CONTENTS
ISSUE 12
Luigi Orru/Music Pics/REX
Steve Lukather of Toto rants and raves in his inimitable style on p64.
46 Chicago
Jason Scheff stirs up the excitement for Chicago’s newest release, Chicago XXXVI: Now. Worth the wait?
48 Saga
After a break from the band, founder and lead singer Michael Sadler is back and rather chuffed to be talking about music past, present and future.
54 Baby Animals
concert DVD, how he dislikes the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame and what the deal is with a new album.
frankly rather bonkers career, from hair-metallers Femme Fatale to modern-day reality TV success.
70 New England
86 Now & Then
They were on the verge of the big league… then they received more encores than Kiss and everything went to hell. Intrigued?
78 That Metal Show
Suze DeMarchi and Baby Animals have many stories to tell. So here, we let them tell them. Enjoy.
We talk to the guys behind VH-1 Classic’s longest-running series. They reveal which artists like them (and which ones don’t).
64 Toto
82 Femme Fatale
Steve Lukather discusses Toto’s
Lorraine Lewis looks back on her
Vega 52 Surprising AOR Albums 60 Dan Reed Network 90
We take a look back at a truly groudbreaking label that helped launch some truly original AOR acts.
34
Kansas Huge, world-conquering yet riven by its members’ differing religious convictions: here’s their story.
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CONTENTS
will ireland/teamrock
ISSUE 12
Dan Reed Network: throwing plenty more shapes on p90.
REVIEWS 10 Best Shot
We’ve never showcased a new band on our Hit Me With Your Best Shot photo spread before. But we have now – so get a taste of Tempt!
12 On Air
All the gossip AOR can squeeze into a news section without it popping, including Seven Hard Years, Pat Benatar, Kylie’s Column, Keyboard Kings, Million $ Misfits, Train and more. Also: Bret Michaels on how best to trash a hotel room.
28 Classic Ads
Up in a dank, dark loft somewhere west of London lurk all manner of crusty, dusty old music mags. We couldn’t do Classic Ads without ’em.
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29 AOR Obsessions
Ken McIntyre on the bizarre chimera that was the All Sports Band.
30 Q&AOR
Loverboy guitarist Paul Dean on why he loved the 80s, the joy of recording new music and how it’s weird to be accused of miming when you’re, er, not.
32 Retro Perspective
Dave Reynolds slips on the rosetinted specs and looks back at White Lion’s 1985 wonder Fight To Survive.
130 Hi Infidelities Ryan Roxie (Alice Cooper, Casablanca and Roxie 77) spills the beans on a few naughty secrets.
97
Album, reissue and live reviews with Loverboy, Kix, Miss Behaviour, Houston, Tempt, the Monsters Of Rock Cruise and much more.
State troopers: Kansas clown for Creem magazine, 1977. (L-r) Robby Steinhardt, Steve Walsh, Kerry Livgren, Rich Williams, Dave Hope, Phil Ehart.
Don Kirshner understood that artists need nurturing – he let the band evolve and took a lot of risks. Rich Williams
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NEIL ZLOZOWER/ATLASICONS.COM
From the very heartlands of America came a band with the skill and vision to fuse AOR with prog rock, delivering a majestic sound all their own, and even scoring hit singles along the way. But once the money started rolling in, disputes over direction and religion tore them asunder. Words: Derek Oliver
anished to a desert island, I’d have a hard time contemplating which Kansas album to take with me. That’s a tough nut to chew on but if someone stuck a copy of Point Of Know Return in my pocket I wouldn’t exactly kick up a fuss. There are some bands you love and some bands you simply just can’t live without, and I’m not afraid to say that Kansas are one of the latter. Every time I hear their music I’m like Nipper, the little dog that used to sit next to the big gramophone horn in old HMV adverts. Nothing can drag me away. And what a story they have to tell: a bunch of straw-behind-the-ears Midwesterners coming together in a rural landscape to craft a mesmerising
blend of sublime AOR and progressive rock. How could that be possible for people so culturally isolated? I mean, if they’d been born in New York or Los Angeles you’d be impressed, certainly, maybe even surprised, but not totally flummoxed. The fact that Kansas – the band, not the state – came up with such an incredibly complex and highly developed sound coming from Kansas – the state, not the band – is remarkable. It was such a stunning achievement that you’d almost wager they must be from another planet. In a way, they may as well be. The unfolding story of this band gets weirder as time goes by, and recently, with the departure of frontman Steve Walsh, the tale has taken yet another twist. Just prior to their recent European tour, I was given the telephone numbers of the last two
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NEIL ZLOZOWER/ATLASICONS.COM
Sony Legacy/PRESS
Carry on my wayward sunset.
