796. The Motels, Little Robbers (1983)

The Motels had their earliest rumbling in 1971. That’s the year a charismatic, distinctive singer and guitarist named Martha Davis connect with several other California musicians to form a band called the Warfield Foxes. They later became Angels of Mercy before settling on the Motels, the moniker under which they recorded a demo that was shopped to the labels. Warner Bros. turned them down, but Capitol Records offered a contract. The group opted against it, though, and everything fell apart.

In the late nineteen-seventies, Davis decided to try again. After reestablishing themselves on the scene, Capitol’s interest was revived and this time the band bit. From there, it was a tenacious grind toward success. The Motels’ first two albums did middling business and yielded no singles that could gain traction on the Billboard charts. For their third full-length, the band hired Val Garay to produce, just as he was riding high from serving the same role on “Bette Davis Eyes,” the massive hit from Kim Carnes. Despite that pedigree, Capitol wasn’t enamored with the album as initially presented to them, deeming it weird and sending everyone back to the studio to try again. The second time was the charm, and the resulting album, All Four One, was a breakthrough, led by the Top 10 hit “Only the Lonely.”

Little Robbers was the band’s follow-up, and it largely adhered to the template. Garay was back behind the board, and he followed his previous practice of freely incorporating the work of studio session musicians alongside that of the regular (albeit somewhat volatile) lineup of the Motels. In one of the simplest measures, the approach succeeded. Lead single “Suddenly Last Summer,” which was a twin to “Only the Lonely,” took the band back to the Billboard Top 10. Like the earlier hit, the single peaked at #9 and had a constant MTV presence that gave it the aura of something yet bigger.

There are other spots where Little Robbers is clearly emulating previous musical triumphs, notably on the ruminative “Tables Turned” and even the comparatively upbeat “Where Do We Go From Here (Nothing Sacred),” which is all churning high drama. But the album is also impressively wide-ranging, exhibiting an exploratory rambunctiousness that puts it in line with other new wave wonders of the era. The jabbing energy of “Trust Me” and the fun, skipping title cut provide added zing to the record.

Among its other notable results, Little Robbers taught the Motels the risks that come with success, especially when a little hubris is in the mix. When the band went on tour to support the album, they insisted on headliner status and toting around an elaborate stage show set, leading to significant financial distress.

“We went out and lost sixty grand a week,” David later told Billboard. “It was so demoralizing.”

 

 

795. Lou Reed, The Blue Mask (1982)

Rock ‘n’ roll stars weren’t supposed to push into middle age. That was part of the implicit contract, though the tenet was mostly predicated on a lack of precedent, which in turn provided little notion about how the common topics of swooning romance and raucous misbehavior might cede the floor to more mature concerns. Rocking around the clock can get problematic when there are mortgage payments to worry about. Approaching his fortieth birthday as he recorded The Blue Mask, Lou Reed was obligated to grapple with precisely that evolution.

“Life is made up of a lot of things,” Reed observed later. “You could write about moon and spoon forever, and leave any other realistic feeling you have out of the songbook. I don’t understand why you would, and yet if you include the rest of your life in it, you’re called negative, dark.”

After a few years signed to Arista Records, Reed was back on RCA, the label where he’d launched his solo career. He was also in the first years of his marriage to Sylvia Morales. Robert Quine, formerly a member of Richard Hell’s backing band the Voidoids, was brought in to play guitars on The Blue Mask. All of these changes enlivened Reed’s creativity, even as he pushed his lyrics into areas that alternated between mundane concerns and deep probes into his own frailties and anxieties. Occasionally, the disparate qualities coexist in the same song, as with  “My House,” on which Reed casually explains becoming uniquely acquainted with a new domicile included the moment “Sylvia and I got out our ouija board,” discovering the ghost of poet Delmore Schwartz, Reed’s onetime mentor, had taken up residence, too. “I really got a lucky life,” sings Reed. “My writing, my motorcycle, and my wife/ And to top it all off a spirit of pure poetry/ Is living in this stone and wood house with me.”

