45. 1984 by Van Halen

 45. 1984 by Van Halen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM68ZL42hp0&list=OLAK5uy_k-Wp747MeVPu1IxzedbjSKI4X1Jiteh7w

I should probably use the title MCMLXXXIV for this entry, as that's the title on the album cover. But let's be real. People don't use Roman numerals to refer to years anymore, unless your job is writing movie and TV end credits, or if you're creating commercial graphics for the next Superbowl. I remember once being as a churchball game in which John and Vince were keeping track of the score in Roman numerals on a rolling blackboard, but I also remember there was some discussion as to what to do after the score went above 39. 

This album was released on January 9, 1984, so it is a big part of the soundtrack to that last miserable semester of high school. Since Randy had introduced me to Van Halen years before, I considered myself a big fan of the band, but not so big of one that I tried to go to the concert when they came to Pocatello in early May of 1984. I'd barely been able to get the okay from Mom and Dad to go to the Billy Joel concert, so I didn't want to push my luck with a request to blow more money on tickets to see Van Halen. Also, I never purchased this album while I was in high school because I didn't wan to have to explain to Mom why it was funny for angel babies to smoke cigarettes. Still, I heard the album plenty between it being played at school, track practice, and everywhere else. In the summer after graduation, Bill Johns asked me to go on a campout with the ward scouts as part of the "adult" leadership, and I said I would, even though I was so much older than the other boys and none of the other Arimo Mafia was going. One of the boys had a Sony Walkman and the 1984 tape. I asked if it was okay for me to listen to the album while they were off doing some merit badge stuff that I didn't need to be there for, and I must have listened to it about 10 times in a row. I felt kind of bad when the boys came back and the boy went to listen to his tape, and the batteries ran out of power. That was totally my fault, but I didn't have extra batteries for him, so he had to enjoy the sounds of nature for the rest of the campout. (Remember how Jimmy Gunter wouldn't let us bring electronic entertainment devices on campouts?)

I also remember when 1984 first came out that some of the guys at school were shocked that Eddie Van Halen was playing the synthesizer on "Jump." But Eddie learned to play the piano long before he learned to play guitar. In fact, when the Van Halen brothers were practicing instruments to form a band, Eddie was on the drums, and his brother Alex was on the guitar. But then Eddie complained about Alex's playing, and so Alex made him swap instruments. And the the rest is history. Now, having played the piano a bit myself, I was less impressed by Eddie's keyboard solo on "Jump" than my classmates. Yes, his fingers are moving pretty fast during those solos, but not nearly as fast as Billy Joel's on "Angry Young Man" or "Root Beer Rag" or "I Go to Extremes" or "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" or...but I digress. Still, I liked Eddie's synth work on "Jump" enough to figure out the opening chord progression on the piano at home.

While "Jump" was the early hit from the album--having been released as a single in December of '83--it's not actually my favorite song. That honor goes to "Panama," with "Hot for Teacher," running a close second. After that comes "Jump and "I'll Wait." I like the rest of the songs at an equal level, as they all feature Eddie's guitar pyrotechnics, which is what I like most about any Van Halen song. 

In my opinion, Dave's singing and lyrics were never at the same level of Eddie's musicianship. The only thing Dave did better than the rest of the band was wear spandex and strut/jump/dance on stage and mug for the camera and engage in hilariously goofy antics. But in the MTV '80s, that was kind of visual stage presence became super important, a fact that became painfully clear when Dave left the band and Sammy Hagar took over as the lead singer. Yes, Sammy can sing, but he just isn't as much fun to watch on stage as Diamond Dave. 

This album was the last full album for the band's original line-up, as Sammy took bass player Michael Anthony with him when he left Van Halen, and the two eventually formed Chickenfoot with Joe Satriani and Chad Smith of The Red Hot Chili Peppers fame. Dave reunited with the band for like two songs in the late '90s, and didn't rejoin for good again until 2007. Of course, when Eddie died in late 2020, that was the end of Van Halen. Wolfgang Van Halen, Eddie's son and the bass player for the group after Michael Anthony left, confirmed as much on Howard Stern's radio show, saying that Van Halen wouldn't be Van Halen without Eddie. He's right.

While I hadn't purchased the album when I was in high school, when I returned home from Sweden, I raided my brother-in-law's record collection and made a dozen or so tapes from the vinyl originals, and that's when 1984 went into the rotation of tapes I jammed out to in the black step-side Chevy pickup. And while I didn't dislike all the songs that Van Halen released after Dave left the band, I was never tempted to buy a Hagar-sung album. So for me, the sound of Van Halen is the sound of this album, with Dave singing/shouting lustful lyrics and Eddie delivering a heaping helping of infectious hooks and face-melting guitar solos, as well as a few keyboard solos just so that he can--you know--rest his fingers a little bit.

