T is also for This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us

I just remembered that I'd wanted to use this song for the letter T, so I'm adding it here. This is a 1993 acoustic version of the original 1974 single.

Sparks is one of those bands that you know about but you're not sure if you actually know anything by them. If anything, you may remember "Cool Places", a song from their 1983 album In Outer Space, which had Jane Wiedlin from the Go-Gos sharing vocals. Or lacking that, you might recognize the band as the two Mael brothers--the pretty-boy singer Russell and the weird-looking, pencil-mustachioed keyboardist Ron--and their quirky videos in the early days of MTV.

I never really paid too much attention to them until just recently when I saw the above video on YouTube. I was familiar with the song through the Siouxsie & the Banshees cover from 1987's Through the Looking Glass. After that I started downloading more of their earlier albums, and I'm glad to say I'm quite happy I did--they're extremely odd, but they're damn fine songwriters and a lot of fun to listen to.

W is for Who's Behind the Door

I will totally fess up here--this was the first band I ever went to see live (they opened up for Loverboy at the Worcester Centrum), and I was completely obsessed with their debut album from 1983. I loved the interplay between the Felix Hanemann's synthesizers, Randy Jackson's intricate guitar work, and Guy Gelso's thunderous drumming, and this song definitely had that EPIC sound that drew fans. It all might sound a bit dated now, but if you put that aside, you'll actually hear some pretty damn good prog musicianship there. There's even a few tracks that, if they were arranged and mixed slightly different, could easily be Porcupine Tree songs.

Before my foray into Top 40 music and well before discovering college radio, for a time I was into the straight-ahead stuff you'd hear on rock stations. Along with the classic rock, you'd hear the occasional hair-metal/hard rock stuff. A lot of it went by the wayside--mostly for good reason--but some of it actually wasn't too bad. It was lightweight fun, something to listen to that you didn't have to take too seriously...a lot of arena rock was like that. Zebra didn't get too much airplay other than this and a few other songs ("Tell Me What You Want" from the first album, and probably "Bears" from the second one), and they were a little too serious to be taken lightly. This wasn't your typical throwaway hard rock, it was prog-metal a way. The lyrics might have been a bit bland, but their musicianship was pretty impressive.