Sheepish Musical Pleasures: Red Rider "Lunatic Fringe"

[Editor's Note: I've been swamped with work, a commute made difficult by a train derailment yesterday, and writing and editing articles to be published on more renowned websites than this one. So it's time for the equivalent of a Notes From The Ironbound clip show. This is a post from when this blog was new and a series I need to reanimate.]

I used to talk about having guilty pleasures when it came to pop music, but my friend Rachel L. convinced me that I should just like the stuff I like, and therefore not feel guilty about it.  I think she's right, and consequently, I feel no guilt about loving cheestastic ABBA and rock snob-approved Pavement with equal feeling.  That said, I do get a little embarrassed about admitting some of my musical preferences to the my more discerning friends.  My emotions about this less than exalted music is more sheepishness than guilt.  I hope to have a running series on this blog about sheepishmusical pleasures.

What better place to start than with "Lunatic Fringe" by Red Rider?  It's a song I've heard for years, but I never knew the artist until recently, when I saw it featured on a Vh1 "one hit wonders" countdown.  The band is the north of the border combo Red Rider, featuring future "Life is a Highway" singer Tom Cochrane.  "Lunatic Fringe" is one of those songs that seems to have just been dropped out of the sky solely for the purpose of being pumped through the sound systems of pickup trucks in the heartland as it's being played on the local classic rock station.

You can tell it's from 1981, because the drums and guitars are leavened by a good dose of synthesizers, which give the song the added ingredient to put it over the top.  Like their Canadian peers Rush, Red Rider (at least on this track) figured out how to make synthesizers work in the interest of the song, rather than the other way around, especially in setting an ominous mood at the beginning.   The loud splashes of synth in the breaks raise the drama, too.

My favorite part about the song, however, is the fantastic rolling rhythm established at the beginning, which suggests a semi-truck of pure rocking power cruising down a glorious highway.  By the early 1980s, most classic rock had become completely uninteresting from a rhythmic point of view.  I also really dig the soaring steel guitar solo, which sounds like something the Edge would have played had he grown up in Winnipeg rather than Dublin.

Furthermore, I've recently discovered the political meaning of the song; the title refers to the rise in right wing, racist extremists at the time the song was written.  Very rarely can such a pointed political song ("you're not gonna win this time") rock this hard without devolving into sanctimony.

Of course, there's plenty here to make me sheepish, from the 80s production to the simplistic nature of the lyrics (lack of sanctimony only carries you so far) to the fact that this is the kind of song that Kenny Powers listens to.  But hey, I am sure there are others of discerning taste who like this song.  I know you're out there.

Double Live!

Ever since I got a turntable four years ago and started trolling the bins for LPs I've been fascinated with a genre of music I call "double live."  It is a music made by hard rock bands of the 1970s who put out double live albums, with Frampton Comes Alive being the most famous and lucrative.  The double live album was convenient for bands back in the day, who normally had contracts demanding several records in a short period of time.  The double live album had the twin advantages of knocking two records off the list, and being easy to record.  Instead of coming up with new material and going through endless studio sessions, a band could be recorded doing their thing on stage with minimal fuss.  These records were quick, easy, and potential gold mines.  Frampton Comes Alive made the journeyman guitar hero Peter Frampton a major star and gave Kiss the hit record that had long eluded them.  The modern rock show, with its enormodomes and stacks of amps was just coming into being in the 1970s.  The novelty hadn't worn off, and for fans who couldn't see the show or who wanted to relive it, they could bring it home from the record store and play it on their hi-fi.

Arena rock shows today are kinda lame: expensive, impersonal, and lacking the chaos and clouds of ganja smoke necessary to create the right atmosphere.  I secretly long to start a cover band called Double Live that would only play songs by 70s bands that recorded double live albums.  We could bring some of that old magic back, but to the club stage.  Who's with me?