The feeling of personal contentment doesn’t last. “Underneath the Bottle” and “Waves of Fear” pair pummeling music with Reed’s consideration of the wreckage of substance addiction and the agony of going clean, topics much on his mind as he was about a year into the Alcoholics Anonymous program. And the corroding steel wall of noise of the title cut carries lyrics of fairly graphic brutality (“The pain was lean and it made him scream/ He knew he was alive/ He put a pin through the nipples on his chest/ He thought he was a saint”). It wasn’t solely a contrast with the sunnier side of pop that made Reed seem dark.

 

 

794. The Plimsouls, The Plimsouls (1981)

“The record wasn’t produced with the kind of sound we wanted,” Peter Case said of the self-titled debut by his band the Plimsouls. “The material was popular live, but the production didn’t capture that.”

Formed in the late nineteen-seventies after Case’s previous band, the Nerves, broke up after a single EP, the Plimsouls steadily built a reputation in the very fertile Los Angeles scene, which at the time notably also include the Go-Go’s. If that band rode a modernized version of girl group sassy romanticism to the top of charts, the Plimsouls represented the boys playing the sock hop in the rougher part of town, influenced by the Kinks instead of the Ronettes.

Case might have found — and might still find — The Plimsouls lacking, but it sounds to me like a ceaselessly charming collection of power pop confectioneries. Led by the marvelous “Lost Time,” the album clicks efficiently through songs built around irresistible hooks and chiming, soaring instrumentation. There’s the Elvis Costello-style assault of “This Town,” the greaser prowl “Women,” and the Beatles-in-the-Cavern-Club controlled recklessness of “Hush Hush.” The band even finds a little funkiness within them, in the midpoint breakdown of “I Want What You Got” and their cover of Wilson Pickett’s “Mini Skirt Minnie,” which sounds like Archie Bell and the Drells after a handful of downers.

The band’s discontentment with the album was significant enough to prompt the wrangling necessary to leave their label, Planet Records. They signed on with Geffen Records instead, but fared no better commercially, despite a boost in prominence thanks to their inclusion on the Valley Girl soundtrack. By the middle of the nineteen-eighties, the Plimsouls were no more, and Case moved on to a widely respected solo career.

 

 

793. Nick Lowe, The Abominable Showman (1983)

Nearly ten years after the end of his band Brinsley Schwarz and three years removed from his rollicking sidebar with Dave Edmunds and Rockpile, Nick Lowe was figuring out who he wanted to be on record. By most assessments, Lowe’s fourth solo album, The Abominable Showman, is one of the weaker efforts of his solo career. Lowe himself gives it a subpar grade, later saying he’d “sort of lost the plot” by this point. That there is still so much to like on the record is a testament to Lowe’s perpetually underrated skills as a songwriter.

Lowe was in the early years of his marriage to country music performer Carlene Carter (which ended in divorce in 1990) and a certain amount of down home Americana seeps into The Abominable Showman. Carter co-wrote both the smooth “We Want Action” and the mid-tempo, Squeeze-like “Time Wounds All Heels,” the latter of which finds her pitching in on vocals. There’s an easy playfulness to these cuts and others, such as “Tanque-Rae,” on which Lowe gives it his best Elvis swagger. And the bright, vintage rock “Raging Eyes” is Lowe as his most sly and endearing.  “Wish You Were Here” is sunk by some hokey lyrics (“You’re OK/ You’re alright/ Don’t have to be blind to know that you’re out of sight”) and “Saint Beneath the Paint” does come across as muddled, as if Lowe is trying to mix together the ingredients of a half-remembered recipe for hits.

The Abominable Showman winds up as oddly lovely log pile of almosts. In that way, it’s as accurate a reflection of Lowe’s career as anything else he ever signed his name to.

To learn more about this gigantic endeavor, head over to the introduction. Other entries can be found at the CMJ Top 1000 tag. Most of the images in these posts come straight from the invaluable Discogs.