Rolling Past Expiry Hard Rock 2010

So, Private Lines Trouble In School album from 1980 turns out to not quite smoke in the boys' room as much as its title made me hope for, but it's still good catchy tricky very slightly new wavey hard pomp pop rock along the lines of, say, Shooting Star or Streetheart or Prism from the same time period. Loudest guitars probably "How Long"; stickiest hooks title cut and "Young and Sexy." ("A keyboard-dominated pop-rock band with brutal guitaring--and one album to date," Jasper and Oliver called them in their book.)

Anyway, here's a question; has to do with something Spin assigned me. What, if any, great hard rock albums would you say qualify as "wall of sound," production-wise? Like, in the Phil Spector sense. Things louder than, say, Born To Run or Bat Out Of Hell, I mean. Any?? (Was thinking maybe the first two Boston LPs, or Hysteria; what am I blanking out on? In my head I want something like Dream Police to qualify -- Cheap Trick definitely had beefed-up ELO moments -- but that might stretch things.) (The Move, maybe? I don't know. I feel like there's some obvious examples that just haven't occurred to me yet.)

Or the Who (early '70s), maybe? Have any hard rock bands or producers ever claimed to be influenced by Spector (or George Martin, or Brian Wilson)? (The Ramones had an album produced by Spector, of course, but I'm not sure that counts.) This really isn't something I usually care about, which probably means I'm not a big wall of sound fan myself. (I mean, it's possible you could say most heavy metal works as a "wall of sound" in a sense, but I doubt that will cut it.) (Oh wait, I guess there's Queen, right?)

yeah, queen. boston. aerosmith too depending on the album.

In terms of Cheap Trick maybe the George Martin-produced thing. Actually, "The World's Greatest Lover" is probably closest they got to wall-of-sound early and that's a ballad. The first Boston album, yeah, I'd agree with that although wall-of-sound doesn't equate as "loud" to me. More like smothering, or all filled up. Haven't listend to the second one in years and years so I dunno there.

Maybe a Ramones album or two. However, not the one produced by Spector. More likely Pleasant Dreams, the Gouldman-produced one.

Nothing in the Move's catalog. Technology hadn't caught up with what they were doing.

Keith Olsen produced records in thr Eighties, might include something by Heart and one by .38
Special.

Wall of sound for Spector meant cramming everything into a mono mix to overcome the limitations of
transistor radios and cheap phonographs. Not precisely the same once ornate stereo mixes became common.

You should probably dig through your late Eighties hair metal records after hard limiting was really
entrenched because I recall all those records, no matter what was on them, as delivered to come blasting out of the speakers.

ZZ Top's Rhythmeen and Mescalero, particularly the former, are walls of sound. Rhythmeen virtually
falls over on top of you, just like a wall, at times.

Foghat's Fool for the City is monolithic in that way, too.

The debut by Cactus is a wall of something.

Yes's Tales from the Topographic Chinch Bug and Relayer.

The Godz debut, courtesy of Don Brewer's wall of guitar and drums production.

Lou Reed's Rock n Roll Animal with Wagner and Hunter and guitars. It's allegedly a live album but Al Kooper did some odd things with the guitar tracks in the studio to make it overwhelming.

Not all these are real good records.

You could probably fish one or two or even three from Roy Thomas Baker-produced Queen. The first album, at least.

Ha ha, I think lots of those are "walls of something." But that list definitely helps a lot; thanks George (and Scott)!

Just got offered an interview with Ritchie Blackmore, pegged to a new Blackmore's Night album coming out in January. I told the publicist I'd do it if and only if he was willing to talk about his older bands (which he's gotten testy about doing in the past); I'm willing to indulge him with a few questions about his and his wife's puffy-sleeves folk thing, but if he thinks I'm not gonna ask Rainbow questions less than a year out from Dio's death, he's fuckin' nuts.

yeah, 80's stuff in general was all about that bombastic mix. just get an eddie money record. he even stole phil's girl!

for the wall of sound thing, maybe Mott's Brain Capers for the solid echoey mass, or for the big over-ornateness, Kiss Destroyer or Use Your Illusion.

definitely Dream Police and The Move's Looking On (their heaviest IMO). also Mott's album "The Hoople" - really thick soupy sound.

speaking of which, i recently got beautiful U.K. pressings of Ian's S/T album and Overnight Angels and they are both pretty massive sound-wise. Overnight Angels got the Roy Thomas Baker treatment.

bought lotsa 50-cent past expiry hard rock vinyl today

"I'd buy that for a dollar!" Great purchases for a buck or less

>>The Kids "Anvil Chorus"

aka The Heavy Metal Kids. It's their second album. Not quite as good as the first but still way better than average. Singer Gary Holton wound up on a very popular Brit TV show as one of a crew of migrant bricklayers and construction workers, then died just as he was getting famous, of a drug overdose. Was definitely mining the street glam rock thing and I recall posting a couple YouTube vids of them on some German music show.

The television series produced a good crew of Brit actors you now see in American productions -- Tim Spall, Bill Nighy, for example -- so if he hadn't up and died he might now be famous, too.

Listened to The [New] Runaways "Fast and Loud", a Kim Fowley production effort to revive the band with new personnel sometime in the late Eighties, I think. I never actually saw a copy when it was released, so it might have been enjoined in stores but has now been reissued because of someone's desire to ride along on the minor success of The Runaways revival.

It was a band of laughably lousy ringers, doing songs with embarrassingly sub-moron lyrics like on the first two Runaways albums. But with absurdly tacky, sometimes hilariously inappropriate production and two singers of much less talent than Cherie Curie and Joan Jett. The only thing that came to mind when I was listening was Daphne & Celeste fronting a band of mates trying to do late Eighties Alice Cooper mixed with teen angst torch songs about wanting to be with the bad boys, or the guy/graffiti artist with "boots of fire" -- no joke. Seriously, boots of fire. And they do a song called S-P-E-E-D-M-E-T-A-L which is more like speedy Cramps novelty material.

Actually, the record is so bad I'm having a great time making jokes at its expense. Perversely, xhuxk might actually like parts of it because it has those qualities that led him to put those entries in Stairway to Hell that intensely irritated purists. Kind of an accidental whoopie cushion of a record which I will probably listen to, at most, only one or two times again in my entire life. Two might really be stretching it. Once again, maybe.

And I actually saw a copy in BestBuy where it was listed with The Runaways, with the same name on the label, waiting to trick some unwitting person who doesn't smell the rat.