Bonham - The Disregard of Timekeeping (1989)
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Given the three lousy comments that last week’s Cutouts Gone Wild! on Tall Stories got, I’m going to assume we don’t have very many aging heshers in the audience, but I don’t care — we’re sticking with the Aqua Netal for at least another week, specifically, Bonham’s 1989 debut.

Unlike most of our cutouts, The Disregard of Timekeeping sold pretty well; in fact, if I remember right, it went gold, solely on the strength of the band’s first and last crossover hit, “Wait for You” (download). The song’s video, hand to God, was even in heavy rotation on MTV.

Now, a lot of this can be attributed to the fact that the album represented the debut of the band’s drummer and namesake, Jason Bonham, but “Wait for You” isn’t such a bad song, particularly in the context of its era. It’s got a big, memorable hook, and Bob Ezrin, who produced the record (and who surely thought his career had already sunk as low as it could go the year before, when he did a Kansas album) made sure the drums were appropriately huge. The Carol-Anne-in-the-TV effect on the vocals is a nice touch, too.

In fact, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to suppose that a lot of people bought this album because of “Wait for You.” Perhaps even on cassette. And perhaps they were fifteen at the time, so you should cut them a little fucking slack.

Anyway, as you’ve certainly guessed by now, a little Bonham goes a long, long way. The band seems to be straining for New Zephood here, which makes sense, but the songs aren’t very interesting — something the group, sadly, overcompensated for by making them longer and louder. The Disregard of Timekeeping is an album every bit as bloated and pompous as its title. People of my generation might not be able to suppress a nostalgic sigh for a song that starts out with a minute of background noise (like, say, “Dreams” [download]), but that stuff was silly then and it’s silly today.

Bonham does manage to keep the songs under the five-minute mark a couple of times, but the band never loosens up, or sounds like it’s having fun — tracks like “Holding on Forever” (download) and “Bringing Me Down” (download) (which features some busy harmonica from Jimmy Z) make a lot of noise, but they never really work up a sweat, and they wear out their welcome quickly. A lot of this can be attributed to the ear-piercing cry of singer Daniel MacMaster, who makes Mike Matijevic sound like Barry White, and who presumably went on to a career as a dog whistle after the band broke up.

And break up they did, after taking three years to release their second album, 1992’s Mad Hatter — which is, by the way, better than the debut, but was launched directly into the jaws of a marketplace that no longer cared, and is also a cutout, meaning we’ll probably cover it here someday. Consider yourselves warned.

Tall Stories - Tall Stories (1991)
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I should have done this post months ago, when it was announced that Steve Augeri was leaving Journey and being replaced by Jeff Scott Soto, but what the hey — bad timing has been a major recurring theme in Augeri’s career, so I guess my tardiness fits.

Steve Augeri, for those of you who are completely baffled right now, was the lead singer of Tall Stories. He was then the lead singer of Tyketto, then an employee of The Gap, then the lead singer of Journey — arriving at each stop anywhere between one and eight years too late to be cool.

In the case of Tall Stories (and Tall Stories), it was closer to a year — the album showed up in the fall of 1991, right around the time the band’s target audience was discovering Pearl Jam. (Cue sad trumpet sound.) We’ve covered albums from this era before, and it almost always comes down to the fact that the genre was tired and the band in question wasn’t very good anyway. That applies here, to an extent — Tall Stories’ brand of AOR was strictly hair-by-numbers — but for what they were, the band was really pretty good; Tall Stories beats the pants off Winger’s In the Heart of the Young, for instance, which sold, only the year before, approximately two million copies more than it should have. Kip Winger would have given his stubble for songs like “World Inside You” (download) or “Never Enough” (download), and “Crawling Back” (download) isn’t much worse than Steelheart’s “Angel Eyes.”

The band also wrote most of its own material, which is admirable, and even if it doesn’t take a meeting of great minds to produce lines like “Throw my caution to the wind / You’re my savior, you’re my sin,” this democratic spirit at least partially mitigates the involvement, on a couple of songs, of ’80s rock plague Terry Thomas.

Of course, Augeri was probably the band’s main weapon. He apparently needed tape backups during shows toward the end of his tenure with Journey, but he sounds fine here — certainly good enough to slide into a career doing something other than folding sweaters. Poor bastard. Fortunately, post-Journey Steve seems to be avoiding retail; unfortunately, he’s apparently compiling an album of Tall Stories demos and outtakes. I have a hard time believing (in fact, I desperately reject the notion) that there’s an audience for this, but hey, it beats folding sweaters, right?