Jesus is just alright with him: Kerry Livgren, onstage with Kansas, 1977.
original members of the band – drummer Phil Ehart and guitarist Rich Williams – with instructions to call them and get the lowdown on all the important bits of the band’s twisting history. This roughly equates to throwing a big spotlight on the band’s first six or so albums, the ones leading up to Walsh’s first exit from the band. I catch Williams in a particularly jovial mood, bouncing around his council flat and roaring with laughter, which in itself is quite a surprise, considering how serious the band’s music can be. So, Rich: may I ask if the eyepatch is a sort of showbiz prop or is it actually functional? I’ve been contemplating wearing one myself recently in order to cultivate some thespian gravitas. 36 classicrockmagazine.com
“Well, I’ve been wearing it since I was 14,” he notes, with a serious tone. “As a kid I made a bomb on the fourth of July which went off prematurely and, consequently, blew the shit out of me and the eyeball out of my head, and from that moment on I wore a glass eye. It was never very comfortable. They sort of make you look a bit odd in photo shoots – cock-eyed. I got tired of that so I started to wear an eye patch and I’ve never looked back!” Let’s analyse the layers of Kansas’ golden years. First, though, maybe we should refresh ourselves with some background details – like a sort of musical Time Team special, picking our way over the very origins of the band. The year is 1970 and, fired up by the onslaught of British prog taking the US by storm, a fightback
of sorts is organised in, of all places, Topeka, the capital of Kansas. Following a bit of cross-pollination, two local bands eventually join force to take on the enemy, under the snappy handle of White Clover. The combined unit feature guitarist Kerry Livgren, violinist Robbie Steinhardt, guitarist Rich Williams, bassist Dave Hope, drummer Phil Ehart and vocalist Steve Walsh: effectively Kansas, but not officially dubbed as such until their debut album four years later. Ehart was a much-travelled man, having previously taken a trip to the UK with the idea of recruiting British musicians for his project. Returning to Topeka empty-handed, he hired these homebrew sidemen and the band got down and dirty in various rehearsal spaces, trying to outdo the likes of Yes, Jethro Tull and Genesis. Spending an inordinate amount of time practising and honing their skills to perfection, they recorded a demo at an eight-track demo studio in Liberal, Kansas, and played local shows, even supporting The Doors on one occasion. But, after sending out their demo-tape, all they received in response was rejection letters from every label under the sun. Then something very odd happened. Somehow their demo came across the desk of Don Kirshner, a unique and influential figure in the entertainment world. An old-school impresario, Kirshner was the kind of guy who had his fingers in several pies, with connections at every level – not least at Columbia Records, where he had negotiated a deal for his own boutique record label, a company called Kirshner, presumably so that nobody world forget that he was the boss. For Kansas this label was very good news, as Don’s team promptly fell in love the band and, equally promptly, signed them up. The label also leaned heavily on the group to call themselves Kansas, a name they were pretty used to by that point. “A fellow named Buster Newmann presented us to Mr Kirshner,” Steve Walsh recalled in an online diary. “We never met Buster, but we were all pretty sure he was “kansas is koming!” black by the way he sounded So ran the print ads for on the phone. I’m not trying Kansas’ 1974 debut LP, to sound racist when I say though the message that. He would sometimes call fell on deaf ears, with self-titled offering to his wife and say: ‘Come talk the only reaching No.174 to da boys, Beverly.’ And then on the Billboard charts, while singles Can I Tell a voice would say in and Lonely Wind a pleasant way: ‘Hello boys…’ You failed to chart at all. And what’s funny is I think it
cutout: kevin nikon
Don Hunstein/Sony Legacy/PRESS
Kansas kick back while in the recording studio. (And for those of you reading this mag in black and white, the red mushroom is behind the pink.)