Here are some of the songs we'd do (played like they are on the double live records, not in the studio):

Humble Pie, "I Don't Need No Doctor"

Sadly someone has pulled the video of this from YouTube.  It's the closing track on Humble Pie's killer double live album Performance: Rockin' the Fillmore.  They were a well-regarded and well-attended live act, despite their lack of hit records.  One listen to "Stone Cold Fever" from that album will clue you in.

Peter Frampton, "Do You Feel Like We Do"

This track is the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Madonna, the Venus de Milo of double live songs.  It not only anchored the biggest double live album of all time, it has a talking guitar, rocknroll decadence-drenched lyrics, and more overindulgence than Liberace's wardrobe. 

Grand Funk Railroad, "Are You Ready?"

Because the setlist would not be complete without some Grand Funk.  It'd be like making a martini without the gin.

Aerosmith, "Last Child"

'Cuz a double live frontman's gotta have something to strut to.

Foghat, "Fool For the City"

I am cheating a little because Foghat put a live record, but it wasn't double live.  I consider it to be some kind of crazy oversight, since if there is one band that embodies the empty-headed good time hard riff rocking spirit of double live as a genre, it's Foghat for sure.

REO Speedwagon, "Ridin' the Storm Out"

Before REO hit power-ballad paydirt in the early 1980s, they toured for years as a hard-rockin' but little regarded band.  Their double live record, Live: You Get What You Play For, is the apotheosis of their dues paying years, a sign that they are soon to break out at long last.  (You Can Tune a Piano But You Can't Tuna Fish was their first hit album, and it came out a year later.) For this one we'd need a siren to kick it off, and it would have to be the last song of the main set, so the singer (perhaps me) can intone "last song, people!"  

Kiss, "Rock and Roll All Nite"

Kiss sucks, if you ask me, and Gene Simmons is an insufferable prick.  However, the band managed to put together one truly glorious slab of rock and roll awesomeness in its career, a song that fits the double live ethos to a t.  This song would definitely come on the encore.

Classic Music Video of the Week: Tina Turner, "We Don't Need Another Hero"

Back in the 1980s, before I developed a more sophisticated taste in music, I used to love to buy tapes of movie soundtracks.  The soundtracks to Ghostbusters and Top Gun were two of the first albums I owned, and I still remember all the words to obscure tracks like "Saving the Day." The moribund music industry gave itself a shot in the arm by attaching great singles ("Ghostbusters," "Take My Breath Away," "Danger Zone," etc.) and forgettable filler by second-tier acts on movie soundtracks, which were a great buy for singles-oriented casual listeners like myself.

I must sheepishly admit that "We Don't Need Another Hero" is one of my favorites amid the 1980s soundtrack genre.  In the first place, you have to love a post-apocalyptic movie set in Australia where soul singing belter Tina Turner plays the taupe-clothed, hairsprayed villain.  (It don't get more 80s than that, friends.)  In the second place, Turner can really sing a corny line like "all we want is life beyond the Thunderdome" with absolute, soul-shaking intensity and commitment.  Like all truly great pop songs of its era, it's got a killer sax solo to boot.  ("Baker Street" might be one of the most influential Top 40 hits ever.)  In the video, the guy playing it is sporting leather pants and a Hulk Hogan physique, which only adds to the awesomeness.

Like most of the soundtrack song videos, "We Don't Need Another Hero" features lots of film clips cut in to get the bored suburban teenagers watching MTV to get down to the multiplex and plunk their money down for a Mad Max movie.  The concept of the video is disarmingly simple: Tina in her movie costume belting out the song alone, lit from below like a goddess.  Of course, a children's choir comes in at the end, as if conjured by her divine command "all the children sing!"

Perhaps I like this song so much because it's the perfect example of a kitsch pie with an authentic center.  I have heard "We Don't Need Another Hero" so many times as muzak at shopping malls and dentists' offices, but the gritty soul in Tina Turner's performance refuses to be turned into musical wallpaper.  

