I have no idea who opened for Loverboy or Eddie Money in
1980, but I do know, with absolute certainty, that they sounded exactly like this
album: crisp ringing trebly guitar chords hanging in the air, faux-anthemic synth climbs to anticlimactic pseudo-crescendos, plenty
of open space for live handclaps, and not a song in sight. Drowning out the
sad, lazy all-filler tracks is the giant sucking sound of the now-absent Gene
Clark, responsible for many of the best moments in the previous McGuinn-Hillman
affairs. In his place are a nonsensically sequenced consecutive double whammy
of Graham Parker tunes on side 1, a procession of farmed-out hack-written songs
neither better nor worse than the former Byrds’s inert originals, and the
grinding death throes of the promises of the 1960s. I guess this is what
America deserved for electing Reagan.
Capitol seemed to know this one was slated for oblivion; as
far as I can tell, between the front and back covers, the target audience for
this LP was inattentive bikers impulse-buying based on the logo, sunburn victims, and barefoot survivalists
surfacing from their fallout shelters to buy batteries.
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