Kansas’ music is so much bigger than the individuals – the songs have taken on a life of their own. Rich Williams
very well could have been Buster disguising his voice to sound like a woman. It had that kind of quality. How he got the tape was a mystery to us, but when he first called, we were playing in a very dank and lonely basement of a bar in Dodge City, Kansas.” he debut self-titled Kansas album, recorded in New York City at the world-famous Record Plant Studios, was produced by Wally Gold, which on the face of it was an ill-matched coupling. Wally had spent most of the 1960s working with middle-of-theroad acts including Nat King Cole, Pat Boone and Tony Bennett. In an interesting twist of fate, one of the assistant engineers on the record was Jimmy Iovine, later to co-found Interscope Records and eventually, with Dr Dre, the mastermind behind the multi-million disposal of the Beats headphone range to Apple Inc.
“We went to New York in the dead of winter to rehearse with Wally,” recalled Steve. “We felt great in his presence, or at least I did. Don Kirshner had sent him out to see us play in a small town in western Kansas [practically everything is west of Topeka] and we set it up so that there was free beer before Wally arrived. When he came in, what he saw was an over-the-top crowd. Of course they were all shitfaced. “In New York everything was magic. We were all in our mid-20s and had a few bucks in our pockets. We stayed on 48th and 8th, at the Ramada Inn. Wally recorded us in two segments. We did some songs, then went home and returned to do the rest.” Looking back, it seems odd that as pop impresario such as Don
Kirshner would’ve been attracted to a progressive rock band like Kansas. “It wasn’t like we were courting a lot of record deals,” admits Williams. “That was our only offer and we really wanted to make a record so we just said: ‘Okay let’s do this.’ We signed the deal. All we knew about Don Kirshner was The Monkees, and funnily enough he had problems with them because he felt they were starting to get too progressive and psychedelic. “He may have been an old-school guy but he understood that artists needed nurturing – he gave us tour support and let the band evolve. He did that for three albums and kept paying the bills. He took a lot of risk. I’m sure that everyone over at CBS was asking if he’d lost his mind. You don’t get that in a record company any more where they keep on believing in you.” Production issues aside, the Kansas album, issued in 1974, was lauded for its unique style and intricate songs, including Death Of Mother Nature Suite, Belexes and the awesome Journey From Mariabronn, a defining track that featured in the band’s live set for several years. While their debut classicrockmagazine.com 37
Baby Animals far outreached any dreams that I had for a band. I didn’t expect much but I expected to do something good.
This is not the end: Suze DeMarchi today, on the upswing of a comeback.
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Suze DeMarchi escaped becoming a Stock, Aitken & Waterman popstrel to create Baby Animals. As the group re-form after two decades, they tell all about Van Halen orgies, divorce and how life’s too short for bitterness. Words: Steve Mascord
Animals mk 1
1991’s self-titled debut album topped the Australian charts, reaching No.70 in the UK. But while 1993’s Shaved And Dangerous debuted at No.2 in Australia, sales soon fatally fell away.
om Morello played Bulls On Parade for my daughter’s twelfth birthday party,” Suze DeMarchi says, raising an eyebrow just slightly. The Australian chanteuse’s long-time foil, Dave Leslie, interjects: “It was fucking unbelievable. I’ve got it on film.” DeMarchi wonders whether she, too, has footage of the Rage Against The Machine song, and then outdoes herself. “And Steve Perry got up and sang happy birthday to Bebe as well. She’s had a pretty good run…” We are in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Alexandria, a haven for light industry and hideous buildings, located close enough to the airport for jets to roar overhead every few minutes. At a rickety table in near darkness are Suze and Leslie, singer and guitarist with cult (if you’re from anywhere but Australia) rockers Baby Animals. Although their rehearsal space, Top End Sound, is relatively new, our gathering could easily have convened almost a quarter-century earlier in any one of a number of nearby studios, back when Suze and Dave were enthralling Antipodeans with Baby Animals’
punchy, catchy and commercial selftitled debut. But, back then, Suze would be telling very different stories. In 1991, she was not yet the former-Mrs-NunoBettencourt. Gavin Rossdale may have already written Comedown, on Bush’s six-million-selling album 16 Stone, about his experiences dating her, but no one had heard it. Baby Animals had not yet broken up, DeMarchi had not moved to America, and she had not reunited with – and then split from – the other two founding members, bassist Eddie Parise and drummer Frank Celenza. Not only has the experience of being in a rock’n’roll power-couple given DeMarchi some yarns to tell journalists, it’s informed the heart-wrenchingly confessional Baby Animals comeback album, This Is Not The End. And so here we are, in 2014. Suze, 50, has aged spectacularly well, although our interview almost took place over the phone despite us being in the same city, due to a persistent neck complaint for which she has just seen a doctor. “Whatever you do, you want a lot of people to hear it,” says DeMarchi, devouring a health shake with a similar hue to that of plutonium. “That’s one of the reasons we
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Baby Animals, all grown up now: (l-r) Dario Bortolin, Suze DeMarchi, Mick Skelton, Dave Leslie.