Sheepish Musical Pleasures: Foreigner, "Hot Blooded"

My God,this song is horrible, isn't it?  The lead singer just screams about how he wants to take a girl home and sex her with about as much romance as a jackhammer.  Lou Gramm's strained singing and forcefulness make the song's character (Lord I hope it's a character) sound like the kind of guy who thinks that that yelling "brace yourself" is foreplay and that three minutes of intercourse constitutes a marathon session.  This is the worst of hairy-chested 1970s masculinity in all of its sweaty, misogynistic glory.

Yet I still find myself singing along to this song, which is hooky as all get out with a monster riff designed to break down my defenses.  I try to tell myself that I enjoy its grunting desperation ironically, but I give myself over to the song with all my being when it happens to come on classic rock radio when I'm behind the wheel.

Sheepish Musical Pleasures: Toto, "Rosanna"

Back in the olden days when the wooly mammoths walked the earth in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were many very successful rock groups whose use of abstract symbols on their album covers spoke of their anonymity.  Journey, Styx, Kansas, Asia and the like lacked charismatic, Jagger-like frontmen, and preferred muso chops to the kind of raw feeling spewing forth from the punk scene at the time.

No band better exemplified this brand of highly competent corporate rock than Toto, a group made up of relatively faceless LA studio musicians.  Casual music fans would know their songs, but yet would be hard-pressed to name any member of the band.  Their magnum opus came in the form of 1982's "Rosanna."

Most pop music is completely dynamically flat, with few ups and downs.  However, "Rosanna" bursts with drama, from the building up to the majestic horns that announce the "meet you all the way" chorus to the dropping out of all the instruments so that the only thing the listener hears is singer Steve Porcaro's mezzo piano voice and fingers snapping.  Throw in the most gratuitous synthesizer solo ever to grace the Top 40 balanced by some truly righteous guitar shredding, and you have a range of sounds worthy of a symphony orchestra.

And what a video to go with it!  There's a ballerina twirling amidst faux urban decay, sharks vs. jets choreographed gang fighting featuring a young Patrick Swayze, and more bad 80s aviator sunglasses than you can shake a stick at.  All in all, it's pretty damn impressive for a tune merely intended to woo Rosanna Arquette.

Sheepish Musical Pleasures: John Denver, "Country Roads"

My parents mostly stopped listening to new music sometime in the mid to late 1970s, and for that reason I have an inordinate emotional connection to The Carpenters, Kenny Rogers, and John Denver, since I heard their music on a constant basis in my early childhood.  We didn't have a record player or stereo, but played tapes on a dinky little one-speaker tape recorder until my folks got my sisters and I a boom box for Christmas in 1984.  (I used to resent my parents for being so cheap, but now I am glad that I learned at a young age to not be wrapped up in owning material things.)  My memories of my childhood before I started going to school can be instantly conjured by playing "Rainy Days and Mondays" and "The Gambler," or by hearing the theme songs to "The Price is Right" and "The Young and the Restless."  The former was my favorite day-time game show, the latter my Mom's soap opera, the only one she watched.

Of all that music, no one song from my early years cuts right through me more than John Denver's "Country Roads."  This has less to do with hearing it on a daily basis as a five-year-old than it does with our family road trips.  Every summer we would hit the road in a Chevy van, usually driving out to Colorado and other points in the mountain West.  Many of the same tapes we listened to at home would find their way into the van's tape deck, and my Dad always relished playing this song on the way home, even if we were headed back to Nebraska, not West Virginia.  We always took a "shortcut" from I-80 to my hometown, which meant that country roads did indeed take us home.

Nothing ever made my father happier than these vacations, and his eyes still light up whenever we talk about our memories of them.  He worked a job he disliked for four decades to provide for us, and the road trips were the one time when he could put all the stress and bullshit of his work aside and be out in nature with his family, which is still the thing that makes him happiest.  Whenever I hear this song I think of hitting the home stretch on our return from vacation, a bittersweet moment of having to g back to normal life after so much fun.  As much as I love where I live now, "Country Roads" also reminds me of how far away I am from my family and my homeland, and I badly I miss them.

