1981 = year of 70s dino rockers w modren/wavo comeback LPs

xxx-post - GOD YES!!! that's fantastic (gaskin & stewart thing). that's EXACTLY the sort of thing i like to imagine exists out there, somewhere.

i wonder why the 80s were so friendly to an older generation of artists getting hip to the new techniques and styles? i can't think of a another time when this happened to such a degree.

― M@tt He1ges0n

kind of the million-dollar question here. doesn't seen to happen anymore. someone mentioned the "grunge explosion" upthread, but i don't remember many 80s dinosaurs getting a new lease on life with the yarling bigmuff. just didn't happen. and nu-metal didn't seem to provide many cash-in opportunities for long-in-the-tooth headbangers.

Here's another from 1981...

http://www.hunter-mott.com/discography/sleeves/short_back_n_sides.jpg

someone mentioned the "grunge explosion" upthread, but i don't remember many 80s dinosaurs getting a new lease on life with the yarling bigmuff.

yeah i mean there was neil young, but that was more just neil young making neil young records and the press said he was the godfather of grunge. bowie made some drum n bass shit but that was just bowie being bowie not really a trend.

That Ian Hunter is great. An example of a guy using elements of punk and new wave while keeping his integrity. (but not his hair)

yeah but honestly ian hunter's general MO was pretty in line with powerpoppy new wave to begin with.

xpIan Hunter, fwiw, already seemed pretty new wave with You're Never Alone With Schizophrenic in 1979, though yeah, the haircut counts for something. (Also weird to think of people like him and Roxy Music as "going new wave," since they were already pretty new wave to begin with, before new wave ever happened. I used to call them "old wave" back then.)

Even better example of proto-new-wave old wavers going new-new-wave in the early '80s might be the Tubes (whose 1981 album was The Completion Backward Principle, with "Don't Want To Wait Anymore." Though for them, the whole switch in sound was maybe more like an MOR sellout, actually.)

Not sure I understand how Cheap Trick, Benatar, and Petty (all mentioned above) fit into this, to be honest. They'd all been sort of new wave from the beginning, and if anything, to me, the 1981 albums mentioned above make them seem less new wave (less frantic tempos & blander hooks, for instance.)

Anybody mentioned Kim Carnes yet? "Bette Davis Eyes" definitely an '81 biggie; not sure about the album.

Also, if nobody's mentioned them, you had all these old prog guys like King Crimson (Discipline, '81) and Adrian Belew (The Lone Rhino, '82) coming back as reborn Talking Heads fans.

um, maybe albums like drama represent an evolving but overall consistent aesthetic that influenced new wave, and not the reverse? although i suppose that disrupts convenient timelines which diminish the dinos in favor of the young turks, so forget i said anything

dave edmunds' jeff lynne-produced information from '83

Yeah, but again, he was new wave already(Repeat When Necessary absolutely conisdered new wave in '79 -- even read Xgau's Pazz & Jop essays from around then; he even covered a Costello songs, right?); he just added ELO keybs later, big whoop.

Alice's Flush The Fashion a great LP, btw.

I think that After The Fire were pretty prog rock until 1980-ish, then they started doing this stuff ^^^

alternately: any other years that were defined by this kind of industry-wide trendhopping?

Didn't Debbie Gibson, Poison, and other 80s teen idols release "grunge" records around 1994?

― dad a, Monday, February 9, 2009 2:43 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

Disco beats in the late 70s & trip-hop in the late 90s. There's gotta be tons of examples of this.

yeah but it's not like those records did half as well as say, tina turner or bruce or steve winwood or whoever in the 80s

Notice that Cheap Trick are at the start of this thread. NOTICE

that's a good point about cheap trick, xhuxk. i count them here because of the significant overhaul of the sound circa one on one, seemingly in response to MTV culture, and due to their having made a home for themselves on 70s rock radio. i'm also drawing a faint line between jittery, power-poppy guitar music, and the shiny-happy post-cars danceparty sound. thus pride of place to acts who incorporate full-on synthpop sounds, a la pete shelley's homosapien.

that also goes as a response to yr. point about information. yeah, the earlier edmuds stuff was new wave, but it hadn't yet been reprocessed for MTV. i.e., it wasn't the NEW new, retrofitted for flash-in-the-pan pop stardom.

also lots of waved-out cover art on mostly unwave LPs:

http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj242/donaldparsley/elrayox.jpg

http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj242/donaldparsley/boptillu.jpg

Look, there is no way Cheap Trick are not going to claim my Beatles soul.