For more on Tall Stories (and Tall Stories), I turned to the Internet’s reigning AOR authority, the recently retired Kurt. Take it away, Kurt!

Kurt: 1991 was a transitional year for music, and an album like Tall Stories’ debut only proves it. It was the beginning of the end for the hair metal and AOR, thanks to a certain unwashed rocker from Seattle (and do I really need to name names?). This is one of those discs that, had it come out maybe a year or two earlier, might have sold an extra dozen or so copies (these guys weren’t exactly video-friendly:not that that explains how Asia or Yes became MTV stars, but I digress). I kid, of course:I think it had a chance at going gold, at least, because the rockers rocked and the ballads, um, did whatever ballads were supposed to do. Scott Shannon’s Pirate Radio should have been all over this; as was typical of the time, it was released straight to the cutout bins.

Tall Stories’ biggest asset was that singer Steve Augeri sounded so much like Steve Perry that initially, many thought it was Journey. [Jefito's Note: I missed the Journey connection when this came out, but this is probably because I had purged my home of anything to do with that band — even my parents' Gold & Platinum cassettes from 1983 and 1984.] Of course, the Journey boys must have heard this disc when they decided to replace Steve Perry with Steve Augeri for Arrival. Not as amusing as when Emerson, Lake & Palmer replaced Carl Palmer with Cozy Powell to keep their ELP moniker, but a Steve for a Steve almost worked until the band went and fucked it up by then replacing Steve the Second with Jeff Scott Soto.

I used to own this disc and sort of treasured it, being the AOR nut I am. But, as time wore on, the more I listened the less I liked it. It’s got ten songs and only five are any good; the other five are the sort of generic blah-ness that helped make people like Cobain and Vedder stars.

I have to admit that when songs like “Somewhere She Waits,” “Chain of Love” (download), or “Stay With Me” come up in Shuffle Mode, I do tweak that volume up a few notches, if only to feel like I’m 25 again for just a few minutes.

Corey Hart- Bang! (1990)
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To most Americans, Corey Hart is a long-forgotten relic of a distant, silly past — sort of like the keytar, only with more hair product — and although this isn’t undeserved, it’s still worth noting that he had a number of hits here throughout the ’80s, and has continued to carve out a career for himself as a songwriter into the 21st century. I haven’t heard any of these songs — and given that some of them have been recorded by Celine Dion, I certainly can’t vouch for their quality — but still, Corey Hart is doing all right for himself; I can’t imagine we’ll see him standing alongside, say, Paul Young or the reconstituted T’Pau at an ’80s revival concert anytime soon.

Having said a few nice things about Corey Hart, I will now hasten to point out that his music was never very good and has aged terribly. In terms of sound and image, Hart combined the least interesting features of Eddie Money and Billy Idol. His vocals were impassioned, yet unintelligible; his arrangements bombastic, yet hollow; his melodies soaring, yet almost completely forgettable. In his songs and videos, he presented himself as an incoherently “soulful” doofus with great hair and a heart of gold (which is why I guess we can blame him for laying the groundwork for everything the Goo Goo Dolls have released since 1998).

Hart had two big hits about nothing (”Sunglasses at Night” and “Never Surrender”) in the ’80s, but by 1990, his audience had moved on, and most of the kids who might otherwise have been interested in Bang! were buying Nelson albums. (They had better hair.) Still, leadoff track “A Little Love” (download) inexplicably managed to squeak into the Top 40. Dear God, here’s the video:

As for the rest of the album, I have no recollection of what I thought or wrote about it in 1990; I’ve listened to it three or four times in the last few days, and I can’t tell you anything about it, although I do remember “Chase the Sun” (download) sounding like it could have been an AC hit, “Diamond Cowboy” (download) being unintentionally funny, and “Icon” (download) having a one-word title.

After Bang! flopped, Hart landed at Sire for an album before moving his career north of the border; his two most recent releases, 1996’s Corey Hart and 1998’s Jade, have been distributed by Sony’s Canadian branch. According to his website, Corey’s most recent project is something called “Sunglasses at Night 2002.” I’m not listening to it, ever, and Hart himself says “In my opinion nothing will ever replace the magical innocence of the original,” but if you’re interested, it looks like you can stream it at the site.