Sheepish Musical Pleasures: Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, "Almost Cut My Hair"

There is very little music that sounds more dated today than post-sixties hippie rock in general, and Crobsy, Stills, Nash and (sometimes) Young in particular.  Don't get me wrong; I am a huge Neil Young fan, I love the Byrds, dig Buffalo Springfield, and have always enjoyed the classic pop of The Hollies.  However, when you take elements of all of these great things and form a kind of Frankenstein's monster of hubristic, narcissistic, affluent Boomer hippiedom, it adds up to a whole lot less than the sum of its parts, akin to avocado, bacon, and broccoli ice cream.  Sure, 1970's Deja Vu is a pretty good album, but I'd rather listen to Young's After the Gold Rush, (released in the same year) every time, if given the chance.

There are few groups this side of Rush who sing such daft lyrics with such unabashed conviction.  Over forty years on, a song called "Woodstock" with a refrain of "we are stardust/ we are golden/ and we've got to get ourselves/ back to the garden" seems more like a joke than a generational call to arms.  (In CSNY's defense, this song was written by Joni Mitchell, not them.)  These words seem positively level-headed compared to the David Crosby-penned "Almost Cut My Hair."  Growing up I knew a lot more about the man's epic substance abuse problems than his music, and a little of that drug casualty spirit is present in this song, which is an uproariously funny counterculture paranoid fantasy where Crosby declares "I feel like letting my freak flag fly."  That's not my favorite line of flower power doggerel, either.  Every time he says his paranoia is like "looking in the mirror/ and seeing a police car" I have a hard time not laughing audibly.

Hearing wealthy rock stars lament how hard it is to turn rebellion into money, as The Clash once said, is pretty damn chuckle worthy.  That being said, I can't stop going back to this song.  Like a prehistoric fly caught in amber, it preserves a particularly detailed relic of an interesting and increasingly incomprehensible past.  It's also one of the few times on a CSNY record that Stills and Young cut loose with their guitars with the same abandon that they showed on Buffalo Springfield chestnuts like "Mr. Soul."  With a little more dueling electric mayhem and a little less woodsy harmonizing they could've been a much cooler band.

Sheepish Music Pleasures: Porter Wagoner, "Rubber Room"

There are only a small select number of musical artists that I adore that my wife prefers that I do not play in her presence.  Porter Wagoner is perhaps the one she loathes the most, which has been unfortunate for her, since I went on a record-buying binge of wax from the Wagonmaster's late sixties-early seventies glory days.  (When I lived in Texas finding these albums was a lot easier than in New Jersey, so she's gotten a reprieve as of late.)  If I recall, it was "Waldo the Weirdo" that put her over the edge, since it features his signature talking style of singing, religious moralizing, and oddball sensibility.  It's perfectly normal to find such a song to be completely unappealing.  I for one love all of these things, mostly since Wagoner, unlike so many artists today, is willing to go completely over the top without even the slightest hint of irony.  This is a true act of artistic bravery, and I applaud him for it though others may mock him.

Most people think of Porter Wagoner as a cheesy, cornpone, country-fried showman encased in gaudy, rhinestone encrusted Nudie suits, a sort of Nashville Wayne Newton.  However, beneath that glittery, showbiz exterior lives the dark mind of a man who has found the magic formula of Southern gothic story-telling crossed with preacher parables and gut-bucket honky tonk twanging.  Among his darkest songs is "Rubber Room," the tale of a man committed to an insane asylum.  Wagoner knew of what he spoke, since he spent some time in the sixties at a Nashville mental hospital.

What makes this song even more brilliant than other Wagoner noir classics like "The Carroll County Accident" and "The Cold Hard Facts of Life" is that he uses psychedelic sound effects one normally associates with acid rock bands.  This type of thing simply isn't done in country music, but it takes an unconventional guy like Wagoner to cross a line traditionalists would not dare to tread.

