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

cheap trick - one on one
zz top - el loco
rush - moving pictures
blue oyster cult - fire of unknown origin
genesis - abacab
j. geils band - freeze-frame

imprecise, cuz j. geils, b.o.c & rush were following up less successful 1980 efforts, and zz top wouldn't quite hit stride w the style until eliminator, but 1981 still seems like ground zero for this kinda thing.

context = cars' shake it up, blondie's autoamerican, go-gos' beauty & the beat, devo's freedom of choice & new traditionalists, b-52s, romantics, vapors, etc.

any other "modern rock" crossover/cash-in LPs circa '81 from 70s hitmakers?

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

Pat Benatar - Precious Time
Tom Petty - Hard Promises

fix apostrophes?

Oh, didn't Ian Gillan do one of those?

Or was that some time 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?

ian gillan (as "gillan") has an album called future shock from '81, but i haven't heard it. cover art is priceless.

plus trans, by neil young! - from '82, but close enough to count

rush went "new wave" with permanent waves which was a big hit so you're wrong there
also, you could argue the yes/buggles album, but that was 1980

Billy Joel's Glass Houses is 1980 but definitely qualifies, I think (insofar as he could be thought of as a biz dinosaur, not a "rocker" per se).

pointed out that moving pictures was rush's second (and more successful) stab at the sound, so hold your charge, velko

yes's drama totally counts! a year early is all

steve winwood's arc of a diver 1980 and talking back to the night 1982 fit here

oooh, yeah: glass houses is canon! slots in very well w the cheap trick & j geils lps. plus he totally rockered out for that one.

1980 has Pete Townshend - Empty Glass, & Phil Lynott - Solo in Soho

Both of which fit the bill perfectly.

A couple of oldsters that went new wave in 1981, but I don't know that they were famous enough or came back enough to qualify.

Sir Douglas Quintet - Border Wave
Joe Ely - Live Shots

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?

"Camera Camera" by Renaissance (1981) is a textbook example of the attempted wavo comeback.

Alice Cooper's Flush the Fashion was 1980

these last few (plus gillan future shock) are EXACTLY what i'm looking for, 'cuz i love this sound, but am real tired of the old standbys. i mean, i've heard empty glass, but the phil lynott, sir doug and joe ely recs are news to me.

also: dave edmunds' jeff lynne-produced information from '83 (a year or two late, but a fine specimen nonetheless - note the title's clear announcement of intent)

fugg! how could i forget flush the fashion?!? thanks, dan.

and is the renaissance LP any good? i mean, i've never so much as heard of the band...

also, dad a OTM about the grunge thing. was 94 really the peak year for "seattle sound" grabs? any other noms for years/albums? i mean, i'm not as up on my best-forgotten mid-90s radio pop...

awesome! i (vaguely, almost) remember that. coming in late at 84, but note-perfect. machine talk noises! want to hear grace jones version. video is ace, too.

I just pulled this out to listen.

Sir Douglas Quintet - Border Wave (1981 Takoma) it's got a colorful cover and skinny ties. Craig Leon produced. The music is the same Tex/Mex roots rock Doug Sahm worked his whole life, but the 96 Tears keyboards are emphasized and the tunes are extra bouncy and catchy. Kinks and 13 Floor Elevators covers. Someone probably gave them a budget thinking they could be as big as Joe King Carrasco.

This is a case where linking the sounds of original garage rock with the New Wave made perfect sense.

currently listening to phil lynott's very mysterious & crepey "yellow pearl" offa solo in soho. so great, want the whole album now. wish there were a proper video, but i can only find this lame cover shot fan job:

assume sir doug will be harder to track down...

linking the sounds of original garage rock with the New Wave made perfect sense

The 1980 Paul Simon movie One Trick Pony is a somewhat tepid protest anticipating this sort of thing. (The problem with the movie is that if you want to make a movie about how awful it is to have new wave pressure bearing down on fogeys past their glory days, you DON'T use prime period B-52's as Exhibit A of the shape of things to come. It sends a different message than intended.)

(x-post) Renaissance, 1977:

"Camera Camera" honestly isn't very good at all, iirc. (Didn't know listenability was a criteria!) Just a great example of a formerly long-winded, classical-inspired prog band shortening the song lengths (and the hair!) and donning stripy clothes:

https://www.insideoutshop.de/images/RenaissanceCamera.jpg

In addition to Empty Glass, Face Dances comes out in 81 as well.
Also King Crimson: Discipline, Lindsey Buckingham: Law & Order, Frank Zappa: You Are What You Is.

does this count?