46. 90125 by Yes

 46. 90125 by Yes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVOuYquXuuc&list=OLAK5uy_nZL3S4dYY2pab61tWxvAou9ZTY2edmGb0

If you're a fan of the brand of progressive rock produced by Yes in the 70s, then you probably don't like 90125--an album named after its catalog number with the record company, which is either a really creative idea or really uncreative idea (I can't decide which). It's much more pop oriented than their previous prog-rock albums. According to the Wikipedia, that's because this album was nearly put out as a Cinema album instead of a Yes album. See, after the band broke up in 1981, Cinema was formed as another band with a different sound that was made up some former members of Yes--including musicians that toured with the group. So Cinema was its own thing, and not really Yes. But when they got to mixing all of the music, they decided to offer Yes's former lead singer, Jon Anderson, the job of being lead singer on this new Cinema album. He took them up on the offer, and shortly thereafter they got together with the marketing folks and began thinking about how they could sell more copies of the album, and that's when the former members of Yes in Cinema decided to stop being Cinema and become Yes again.

Even though I liked their 1972 hit song "Roundabout" well enough, I really wasn't a Yes fan until "Owner of a Lonely Heart" started to chart. I played this song during school dances right after I experienced a major heart-breaking rejection by the red-haired beauty of my dreams. That's when the lyric that being an owner of a lonely heart is much better than being an owner of a broken heart really hit home with me. And that lesson got reinforced a few months later when, after I thought I had recovered from the red-head's rejection, I experienced another major rejection by the black-haired beauty of my dreams, after which I did not recover and stopped dating entirely and renewed my vows to the He-Men-Women-Hater's Club. I may have also thought about trying to get a renewed membership in the Virgin Lips club, but my backstage kiss with Kim Hawes during my junior year had been too mind-blowing to ever want my lips' virginity to be restored. (I did get forced into going on one date during my freshman year of college, but as I explained in my last album write-up, I regretted every second of it.)

There were several other songs on this album that I rate as top-notch, including "Hold On," "It Can Happen," "Leave It," and "Our Song." However, the other songs are quite good and not the usual crappy filler songs found on so many '80s albums. So I really like the entire album, including the instrumental song "Cinema," which won the 1985 Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance, which turned out to be the band's only Grammy, which is just plain stupid because they are a very influential prog-rock band. And don't get me started with how a song released on a 1983 album qualifies for a Grammy in 1985. (It has to do with the Grammy rules being formulated by ego-maniacal thickheads too high on cocaine to realize their awesome rule-change or new category idea is a steaming pile of horseshit, not apple butter.)

The band came out with a 2004 CD Deluxe Edition of 90125 with five extra tracks, including two new songs "Make It Easy" and "It's Over"--two hold-overs from Cinema recordings that were sung by Trevor Rabin, not John Anderson, so they don't really have the same sound as the other songs on 90125. While they're okay songs, I don't consider them to really be worth listening to more than once. The 7-minute extended remix of "Owner of a Lonely Heart" sounds like it's just the intro to the song being played over and over by the David S. Pumpkin's band, but David S. Pumpkin isn't singing the actual lyrics along to the music because he's too busy stuffing your ears with overcooked Brussels sprouts. The Cinema version of "It Could Happen" should have never happened. And the A Capella version of "Leave It" sounds just like the original, only without all of that good music that makes it a song worth listening to. This is one of those times I wish I had been exposed to massive amounts of gamma radiation in my youth so that I could have grown three enormous angry thumbs and then turned them all down on these extra tracks. 

However, the original album is definitely worth listening to many times over and over, preferably without miniature cabbages lodged in your ear canals. When I returned home from Sweden in 1987, that's exactly what I did. I got a 90125 tape, and I played it over and over until I felt I had recovered from my previous high-school era rejections and went back to college, where I soon got rejected by the blonde-haired beauty of my dreams. Then I consoled myself by repeatedly playing "Owner of a Lonely Heart" while driving around in that black step-side Chevy pickup, convinced that I was not going to date any more in college until I graduated. 

But then my old mission companion forced me to ask someone out so that we could haul his motorcycles on my pickup out to the St. Anthony sand dunes where we would all enjoy a double date in which everyone could inexplicably get sand in every crevice of their bodies. That's when I started dating the brown-haired beauty of my dreams and stopped being an owner of a lonely heart because, as the last line of the album goes, "two hearts are better than one." Fortunately, when I said to Julie that we were going to have to either get married or break up, she said, "Yes." At least, I took it as a positive response to my kind-of-proposal. It didn't occur to me until now that she may have just been asking me to pop 90125 into the tape deck so that I could hear "Owner of a Lonely Heart" as her answer. Now THAT would have been a rejection that would have been much more difficult to recover from, because that would have left a white-haired woman as my only remaining option for finding true love, and while two hearts may be better than one, that can't really be the case if the second heart has a pace-maker.