This song might sound kitschy, but if you listen closer, Porter ain't joking.  Last year, when my job turned nightmarish and I was living 1500 miles from my wife in an isolated crud hole town, I used to put this record on the turntable in the morning as a grim joke before going to work.  For about a month or so there it did really feel like I was going to crack up; it was good to get those thoughts out of my system by singing along to "Rubber Room."  I can't think of another song that would have done the trick.

Sheepish Musical Pleasures: Seals and Crofts, "Summer Breeze"

This time of year I always get a jones for this song, and I must sheepishly admit that it's the first that I ever bought on iTunes.  (It's the perfect iTunes purchase, since I didn't want a full Seals and Croft album, and buying it at the store would have hurt my street cred.)  Back when I lived in Michigan, the local oldies station used to play it a lot, and I always felt it was the perfect accompaniment to the long, golden summer evenings of Grand Rapids.

Its mellow feel and images also remind me of early summer nights when I was a child, the times growing up when I was by far the happiest.  At school I had few friends and experienced constant teasing and bullying.  It didn't help that my two best friends went to a different school after the second grade (our parents pulled us out of the draconian Catholic school we attended, but my friends lived in another public school district.)  During the summer I could spend more time with them, and many an evening was spent at my buddy Dan's place, shooting hoops until the sun went down and I had to go home.  I will never know such a purely care-free existence ever again in my life, which must be what my Dad meant when he told me to appreciate my childhood.

This song reminds me especially of early summer, which I think of as the period between Memorial Day and the summer solstice.  Out in my rural Nebraska homeland, the prairie exploded into life and the corn stalks suddenly shot out of the ground, their leaves green beyond green.  During this blessed four week period the days seemed to last forever, and the oppressive heat of summer in the Great Plains had yet to burn up the outdoors.  In these precious late May and early June days, you really could still feel a cool summer breeze.  Not so in July and August, when the Nebraska air gets so hot that it feels like the wind is blasting out of some kind of massive hair dryer.

In the early summer, I could still taste my freedom from school, and savor it without any thoughts of having to go back, which pretty much dominated my mind from late-July forward.  (Yes, I was an anxious child.)  It seemed like the summer movies that I cared about the most always seemed to come out during this particular part of summer.  On the evening after my last day of school in the first grade, my family went to see The Return of the Jedi at the newly finished mall multiplex, and being the exact right age to appreciate Ewoks, I went home exhilarated.  Six years later, after my last day of school in seventh grade, a friend and I saw the end of another epic trilogy, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  I still remember visiting my aunt and uncle's house after the movie was over, jabbering away at all the amazing stuff I'd seen, from rats in catacombs to the scene when one of the characters chooses the wrong grail.  That night, with school over and a joyous cinematic experience fresh in my head and the summer stretched out before me like the milk and honey-giving valleys of a promised land of easeful leisure, may have been among the happiest that I ever knew as a child.  When I listen to "Summer Breeze," I get to feel a small fraction of that care-free satisfaction.

Sheepish Musical Pleasures: Billy Idol, "Eyes Without a Face"

There's a certain kind of mid-1980s pop music that I think of as "Y music" because I used to hear it when I went to the YMCA to go swimming or play basketball.  They played the local hits station over the PA, and since the complex was completed in 1981 with a light brown and powder blue color scheme, it was totally 80s-tastic to begin with, and reached new levels of awesomeness when "Abracadabra" by Steve Miller filled the air.  (There's one summer where I swear I heard that song in the locker room after my swimming lessons each and every day.)

Billy Idol's "Eyes Without a Face" always brings me back to the summer of 1984 at the Y.  It's a song tailor made for the YMCA experience: the shimmery synths fit well with the play of light on the water in the pool, and the relaxed vibe with a place that always seemed to exist outside of time for me.

The effects laden guitar reminiscent of Robert Fripp that comes stomping in halfway through was also one of the first things I ever heard approximating punk rock.  Idol had fallen far from his days as a punker in Generation X, losing the DIY ethos but retaining the sneer, spiky hairdo, and other surface accouterments of a once great musical genre.  Back in the height of the Reagan-era, the surface tokens of the former counterculture were as close as a kid in a rural town could get to the real thing.