Reunited and dangerous: live at The Standard, Sydney, Australia, April 23, 2013.
David Petranker/Alamy
re-released [This Is Not The End] with added stuff. We don’t have a big label behind us throwing everything they’ve got at it. It’s really up to us to get it out as much as we can. “I moved back to Australia, probably, three years ago now. When I moved back, we started on it pretty much straight away, within six months. This is the end of the cycle now.” But this is not the end. DeMarchi was never destined for an ordinary life. The daughter of a singer and a panel-beater from Perth, Western Australia, she was warbling in local bars by the age of 17, despite her sister being the one who received formal training as a singer. Suze went to London in the late 80s with a £1 million EMI record deal – but like most young Australians in the capital to this day, she spent most of her time and money getting drunk. “I was really broke when I lived in London,” recalls DeMarchi. “I had a big record deal there but I didn’t have any money. I was temping and doing all sorts of stuff to make money. I was on the dole there for a while.” She worked at Abbey Road, with the likes of Steve Lillywhite and Simon Climie, and released three pop-rock singles while rebelling against pressure to enter hitmaking factories such as that of Stock, Aitken and Waterman. Back then, record companies could just write off such insubordination as a bad investment. Her return to Australia led to the union with Leslie, Parise and Celenza, management with raconteur John Woodruff, and becoming the marquee signing for Imago Records, a company formed by key figures from Chrysalis. Baby Animals’ first appearance on record came when Adelaide rockers The Angels chose to feature demos by three new groups – all of whom had recently toured with The Angels – as the flipside to their 1990 single Dogs Are Talking. An embryonic take of Baby Animals’ Break My Heart took its place alongside tracks by the long-forgotten Hurricanes and Desert Cats, and the group were off and running. Despite her delicate good looks,
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DeMarchi swore like a sailor and things take a really dramatic turn. threw herself into touring and its It’s also where children Bebe, now attendant excesses like a seasoned 18, and Lorenzo, 11, join our road dog. It was a bankable narrative. Extreme guitarist Nuno combination of beauty and Bettencourt saw Suze on MTV, humorous coarseness at a time obtained her phone number when hard rock was still holding through management, and its own, with grunge merely invited her to see the band in a growing speck on the horizon. London during December 1992. DeMarchi & co to tour the UK Before long, Baby Animals were One of DeMarchi’s favourite again? Don’t treading the boards at Wembley yarns unfurled that very night. bet on it… Arena supporting Bryan Adams When AOR asks where She became excited when and when Suze and attending Van Halen’s Queen’s Brian May saw her beneath-stage party/orgies as the DeMarchi and Dave backstage and crossed the room Leslie think Baby megastars’ US support band. towards her. Flattered such an Animals’ UK presence DeMarchi says Sammy Hagar’s died, the latter icon would recognise her, Suze answers: “I think, for bacchanalian mid-show breaks, was more than nonplussed when me, it stopped halfway as described in his biography, between Glasgow and he asked her to iron his shirt. weren’t even the best party in the Edinburgh, in the toilet DeMarchi and Bettencourt nearest square few feet. Although of a bus called the later married in Portugal, hiring Nighthawk II, when Hagar wore a robe onstage after a DC-10 to fly in their families someone did a poo. Michael Anthony’s bass solo to and friends. That’s where it stopped for me.” hide an erection, it was The follow-up to Baby DeMarchi laughs Anthony’s party during Eddie Animals’ 1991 self-titled debut, heartily, the way close Van Halen’s spot you really 1993’s Shaved & Dangerous (named friends do. “That was it. We’re never going wanted to go to. after a magazine in their Bahamas back. You never want “[Hagar’s] was boring,” she recording studio that was not, it’s to relive that. People recalls. “Michael Anthony’s was safe to say, aimed at barbers), was are often asking when we’re going to come rocking. His was the one, the less successful, but still made its back and play the UK. ‘Tiki Terrace’.” Australian chart debut at No.2. I’d love to go back On