Dan! I'm so happy to hear from you, but I keep hearing Donna Summer MacArthur Park now. Please make it stop. I've got to stop.

make it stop
she shimmies her tits in this thing

I just wanted one gay queen icon, just one. Couldn't you let me have one?
I'm going to have to come out of the closet as a gay man who likes men.
I feel a lot of shame about it, but there she is, and she's like broadway.
Let her be the karaoke inspiration for the world.

Also, I've never heard any more of the album than the single, "Find Your Way Back," but Jefferson Starship's 1981 album "Modern Times" sure doesn't LOOK like "After Bathing at Baxter's..."

http://covers.mp3sparks.com/covers/j/jefferson_starship/1981_-_modern_times/cover.jpg

^^ HI BIMBLE, WRONG THRED!

anyway, goddam, that resaissance is horrid. plus totally not wavo. no offense, dan.

plus from 80, though it's off his 1st solo lp, belew is so obv a 70s prog guy doing the new wave thing:

video is beyond great

fuck is with this embedding disabled? goddam

>>that resaissance is horrid. plus totally not wavo

No, that's the 1977 prog Renaissance on Midnight Special. I couldn't find a vid for their wavo phase.

Lots more of these, I think; I just need to pour through my vinyl shelves. (Linda Rondstadt's 1980 Mad Love, full of new wave covers of bands like the Cretones, was her Glass Houses.)

Agree ZZ Top didn't hit their commercial stride til Eliminator, but El Loco is actually the weirder and more new wave album. ("Party On The Patio" is totally their B-52s song, and seems they were probably listening to Captain Beefheart, too.)

Geils' Freeze Frame also totally a post-Cars new wave album (and yeah, a commercial leap up from the somewhat new wave Love Stinks.)

You also had old guys coming back under new names and in new wave clothes like Donnie Iris (formerly of the one hit wonders Jaggerz) with Back On The Streets in 1980 and King Cool in 1981).'

Plus Marianne Faithful (Broken English, 1980).

More will popping into my head all afternoon, just wait. (Let's see...Golden Earring didn't go new wave til 1982, Slade not til 1984. How bout Steve Miller?)

Foreigner 4 with its Thomas Dolby guest spots and funk and rockabilly moves was 1981, too (though they were more new wave than people ever gave them credit for from the gitgo, with "Headknocker" on the debut and "Dirty White Boy" on the third album plus all those Cars-style post-Roxy synths and stuff.)

This thread is totally what I think of as your thing, xhuxk.

Didn't know Doug Sahm did a new wave-y album. And Craig Leon/Takoma too, wtf?? Eugene Chadbourne laps it up on AMG. Need to check this out. Added Sahm facticity: according to wikipedia, Sahm's son later drummed for the Meat Puppets

yeah, golden earring's cut (w the textbook twilight zone) came out in 82, didn't hit til 83, but i'm trying to rope in as much stuff as possible. plus great song, so okay w me

moody blues massive (and justly forgotten) long distance voyager is another one from 81, with the gemini dream, etc. they'd arguably been moving in this direction since 78's octave, though (steppin' in a slide zone). somewhere between disco, new wave and showtunez

and yeah, i think of foreigner as part of the moment that the dinosaurs were responding to, more than old dogs learning new tricks

Not sure if Hall & Oates are the brand of Rock in question, but their 1981 comeback set the benchmark (and for many, seems to be their only known material)

Also Styx, with "Too Much Time On My Hands"' post-Kraftwerk/Devo electropop on Paradise Theater.

And Olivia Newton-John with Physical. (And maybe Moody Blues with Long Distance Voyager? Haven't heard that in forever, but they were for sure dabbling in new waviness around that time.)

38 Special started making their Cars/powerpop move in 1981, too, with "Hold On Loosely" off Wild Eyed Southern Boys (though I don't think they really kicked it into full skinny-tie gear until Special Forces a year later.)

[xp -- made my Moody Blues nomination before I saw Dagmar's]

<3 Hold On Loosely

Joe Ely - Live Shots isn't New Wave at all in sound, it's roots rock, country rockabilly like all his other stuff, but it was recorded live in England opening for the Clash. (the cover is very two tone looking).

His 1984 one Hi-Res is the one with synthesizers and production. (cover is primitive computer graphics)

I suppose there has to be a "going disco" equivelent a few years earlier, but I don't know enough to pinpoint exactly what year that is. 78, maybe?

equivalent*

1981 (and awesome):
http://www.dragcity.com/catalog/records/dc80.jpg

And don't forget Ray Manzarek doing Soul Kitchen with X in 1980.

george clinton - computer games from '82 (not a big change in sound, but period production)

kraftwerk - computer world (not that they were really "70s dinosaur rockers", but you can really hear the influence of their offsprings here)

The Stones kept going from disco to new wave from 1976 to 1981.