"If You Want My Love"

It's all your fault, ilx. I blame all of you.

I know you guys want to fight me down the pub, I know, but I'm going to have to take you on.

i am going to walk behind you with a pipe, ominously whistling "he's a whore"

i express solidarity with bimble in his cheap trick beatles love, if not in pub fights

maybe albums like drama represent an evolving but overall consistent aesthetic that influenced new wave, and not the reverse? although i suppose that disrupts convenient timelines which diminish the dinos in favor of the young turks...

― kamerad

i'm sure it cuts both ways, but it's hard not to attach a BIG part of the shift in yes' sound circa drama to trevor horne and geoff downes, who though they weren't much younger than the rest of the band, were closely affiliated with the emerging "new wave scene".

Didn't Cheap Trick go way more synthy/keyby on Dream Police than One On One, though? (Though I admittedly haven't listened to the latter forever. Always seemed like kind of a retreat to me (especially after 1980's All Shook Up, which was both a much better album and a higher charter.)

Btw, pretty sure there are previous threads where lots of these issues have been addressed, just not sure what they're called. There was definitely one last year where we were talking new wave moves and Scott Seward, I think, mentioned how much he didn't like Cooder's Bop Til You Drop. Also one a few years ago where the idea was to come up with '70s artists who actually improved in the '80s. (Winners, I think: Rick Springfield and Billy Ocean, the former of whom almost definitely fits here.)

Eddy Grant made a new wave move in the early '80s too, right? (Though maybe not until 1983. And I'm not sure whether reggae dinosuars count or not.)

someone mentioned the "grunge explosion" upthread, but i don't remember many 80s dinosaurs getting a new lease on life with the yarling bigmuff.

yeah but it's not like those records did half as well as say, tina turner or bruce or steve winwood or whoever in the 80s

Even if you can't find a market that's interested, you can still be crossing over/trying to cash in.

Warrant went way more grunge in the '90s than Poison or Debbie btw. (In fact, I'm far from convinced that either of those latter two even went grunge at all.)

Didn't Cheap Trick go way more synthy/keyby on Dream Police than One On One, though?

"she's tight" vs. anything on dream police for toeing the new wave line. plus, geez, all of side 2: "saturday at midnight", "i want be man" (so devo!!!), "four letter word", etc.

way better record than all shook up, but that's just me...

how did i manage to not say "party line"?

Yeah, okay, I can see "She's Tight" I guess. (Also, I prefer their hard rock to their powerpop -- like the first and third albums more than the second one, too -- which explains my All Shook Up thing.)

fwiw, ZZ Top's first real new wave move was "Manic Mechanic" on Deguello (1979.)

And if we're gonna count Ian Hunter and Dave Edmunds, why not Iggy Pop on New Values and Soldier? (After all that artsy-fartsy Berlin B.S. Just kidding. Sort of.) (Speaking of which, if disco dinosaurs going new wave in the early '80s count, there's obviously Grace Jones on Warm Leatherette and Nightclubbing.)

grace jones compass point trilogy and iggy circa soldier are totally OTM (haven't ever heard new values - eep!) thought of grace jones earlier, but failed to nom for no good reason...

In the bigger picture, Cheap Trick's early to mid-Eighties albums weren't very good, if you were there. They weren't so much new wave-y as they were flashy pop. They'd lost some of their grit when Tom Petersson left to be in a band with his wife (can you remember the name?). An official No Prize if you do.

