazy dogs are "arena rock." |
A couple weeks ago (now pushing three weeks), I challenged myself to choose the catalog of one band from my childhood to take with me to a desert island as the only music I would hear for the rest of my life. Here are the bands in play: Styx, Journey, REO Speedwagon, Boston, and Foreigner. Now, for a little framing.
First, why did I choose those bands? Mostly, they were what passed for cool in the American Midwest circa 1980. I’ve since discovered that they passed for cool just about everywhere: even back then and before I had a working understanding of what “big” meant, I grasped that Journey, at least, was massive. Musically, they shaped my earlier understanding of what “rock ‘n’ roll” sounded like and, to some extent, what rock stars looked like. With that, we reach a pivot.
Even though I called three of these bands my personal favorite at some point in my confused little life (for the record, Foreigner, REO Speedwagon and, yes, Styx; Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” sunk a pretty deep hook too), whatever mystique stood between me and at least four of those bands evaporated as I got older and as those bands kept putting out new albums and videos. For instance, some latent instinct told me that 3/5’s of Styx looked anything but “cool” in the video for “Too Much Time on My Hands” (e.g., white pant-suit for James J. Y. Young, the purser’s uniform for drummer John Panozzo, and…just Dennis DeYoung), while Foreigner always came off as middle-aged men singing music suited for guys in their late teens, and REO Speedwagon’s Kevin Cronin knows better than anyone that he doesn’t remotely fit the mold of a rock ‘n’ roll front-man. Between those details and a pile up of fresh inputs – e.g., the immediately mockable “Mr. Roboto,” REO Speedwagon’s pun-infused video for “One Lonely Night,” or even Foreigner’s band-breaking mega-hit, “I Want to Know What Love Is” – it became clearer with each passing year that these were popular bands, and on the cutting edge of absolutely nothing. Everyone involved had real talent, but what they put out stopped meaning anything to me by 1982. (Boston gets a pass in all this because, if I remember right, I had no sense of what they looked like – and for good reason as it turns out.)
Fast forward to today – or, more accurately, to a couple months ago – the fact that I didn’t know anything about all those bands started nagging at me. Defining as all these bands were to their era – i.e., disco, punk, funk, progressive rock, even late-early stage heavy metal all existed or matured at the same time - they occupied a fucking weird space of, for lack of a better word, normal. They were rock music for the straight world…and I still somehow worried that I missed something with one or two of them. So, after starting with a far larger sample (e.g., the first pass included Loverboy, Toto, and about a dozen others), I reduced the sample size to those five bands and started listening – and reading.
My light research into all five bands (seriously, it’s just Wikipedia entries and (massive hat-tip to @morrisonicpod for reminding me they existed!) the Behind the Music features on each) turned up all kinds of surprises. The biggest of those came from how often the same kind of storylines showed up in the different bands – for instance, how many of them started without their most famous and/or revered band members, the instability of their line-ups (and, sometimes, their styles), and how much ego and brand preservation drove that instability. That said, and obviously, no band’s story runs parallel to another’s: think of overlapping circles in a Venn diagram more than anything else, and with a big circle in the middle that reads “arena rock.”
I’ve already written about all five bands in separate posts, and links to those are below. I posted them according to how far or close each band got to coming with me to that desert island, from the last band I’d take to the first one. With that, here are the results and links to each of the earlier posts:
Foreigner, aka, Mick Jones’ Control Issues
First, why did I choose those bands? Mostly, they were what passed for cool in the American Midwest circa 1980. I’ve since discovered that they passed for cool just about everywhere: even back then and before I had a working understanding of what “big” meant, I grasped that Journey, at least, was massive. Musically, they shaped my earlier understanding of what “rock ‘n’ roll” sounded like and, to some extent, what rock stars looked like. With that, we reach a pivot.
Even though I called three of these bands my personal favorite at some point in my confused little life (for the record, Foreigner, REO Speedwagon and, yes, Styx; Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” sunk a pretty deep hook too), whatever mystique stood between me and at least four of those bands evaporated as I got older and as those bands kept putting out new albums and videos. For instance, some latent instinct told me that 3/5’s of Styx looked anything but “cool” in the video for “Too Much Time on My Hands” (e.g., white pant-suit for James J. Y. Young, the purser’s uniform for drummer John Panozzo, and…just Dennis DeYoung), while Foreigner always came off as middle-aged men singing music suited for guys in their late teens, and REO Speedwagon’s Kevin Cronin knows better than anyone that he doesn’t remotely fit the mold of a rock ‘n’ roll front-man. Between those details and a pile up of fresh inputs – e.g., the immediately mockable “Mr. Roboto,” REO Speedwagon’s pun-infused video for “One Lonely Night,” or even Foreigner’s band-breaking mega-hit, “I Want to Know What Love Is” – it became clearer with each passing year that these were popular bands, and on the cutting edge of absolutely nothing. Everyone involved had real talent, but what they put out stopped meaning anything to me by 1982. (Boston gets a pass in all this because, if I remember right, I had no sense of what they looked like – and for good reason as it turns out.)
Fast forward to today – or, more accurately, to a couple months ago – the fact that I didn’t know anything about all those bands started nagging at me. Defining as all these bands were to their era – i.e., disco, punk, funk, progressive rock, even late-early stage heavy metal all existed or matured at the same time - they occupied a fucking weird space of, for lack of a better word, normal. They were rock music for the straight world…and I still somehow worried that I missed something with one or two of them. So, after starting with a far larger sample (e.g., the first pass included Loverboy, Toto, and about a dozen others), I reduced the sample size to those five bands and started listening – and reading.
My light research into all five bands (seriously, it’s just Wikipedia entries and (massive hat-tip to @morrisonicpod for reminding me they existed!) the Behind the Music features on each) turned up all kinds of surprises. The biggest of those came from how often the same kind of storylines showed up in the different bands – for instance, how many of them started without their most famous and/or revered band members, the instability of their line-ups (and, sometimes, their styles), and how much ego and brand preservation drove that instability. That said, and obviously, no band’s story runs parallel to another’s: think of overlapping circles in a Venn diagram more than anything else, and with a big circle in the middle that reads “arena rock.”
I’ve already written about all five bands in separate posts, and links to those are below. I posted them according to how far or close each band got to coming with me to that desert island, from the last band I’d take to the first one. With that, here are the results and links to each of the earlier posts:
Foreigner, aka, Mick Jones’ Control Issues
Boston, The One-Man Act
Styx, I, Too, Blame Dennis DeYoung
Journey, aka, the Panic Attacks of Steve Perry
REO Speedwagon, Champaign, IL’s Party Boy(s)
One final note:
further/continued listening and attempting to create a “Dad Rock Top 20”
revealed that Styx belongs in last place. As it turns out, I’m partial to a
couple Foreigner ballads, while even the stuff I used to like about Styx rubs
me the wrong way.
