There’s never been a musical trend that Cher has been afraid to jump upon.  From watered down hippie-dippy love songs to disco to adult contemporary schlock, the Dark Lady has matched only maybe Bowie in appropriating the current musical climate for her own campy needs.  And New Wave was no exception.

Cher’s flirtation with New Wave started as the ’80s blossomed - she had just released a second, much less successful follow-up to Take Me Home, and the Casablanca disco sound she was currently trading in was on the wane.  Enter Black Rose, a “punk” band that featured Cher on vocals and her then-current boyfriend on guitar.  The idea was that Black Rose was a real band, not a vanity project, so Cher’s image was purposely left off the front album cover art and the press materials downplayed her presence.  The result was a universally ignored album and Black Rose soon withered and died.

Flash forward two years later - Cher signed to Columbia Records for a one-album deal and was teamed with a group of hot writers to record her pop comeback, 1982’s I Paralyze.  Paired with Olivia Newton-John songwriter/producer John Farrar, who was on fire with a streak of hits for John that appropriated New Wave’s synths and drum machines, Cher released the title track (download) as the lead single.  Sounding like an outtake from Physical, “I Paralyze” had all the makings of a sure-fire hit.  However, the single suffered from scant promotion - no video was shot and Cher only made dulsatory appearances on “Solid Gold” and a rapidly aging “American Bandstand” to market it.

Cher’s then-diminished standings in the pop world and the weak promo push resulted in a non-charting lead-off single, not a good sign for the I Paralyze album as a whole.  While most of the world couldn’t hum a bar of the song, it remains a favorite of diva - she even mentions it in her VH1 “Behind the Music” episode as a song she loves and would like to re-record someday. (more…)

Last week I talked about “the Shrink,” the guy at the record show who thinks he knows everything about every artist that ever recorded. This week we move on to another one of my favorite characters: Mr. Random.

Mr. Random is the dude who comes into the twice-a-year record show with thousands of records in milk crates all around the floor and gets pissed off when the records aren’t in alphabetical order. I don’t expect everyone to be a hardcore collector like me, but it still makes me laugh when I see people get angry at randomness. Mr. Random was probably in his mid-40s or so and came in with his wife and two children. He immediately asked the seller, “Are these in any sort of order?” The seller told him that they were by genre only and that he was in the rock and pop section, with country, jazz, easy listening, etc., over on the far wall. After the seller walked away, Mr. Random started loudly complaining to his family: “How does he think anyone will buy any records if they aren’t in order?” Then he started flipping through the crates, you know, like ten records at a time, kind of looking in their general direction and feigning a bit of interest before walking away seemingly disgusted.

I really just wanted to answer his rhetorical question to his wife. “Who’s going to buy them? Well, pretty much everyone who comes here, sir, since you are clearly the only one that just stumbled across this record show. The rest of us are here because of the show, and I’m sure all of us don’t mind not having anything in order, and in fact most of us enjoy the fact that they are random because that’s part of the fun of the search.”

And yes, I completely realize that I sound like a record-show snob at this point, but I’m really not. Ninety-nine percent of the people that were at the record show were totally cool and, really, I couldn’t have cared less what they were doing or buying, but it’s the 1 percent that make for a good story.

NEW MUSIC FOR THE COLLECTION:
David Hasselhoff, Lonely Is the Night
Atlantic Starr, Brilliance
Jethro Tull, Under Wraps
Jethro Tull, Rock Island

More “C” artists to come as we try to keep up with the quality of last week’s songs with 20 more from the bottom of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the ’80s.

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Pete: Haven’t thought about old Spacehog since, well, 1996. But this song did age well.

Jeff: I can’t believe these guys opened for Pearl Jam. Their moment in the sun was sadly brief — that hourglass in the beginning of the video is pretty appropriate — but I guess you don’t need to be too worried about record sales when you’re Liv Tyler’s husband.

Robert: Why, because of her two dads’ cash? ‘Cause she’s not really that big of a movie star. By the by, my pitch for a new version of the ’80s sitcom My Two Dads, starring Steven Tyler and Todd Rundgren as themselves, never made it to the small screen. I was just as surprised as all of you must be right now.

Spacehog’s Royston Langdon played on the Lemonheads’ 1996 album Car Button Cloth and Evan Dando’s 2003 solo album Baby I’m Bored. In 1994 Dando and Tyler played boyfriend and girlfriend in the movie Heavy when she was only 16 or 17. They had at least one make-out scene. Do you think Royston and Evan ever talk about that? If I’m ever in the same room with them and Liv, I’ll be sure to bring it up.

Dunphy: Not an auspicious beginning here — I had no idea what this song was or who did it. Matter of fact, upon reading, the only thing I recalled was Monster Magnet doing “Space … lord … mutha-mutha!!” But “In the Meantime” isn’t that bad. Pretty enjoyable, actually, even if the lead singer looks like Hyde from That ’70s Show.

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During my years on the ‘net, I’ve been a member of various E-mail lists and participated in countless discussion forums, and if there’s one recurring theme that never fails to rankle me, it’s when people so emphatically hold up an artist’s early work as the gold standard of their career that they refuse to acknowledge their later albums as being anything other than complete and total dogshit.

There’s a statistical likelihood that most of these people will fall into one of two categories: Elitist Dickheads or Old Fogies. The Old Fogies at least have the excuse of having been around since Day One of the artist’s career, and having been there when the early work was actually released, you can understand why they’re particularly partial to it; the Elitist Dickheads, however, tend to pay attention to the more pretentious music critics – many of whom happen to be Old Fogies – and presume the artist’s later work is crap not because they’ve actually heard it but, rather, because their favorite Music Bible tells them so.

Man, I hate that.

Maybe I’m just overly sensitive about this because I discovered the Beatles in the early 1980s. If this comment doesn’t provide you with a sufficient explanation for my sensitivity, consider this: any music geek worth his or her salt who’s in the midst of falling head over heels in love with a band is going to seek out solo efforts by the various members of that band. This means that, as a result of the time frame of my discovery, I ended up starting my solo Beatles collection with…

• Paul McCartney, Give My Regards to Broad Street
• George Harrison, Gone Troppo
• Ringo Starr, Stop and Smell the Roses

Don’t worry, I have neither the time nor the energy to sit here and attempt to compose a valid argument that those albums are the best that those guys’ careers have had to offer … mostly because they aren’t. (At ALL.) I’m just saying that it’s easier to find something enjoyable about Gone Troppo when you’ve never heard All Things Must Pass…and even once you finally have heard All Things Must Pass, you don’t necessarily abandon the things you liked about Gone Troppo.

Okay, enough back story. Where was I going with this? Oh, right: I was going to defend the most recent — and possibly final — Prefab Sprout album, The Gunman and Other Stories.

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