Nazareth just made a bad album -- The Fool Circle -- in 1981. Their 1980 one, Malice in Wonderland, had their last charting single, I think, "Holiday." That wasn't a new wave-y record, either, just a stab in a lot of different directions, most of them kind of lame.

Foghat did Boys to Chat, Girls To Bounce. That was another lame record which might have had a slight new wave influence, more accurately a stab at writing something that would get on the radio. It just alienated their audience.

Aerosmith basically didn't exist in 81. Rock in a Hard Place was their only early Eighties thing and it was missing both Whitford and Perry. It was just a bland hard rock LP.

Status Quo was in the middle of a run of records which spawned a variety of bland pop singles like "What You're Proposing" and "Something Bout You Baby I Like," none of which were released in the US.

Scorpions definitely weren't New Waving it in 1981. They were between Blackout and Animal Magnetism.

UFO didn't do New Wave. In 1980, George Martin produced them and a couple songs on it sounded more influenced by Bruce Springsteen. In 1982, they did "The Wild, Willing and Innocent" which was standard hard rock/heavy metal.

So for dino rockers, some of these acts were not much moved by New Wave. Some were on the up-tick, most notably Scorpions. Some on a downward slide like Aerosmith, Nazareth, Foghat, UFO.

Ted Nugent was still big in arenas but wouldn't do anything that was a concession to change until 1986 with Little Miss Dangerous</A>.

Sammy Hagar's [i]Standing Hampton sold big in 1981. Definitely not new wave-y. More produced and heavy (heading toward "I Can't Drive 55-land") than his early hard pop rock albums, like Red and Musical Chairs.

Budgie were in the middle of a resurgence because of the NWOBHM. But their early Eighties albums aren't any good.

Slade were in the midst of a minor comeback in England but had no release schedule in the US. Till Deaf Do Up Part and We'll Bring the House Down are screaming rock 'n' roll records. These came about as a result of a bang-up appearance at Reading in 1980.

New Values was a mediocre album, the last one James Williamson played on and wrote stuff for. And Soldier was just lousy hookless mostly mid-tempo hard rock with dumb lyrics. I stupidly bought both. New Values has a couple keepers on it.

Cheap Trick's "She's Tight" seems to owe more to the Beatles to me.

I was thinking Boston but "Amanda" didn't come out until 86.

No way on Iggy. He didn't have a new wave comeback album, he practically invented New Wave in the 70s (with the help of Bowie and Visconti), and New Values is a great album. I wrote it off as inferior to The Idiot and Lust For LIfe, but now think of it as an equal. Production isn't as interesting, but the songs are awesome.

^ this was my rationale for not mentioning iggy earlier. he seemed to have been at it forever, was as much an influencer as the influenced.

rescinding previous agreeance

he practically invented New Wave in the 70s

was as much an influencer as the influenced

Right. Which is why I prefaced by quasi-nomination of him with "if we're gonna count Ian Hunter and Dave Edmunds."

I'd forgotten Foghat, who to my ears definitely seemed to be heading in a new wave/powerpop direction circa Tight Shoes in 1980.

Believe George has elsewhere mentioned Gentle Giant making a bad new wave move toward the close of the '70s, too.

UFO didn't do New Wave. In 1980, George Martin produced them and a couple songs on it sounded more influenced by Bruce Springsteen. In 1982, they did "The Wild, Willing and Innocent" which was standard hard rock/heavy metal

Though its title seems to retain the Bruce influence!

xp Though as I hinted at before, if we're going to talk about somebody in the mid '70s "inventing new wave" (as in, what new wave as opposed to punk rock would sound like a few years later), I'd be more inclined to pick the Tubes or Sparks than Iggy, I think.(Actually kind of surprised that nobody mentioned Sparks til now, come to think of it.)

(But right, there were actually a few different "new waves," and the '79 one on rock stations wasn't quite the same as the MTV one a few years later.)

tom petty & pat benatar = OTM as examples of the context these bands were responding to. but not as old-timers suddenly changing their sound in the early 80s, right?