47. Chicago 17 by Chicago

 47. Chicago 17 by Chicago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eTnCIy6Rtc&list=OLAK5uy_meQE5iP9DTYhSVEC6S_uhOqesgrLH7v1I

This album came out in May of 1984, so it is connected mainly to a few post-high school memories during the summer and my freshman year at Ricks. One of my fondest memories related to this album is driving with HondoJoe and his brother John in Arimo and listening to John sing made-up-on-the-spot lyrics to "You're the Inspiration." Since that night, I now sing "You're the Perspiration" anytime I hear that song.

If you ordered this album in the mail, how would you ever know that you'd already unwrapped it?

I'm sure that I danced to "You're the Perspiration" at the one date I went on at Ricks, but I'm also sure I was too busy regretting that I'd gone on the date to really enjoy either the song or the dance. "Stay the Night" was definitely not a dance song they would have played at Ricks, and neither was "Hard Habit to Break." "Along Comes a Woman" wasn't all that danceable, so "You're the Perspiration" is probably the second Chicago slow song that I ever danced to--the first being a slow dance with Mary Barlow to "Hard to Say I'm Sorry" from Chicago 16, which is #162 on my Top 200 list, which is also the top ranked Chicago song on that list. The only other Chicago song on that list was "25 or 6 to 4," and that's because it was a favorite pep band song. None of the songs from this album were included on my Top 200 list, but this album altogether is one of my Top 60 albums because of how much I listened to it in 1987 and 1988.

You see, after spending 25 months on a mission to Sweden, I came home to America on a flight from Copenhagen to Chicago. I was supposed to have been on a flight from Copenhagen to Salt Lake City,  but because my group missed our original flight out of Copenhagen, we ended up getting rerouted and put in first class seats on another flight to the states--with the only people on the flight sitting in front of me being the pilot and co-pilot. One of the things I enjoyed the most about that first class flight was that I was finally able to listen on the headphones to whatever rock music I wanted and be 100% guilt free. And as we descended out of the clouds into the Chicago airport, I thought it would be a good idea to listen to the Chicago channel. That's right, they had an entire music channel on that flight devoted to Chicago music. I loved that feeling of being back home in America so much, that I decided that I was going to buy some Chicago albums and listen to them during the summer. But I never did buy any Chicago albums. Instead, I raided my sister's music collection and made a bunch of pirated music tapes of Chicago albums. And it turned out that during that summer and during my sophomore year at Ricks that I gravitated to listening to Chicago 17 more and more. And when I met Julie at the end of my last semester at Ricks, it was one of the tapes that got played a LOT in the black step-side Chevy pickup on our dates from April 1988, when we started dating, until we got married in August 1988. So this album now is forever associated in my mind as a "make-out" album from 1988. (Yes, there are a few other make-out albums on this top 60 list. What can I say. I liked to kiss my future wife.) So that is why even though this album came out in 1984, it wasn't until four years later that I REALLY began to like it. 

Besides the four aforementioned singles, this album has some other solid tunes with "We Can Stop the Hurtin'," "Only You," "Please Hold On," and "Once In a Lifetime." I don't dislike "Remember the Feeling," "Prima Donna," or "Here Is Where We Begin," but they've got such stiff competition from the other 8 songs on this album that they don't really stand out that much.

Fun fact: This was the last Chicago album with Peter Cetera. And based on a documentary I saw about the band, I think that fact is particularly fun for both Peter and the other members of Chicago.

Other fun fact: Chicago 17 was the band's best selling album. They had several other hits after Cetera left the group, which shows that it wasn't the one-man band Peter probably thought it was. Their most recent studio album, Chicago XXXVI: Now, was released in 2014, which continues to sound like Chicago. They just keep on doing what they do.

Wait. I lied. But only kind of. Chicago also put out a Christmas album in 2019. But do Christmas albums really count? I suppose they do for the purposes of counting Chicago album numbers-- which this one clocks in at number 37. Will they make it to 40? If it were any other group, I'd say probably not. But with the way the band works--always bringing in new members to replace old ones that left, retired, or died--there's a chance that Chicago will be around long enough to hit album number 40. They've got 11 current members and 14 previous members, but only 3 of the founding members are still around, and only two still play with the band at concerts. So it's definitely different from the band we grew up with in the 70s and 80s, but they still somehow manage to make songs that have that distinctive Chicago sound. But I highly doubt they'll ever see the success of Chicago 17 ever again. Also, I highly doubt I'll get Julie to make out with me to a Chicago album ever again. Clearly, both Chicago and me peaked in the '80s.