Shooting Star - "Hang On For Your Life"
1981
I recently went on a late seventies/early eighties AOR detour, caused by viewing the video of April Wine's "Enough Is Enough", which entirely took place on a semi and featured: 1) Myles Goodwyn singing into a CB radio handset as the rest of the band was crammed into the cab, and 2) Canadian girls dressed oh-so-early-eighties. Soon enough, I was ears-deep into 707, Axe, Duke Jupiter, Billy Thorpe etc. etc. etc. Maybe this is some sort of decades-later overreaction to not having an AOR station in Grand Forks throughout most of high school and college. KKDQ-FM was AOR until 1981, when it became Top 40 XL93. Q98 out of Fargo was just out of range and my sister made fun of me for listening to its static when it came in on cloudy days. My response was that the static was better than all of Grand Forks radio. (I make a lot of Q98 references here during Tuesday Tuneage, my folks have a cabin an hour east of Fargo, so I got the station out there during summers and through most of the commutes to and from there.)
With nobody to toss me a rope, this recent downward spiral through decades-old AOR continued. And so I ended up at Shooting Star, a Kansas City group that had some success thirty years ago or so. "Hang On For Your Life" is faster than the norm, meaning that punk had allowed the speed limit to be raised in AOR Land. Then again, maybe they were going back to Led Zeppelin's "Good Times, Bad Times" for speed clues. There are working-class nods in the lyrics: "Working hard to make a living", "union scale", and mention of some sort of muscle car. (Also something about needing a strong drink, this song probably wasn't big with the MADD crowd, but hey at least they advised seat belt use, pretty forward thinking in 1981!)
The tune is chock-full of obvious Zep and BadCo influences and is close to being typical faceless early eighties AOR, but there is a certain appeal as you blast in on headphones: 1) Its speed, 2) The vocalist's kinda-raspy voice, 3) The production. Typically with a band like this and a chance at a hit with a hook-filled song, you would expect some studio gloss. Thankfully none of that nonsense shows up here. Maybe being on the Virgin label helped, maybe producer Dennis McKay knew the right touch with which to handle the sound. Whatever the theory, the bare-bones sound completes the charm. Not to mention that Hang On For Your Life is one of my fave album covers, maybe even the favorite of any album I don't actually own. Any child of the seventies who had the Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle would absolutely be drawn in by it.
Special Bonus Addendum: A Google image search of Shooting Star indicates some sort of "get haircuts in order to look relevant" transformation for the band. (Remember Metallica before and after Load?) Check out Shooting Star's "before" look and "after" look. Alas, I didn't find what years these photos are from and apparently the haircuts also shed a band member, perhaps going to the Kansas Music Hall of Fame on a fact-finding mission is in order to clear this matter up.