I think there's a old Sandbox thread about straight-up rock acts taking advantage of the "new wave" label. Dire Straits was another one that sorta fell into that tag just by being part of the pub rock circuit.

if we're gonna talk about inventing new wave in the 70s i'd be more inclined to pick eno

xp

Dire Straits never seemed new wave to me back then, but oddly enough Sniff 'n the Tears, whose sound wasn't very far from Dire Straits' sound, did. Maybe they just had a new wavier name. Which reminds me:

old guys coming back under new names and in new wave clothes

= Flash and the Pan, a/k/a Vanda and Young from the Easybeats (though that was in 1979, not 1981).

Also Moon Martin, formerly just some guy in the early '70s country rock band Southwind, but now wearing much crazier glasses. (Also in 1979.)

Great thread, also, great idea for a box set - I nominate Chuck to curate it.

Sparks made their comeback a couple years earlier, yet "Whoomp That Sucker" may have been the first Sparks album that was more new wave than disco.

Hell, Kimono My House (and everything else they did before they met Giorgio Morodor) was more new wave than disco.

What about the Queen album that nobody remembers, Hot Space? That was 1982, but close enough.

Well, except for "Under Pressure," but that's remembered more on its own than as part of the album.

Hell, Kimono My House (and everything else they did before they met Giorgio Morodor) was more new wave than disco.

I can agree with that. Except their 80s material was new wave in a less experimental and more "pop" way.

Hot Space is popular amongst disco and beardo-disco type fans. It's a really cool new wave funk type rock album.

And about inventing New Wave...there's any number of influences, glam, glitter, punk, art-rock, whatever. I'm not talking about just another influence. Those Iggy Pop records are the very moment that certain key strains of New Wave as we know it crystalize. The combination of the eno and krautrock sonic influences via Bowie/Visconti and the more raw and less ambitious songs of Iggy. The Idiot and Lust for Life both came out in 1977. Maybe I'm looking more at the UK post-punk aspect of New Wave. This has little to do with american punk bands drawing on power-pop and disco and tossing in some synthesizers. I'm talking about Joy Division/New Order, Magazine, Wire, the Associates, etc. Maybe that's not strictly the New Wave we're talking about here. I think much of the british New Wave derives from some of the post-punk trends.

With Sparks, the pre-moroder stuff is certainly influential, but like with Bowie, I think it's too ambitious for the average punk to new waver types. They may have wanted to ape it, but would probably have dumbed it down. No. 1 Song In Heaven is totally ambitious Sparks + Eurodisco, but their following albums I think they played more with simplifying the songs and making more awesome dumb catchy new wave songs, probably due to the influence of punk.

xp Uh, what about the Queen album that everybody does remember, The Game from 1980? (Doubt they would have done "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" in pre-new-wave days. Probably not "Another One Bites The Dust" and some other stuff on there too, even if "Dust" was more a Chic/rap-type move. And "Dragon Attack" was real funky in its own right.)

And yeah, Dan, my definition of new wave is a lot cheesier, crasser, more commercial and less artsy than the Brit post-punk stuff you're talking about (which was a part of new wave, sure, but not necessarily the biggest or most interesting part. And certainly not the part that got on the radio.)

agree w xhuxk that british post-punk and american new wave seem like very different beasts now, and did then. some american acts slot in well w the uk stuff (talking heads, frinstance), but when i think of new wave, i've got my mind on a much less arty vein of smirky dance-pop. at it's extreme: big square beats, shiny production, bouncy synths, tuff guitars, cute & quirky lyrics about modern problems & enthusiasms, absolutely shameless pop ambition. sci-fi themes a plus. begins shading over into synth-pop almost from day 1.

Uh, what about the Queen album that everybody does remember, The Game from 1980

What I love most about that album is how for YEARS, Queen was militant about their "no computers" "no synthesizers" policy and then the first 15 seconds of The Game is a Huge Dramatic Synth Intro that out progs everyone.

Kenny Loggins wasn't a dino rocker but has to fit in here. House at Pooh Corner in the 70s, Footloose in the early 80s.