There's nothing like those summers before I had to start working during my months off in junior high.  Childhood summer floated by with the kind of leisurely ease that I only get to experience today for an hour or two at a time, rather than for three months straight.  As lame as this song might sound today, committing the mortal 80s sin of overproduction, I get a warm feeling remembering those wide-open days of pure delight.

Sheepish Musical Pleasures: Philip Bailey and Phil Collins, "Easy Lover"

I am well aware that loving this song might be crossing the line from sheepish into unconscionable, but it has so many positive memories attached to it that all of your derision matters not.  This song always takes me back to Friday nights at the local pizza place in my hometown in the mid-1980s.  It's the kind of uptempo pop rocker that the patrons liked to plunk their quarters into the jukebox to hear ("Eye of the Tiger" and "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A." were other favorites.)  My family was cheap and we rarely ate out, but on the occasional Friday we'd go get pizza, and I really considered it a special treat.  Hell, my dad would even give us a few quarters to play Ms. Pac Man or put our own songs on the jukebox.  Coming from a man who bought his clothes at K-Mart (only after his old ones had gone totally threadbare) and drove a car so rusty that it left a trail of flakes on his way to work, this was always a pleasant surprise.

Just to give a sense of his parsimoniousness, this pizza place had a promotion where if you bought a glass Coca-Cola pitcher, you could bring it in for free refills.  We acquired this beauty at some point in the early 1980s and he continued to bring it with us to the pizza place years after the promotion had ended. Sometime in the 1990s the owner of the place told my dad not to bother, and that my family would always get free coke as a reward for our loyalty.  This victory of steadfast tightfistedness over the temptation to pay more money in order to avoid embarrassment will probably go down as my father's Austerlitz or Vicksburg.

"Easy Lover" might be a disposable piece of 80s pop, but damn if it doesn't have some hard-rockin' drums and kickin' guitar.  Phil Collins even sounds a little tough!  What makes it, of course, is former Earth, Wind, and Fire singer Philip Bailey's wonderful high voice belting the kind of soulful singing one rarely hears paired with a driving rock accompaniment.  In any case, it makes a great soundtrack to chowing down on a slice of pizza in a small Nebraska town in 1985.

Sheepish Musical Pleasures: 10cc, "I'm Not in Love"

If there's any genre of music that has undergone a consistent beating at the hands of pop cultural hindsight, it's 70s easy listening.  Limp, lifeless, and sappy, the likes of Bread and BJ Thomas are a laughingstock in these edgier times removed from the seventies' Qualuude and Watergate fogged malaise.

However, every now and then even the least regarded forms of music produce a beautiful jewel amidst the dross.  Case in point: British smooth prog rockers 10cc's "I'm not in Love."  The electric piano chords are oh so watery, the synthesizers airy and breathless, and the vocals unfold like little fluffy clouds on the horizon of a gorgeous blue spring sky.  It's so softsational, a tasty, sugary eclair of a song.  I consume my fair share of rock-snob approved vegetables, but it's always fun to treat myself to the occasional dessert.

Sheepish Musical Pleasures: The Steve Miller Band

Steve Miller's appeal is inscrutable.  He doesn't reel off guitar solos, he doesn't rock that hard, he can't sing too well, and his lyrics aren't exactly Dylan-esque.  But if you throw Greatest Hits 1974-'78 on the turntable, I'll know each and every note by heart.

Much of this has to do with the fact that my debate coach during my first year of college always put this album on our van's stereo on all of our long-distance road trips.  Steve Miller was our accompaniment to the endless Nebraska plains rolling by on I-80, a reliable musical companion.  We always teased one member of our team because she never failed to mis-time the handclaps on "Take the Money and Run."  (Here's the secret: the claps come after each mention of Texas, and are thus meant to be a kind of parody/homage/reference to "Deep in the Heart of Texas.")  One time my coach went into a kind of reverie about Miller's stoner vibe while "Rockin' Me Baby" played in the background.  He imagined Miller in the studio taking bong hits while strumming his guitar, so stoned that the line "be with my sweeten baby yeah" resulted from THC induced amnesia.