Rod Stewart's "Young Turks" was 1981, and he'd already been into disco.

I wouldn't count Red Krayola... 1. Mayo + Art of Language had an arty album before that, and 2., the entire band of Red Crayola at the time were certified post-punkers.

xhuxk's styx nom for paradise theater is a good one, though too much time on my hands is an anomaly (most of the rest is unwave glop). came out in '81, total dinosaurs, 80s production, got tons of radio play. still, kilroy was here took it much farther

All those Canadian bands were pretty new wave to begin with, though, probably thanks to their strong Nick Gilder and Streetheart influence.

1979, who cares

Hey at least I didn't post any Kix.

Strange that despite Jeff Lynne being mentioned several times on this thread that ELO's Time hasn't been mentioned yet which is any uneasy mix of newwave synth dystopianism and his Beatles/rock 'n' roll fixation.

Including a couple of blatant Ultravox lifts.

A couple more hasbeen bands up above who I don't think agree went new wave in 1981: The Kinks (who had already gone new wave on Low Budget in 1979) and Hall and Oates (who had already gone new wave on either Along the Red Ledge in 1978 or X-Static in 1979, take your pick).

Strangely, Kim Mitchell of Max Webster did not go new wave until "Go For A Soda" in 1985. (Unless he went earlier and only actual Canadians noticed.)

(Who I don't think I agree. I'm not sure whether the bands agree or not, if they even care.)

include the hall & oatses i mentioned above cuz red ledge and x-static are more tenative, more disco, iirc. then again, it's been a while since i've heard either

And speaking of the Beatles, if Lennon had lived he would surely have moved in a new wave direction based on his work on Yoko Ono's 'Walking on Thin Ice'.

There were a few new wave-ish moments on "Double Fantasy" too. "I'm Losing You", for instance.

i thought conventional wisdom said that if the Doors were a punk/new wave band they'd be the Stranglers? Works in some cases.

Either that or Billy Idol. (Actually, lots of new wave stuff early on sounded Doorsier than the Fixxxx -- esp. in the vocal department. I always figured they were a fairly big inspiration for the genre. Not gonna come up with a list now, though.)

(For the more serious and gloomy and poetically pretentious ends of the genre, at least. Hell, goth singing in general -- maybe even starting with Ian Curtis -- can kind of be traced back to Jimbo.)

My friend called Jim Morrison "the godfather of goth" the other day. I laughed. Morrison seems more like a godfather of punk to me, if anything, but whatever.

iggy = godfather of punk
jim = godfather of nude drunkbeard, unloved 3rd uncle of goth

Why is Lou Reed so often referred to as the Godfather of Punk?

xp Also, obviously, Manzarek did stuff with X, who also covered "Soul Kitchen"; in fact, it's always seemed to me that lots of that decadent early '80s non-hardcore El Lay blues-punk stuff (X, Flesheaters, Gun Club, Alleycats/Zarkons, etc.) was somehow in the Doors lineage.

^ this OTM, esp WR2 the LA blues punk doors hookups. that doors punk angle kinda died of subsequent, tho, didn't it? (punk as gloomy doomy junkie blues thing.)

oh, but wait. what about birthday party and descendents? cave's persona kinda morrison-like. also swans as they rolled along (after the tooth-scraping stuff).

"died off"

Then there's that Echo and the Bunnymen band...

Yeah, it never died, just went further underground (definitely heard Cali bands this decade -- i.e., the Starvations -- that fit in that mold.) And also went Down Under, where the Birthday Party wound up being their own template for scores of bands from the Scientists on (and they also set the template for mid-American pigfuckers like Scatch Acid and Killdozer, a sound that still keeps coming back in incrementally diminished form.) Plus, yeah Goths -- Andrew Eldritch definitely. And Ian Astbury. And etc.

(Though at first I thought you were saying the Doors influenced the Descendants! Kinda doubt that.)

The Doors late-70s resurgence (with Apocalypse Now and the Rolling Stone "He's Sexy He's Dead" cover) coincided with the LA punk years which only fueled more hyperbullshitic nonsense from Manzarek. He would blather on to anyone about how the Doors were the original LA punk band and how if the Doors were still around they would be down with the punks, etc. etc. ad nauseum.

If Jimbo is the godfather of anything, it's late night poetry slam amateur hour at the local hipster cafe.

Still, I like the Doors a lot - mostly because of Kreiger and Densmore.