one occasion, infamous In the meantime, DeMarchi there and play but it groupie ‘Sweet’ Connie Hamzy and Bettencourt moved to Boston would have to work for us financially.” asked Suze for permission to to raise a family. Baby Animals’ fellate her band. She said yes, they label Imago collapsed in late said no. As Van Halen’s For Unlawful Carnal 1994. Legal battles ensued, to the point Knowledge tour wore on, and groupies there was soon no band to fight over. began to liaise romantically with the A DeMarchi solo album, Telelove, made roadies’ torches in the beneath-stage bar, few ripples, even in Oz. the Australians began to give the parties In a recent interview with Australian a wide berth, too. Rolling Stone, Suze described intense What happened next, however, is where feelings of “displacement” living in
Suze enjoys a rare moment of peace during the chaotic promotional duties for the first Baby Animals album.
inspirations for some of the new songs, she looks back defiantly. “Email? You fucking sent it in an email, you know? What do you want me to say? “The songs are really self-explanatory and they are written in moments where you have a need or a desire to share that feeling or that emotion.” During and after the dissolution of her marriage, the band would become DeMarchi’s refuge. But as she emerged from what she described as a psychological “haze”, more conflict and recrimination was just around the corner. The precursor to a full Baby Animals reunion came with an acoustic album, featuring DeMarchi, Leslie and
former Noiseworks man Justin Stanley, and a song which would end up on This Is Not The End: Stitch. Eventually Leslie, Celenza and Parise flew out to Los Angeles. Leslie: “We did re-form, we did have a bit of a run, we did try to write another album. And all we did was argue. All we did was bring up this old shit that should have been left behind. All it was, was airing our dirty laundry and it was no fun. It got to the point where ‘if it was going to be like this, I’d rather not do it’. I want to go out and play with people who are actually enjoying themselves.” He adds: “There was a lot of resentment against Suze for marrying Nuno and
I was temping and doing all sorts of stuff to make money. I was on the dole for a while.
this is not the end
ross halfin
Beantown, and then Los Angeles. She underwent therapy, and was placed on medication. DeMarchi returned to Australia in 2009, with her marriage ending the following year. “I wouldn’t have left,” she told an interviewer. “It took him to leave.” The schism was the catalyst for the song Email: ‘I don’t wanna be with you anymore/You wanna be with me… Please, please when you look for me/Don’t look for that girl/That I used to be/You won’t find me.’ DeMarchi, to this old hack, is a different girl than she used to be: more wary, more determined, less frivolous. When I begin asking about the
The quality of Baby Animals’ comeback album will have true fans replying, “Good!” Be sure to snag the ‘Fully Loaded’ edition, which boasts a full CD’s worth of fresh live recordings.
moving away, you know, effectively dismantling the band. Man, both those guys held that quite firmly and were very resentful. “ DeMarchi: “When Dave and I worked together on the acoustic record, that’s when we started talking about ‘let’s do another Baby Animals record’. Then I started talking to Eddie and Frank and they said ‘we’ll come over’. They stayed at my house for, probably, two or three weeks. We worked on ideas, some ideas. We didn’t get very far with most of them. “We got in a rehearsal room and it became apparent there was some animosity there. People were still pissed off about stuff that had happened 10 years beforehand. It was, like, what? So we did a tour, still thinking positively that this could work. But it was just too hard. “I love working with Dave. The band is, kind of, him and I. When you’re spending so much time trying to appease everyone and explain… life’s too short. When people start to lose that faith in what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, you’re never going to help them to understand. If they don’t understand why you do things a certain way, if the way you’re writing is… the spark has to be there from somewhere. If you’re getting knocked down when you’re presenting things, or ideas even, about the band, not even musical ones, it’s not a good working environment.” classicrockmagazine.com 57
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