His records certainly have more than a faint whiff of ganja about them; they sound as if they should come with rolling papers.  Appropriately, Miller penned "The Joker," one of the great stoner anthems of all time, with its lazy vibe, silly jokes (the guitar cat-calling when he sings "some people call me Maurice"), half-baked lyrics (what the fuck is "the pompitous of love"?), and the declaration that "I'm a joker, I'm a smoker, I'm a midnight toker."  The echoing effects on "Fly Like an Eagle" seem tailor made to accompany a really good high.

High or not, though, the man could write a catchy song, songs so hummable that you forget their inherent ridiculousness. Don't believe me?  Just listen to "Abracadabra," when Steve sings that he'll "reach out and grab ya" to the tune of overdone guitar and synthesizer sound effects.

But what keeps me coming back to Steve Miller, despite my best judgment, are those memories of going down the highway with my debate teammates, many of whom I sadly haven't seen in years.  I remember those days best when I listen to "Jet Airliner," one of the better songs in the "life on the road in a rock band" genre.  (Certainly better than Grand Funk's "American Band," but not as gritty as Bob Seger's "Turn the Page," as funny as Tenacious D's "The Road," or as gloriously overdone as Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive."  That song will likely be the subject of another blog in this series on sheepish pleasures.)  Sometimes a car stereo is the best time machine of all.

Sheepish Musical Pleasures: Red Rider, "Lunatic Fringe"

I used to talk about having guilty pleasures when it came to pop music, but my friend Rachel L. convinced me that I should just like the stuff I like, and therefore not feel guilty about it.  I think she's right, and consequently, I feel no guilt about loving cheestastic ABBA and rock snob-approved Pavement with equal feeling.  That said, I do get a little embarrassed about admitting some of my musical preferences to the my more discerning friends.  My emotions about this less than exalted music is more sheepishness than guilt.  I hope to have a running series on this blog about sheepish musical pleasures.

What better place to start than with "Lunatic Fringe" by Red Rider?  It's a song I've heard for years, but I never knew the artist until recently, when I saw it featured on a Vh1 "one hit wonders" countdown.  The band is the north of the border combo Red Rider, featuring future "Life is a Highway" singer Tom Cochrane.  "Lunatic Fringe" is one of those songs that seems to have just been dropped out of the sky solely for the purpose of being pumped through the sound systems of pickup trucks in the heartland as it's being played on the local classic rock station.

You can tell it's from 1981, because the drums and guitars are leavened by a good dose of synthesizers, which give the song the added ingredient to put it over the top.  Like their Canadian peers Rush, Red Rider (at least on this track) figured out how to make synthesizers work in the interest of the song, rather than the other way around, especially in setting an ominous mood at the beginning.   The loud splashes of synth in the breaks raise the drama, too.

My favorite part about the song, however, is the fantastic rolling rhythm established at the beginning, which suggests a semi-truck of pure rocking power cruising down a glorious highway.  By the early 1980s, most classic rock had become completely uninteresting from a rhythmic point of view.  I also really dig the soaring steel guitar solo, which sounds like something the Edge would have played had he grown up in Winnipeg rather than Dublin.

Furthermore, I've recently discovered the political meaning of the song; the title refers to the rise in right wing, racist extremists at the time the song was written.  Very rarely can such a pointed political song ("you're not gonna win this time") rock this hard without devolving into sanctimony.

Of course, there's plenty here to make me sheepish, from the 80s production to the simplistic nature of the lyrics (lack of sanctimony only carries you so far) to the fact that this is the kind of song that Kenny Powers listens to.  But hey, I am sure there are others of discerning taste who like this song.  I know you're out there.