If Jimbo is the godfather of anything...

http://photos.posh24.com/p/243342/l/joaquin_phoenix/joaquin_phoenix_says_bye_good_to_acting.jpg

There's a great bit in a Mike Nelson piece in his movie review collection talking about the horribleness of Val Kilmer -- his role as Jimbo comes up, Mike takes the time to note that Mr. Morrison is one of his least favorite people in history and then comes up with this, which I can't get out of my head now:

...you can't deny that his voice is very much like any given dad's voice singing clumsily from the shower as he soaps his beefy arms. Just stop for a moment and imagine Morrison's ham-fisted baritone shouting out his idiotic free verse "Break on through to the other side," and now imagine your own father in his tiled stall mindlessly singing the same verse. See? They're indistinguishable!

^ v. klosterman

Pretty good one, from a couple years later: DNA (a/k/a Rick Derringer and Carmine Appice), Party Tested, 1983. Wrote a little more about it here:

Rolling Past Expiry Hard Rock 2011

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQDcNzD3s6k

Sir Douglas Quintet - Border Wave (1981 Takoma) it's got a colorful cover and skinny ties. Craig Leon produced. The music is the same Tex/Mex roots rock Doug Sahm worked his whole life, but the 96 Tears keyboards are emphasized and the tunes are extra bouncy and catchy. Kinks and 13 Floor Elevators covers. Someone probably gave them a budget thinking they could be as big as Joe King Carrasco.

This is a case where linking the sounds of original garage rock with the New Wave made perfect sense.

Here's a clip of the SDQ doing "Mendocino" and two cuts from Border Wave on the notorious "Andy Kaufman quits" ep of "Fridays".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6PoOT44zUo

see also womble-creator mike batt's jaw-dropping synthpop (and avant-orchestral operetta zero zero from '82, soundtrack to a musical TV special produced for australian television. he'd flirted with synthpop sounds on his previous waves and six days in berlin, but here he goes all in. scott seward started an excellent but little-visited thread about it a while back. kind of horrible, kind of amazing. selections:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wse5A0RO53k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3doI9Le35nQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ahqp_vBv8s

the Heavy Metal soundtrack is right in the center of this, dinos going new wave or modern w/ DEVO thrown in for street cred

more synthed-up Cheap Trick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s1Jsz1lj1Y

in my xpost, add an end-parens after "orchestral," iyp. recommended to anyone with fond memories of peter schilling's error in the system.

I've been into Judas Priest - Point Of Entry lately. I didn't like it much at the time, and while it was predictive of stuff like Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone," it holds up. Way better than Turbo. I also have a soft spot for the albums by Saga and The Fixx from that period, Rupert Hine produced electro AOR prog wave!

Pretty Things on '80's Cross Talk fits right in here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tU3OgZT0DI

I had no idea that Andy Fraser of Free did this totally-80s song/video until today. The dance moves!

This is 1984, not 1981, and not exactly new wave but rather that dance-rock with gated drums and synths that was ubiquitous in the 80s. (Think Robert Palmer.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soE63vWxZnE

Civilian by Gentle Giant (1980) - strong Duke/Abacab vibes and sounds better now than it did then.

I feel like their previous two albums were their attempts at "punk" or new wave, and Civilian was more or less straight AOR with some prog trappings left over.

Alan Parsons Project - Pyramania (from the album Pyramid, 1978!)

No, really!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWTJmrPa5TQ

The only mention of Nick Lowe in this thread is Dave "Edmunds always worked closely with new wave acts such as Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello...," forgetting that Lowe was essentially a country/pub rocker for the previous 10 years.

Godley & Creme - Babies (1981)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQlieiOnui0

and my personal favourite.

Alvin Stardust - Luxury
B-side of I Feel Like Buddy Holly.
Released in 1984 but sounds like it was recorded a couple of years earlier. Would love to have a whole LP of this style

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7UBQ8uQSTM

Tangentially related note: were there any big 60s or 70s stars who continued through the 80s doing the exact same style they became famous for? There must be some but I can't think of any. Seems like pretty much none of them took that path.

maybe The Kinks?

James Brown, perhaps?

James Taylor?

Just reading some debate about Jim Morrison as either being godfather of goth or godfather of punk up thread.
On one side black leather and gloomy portentous/pretentious lyricism on the other what could be more punk than presciently getting your Dad to start the Vietnam war so you could have more of a counterculture audience to be an icon to and then claiming your parents were dead to disown them.

Tangentially related note: were there any big 60s or 70s stars who continued through the 80s doing the exact same style they became famous for? There must be some but I can't think of any. Seems like pretty much none of them took that path.

good call imo