Between 1976 and 1986, album-oriented rock reached a commercial and creative peak. FM radio, major label budgets and a new generation of virtuoso players combined to produce records built for wide highways and packed arenas. The five songs chosen by Paul Rees, author of Raised on Radio: Power Ballads, Cocaine and Payola, capture that moment at its height.
JOURNEY ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ (1981)
Jonathan Cain’s rolling piano. Neal Schon’s spiralling guitar notes, approaching like an express train from out of a tunnel. The whole band crashing in, and then that voice rising up. Steve Perry, the greatest singer of his generation singing the era’s greatest song. Forty-five years after it opened the Escape album, titled after an entreaty Cain’s father would give him, and the magic of ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ goes on and on.
TOTO ‘Hold the Line’ (1978)
David Paich copped the piano riff from Sly and the Family Stone’s ‘Hot Fun in the Summertime’. The rest, Jeff Porcaro’s swinging drum part, Steve Lukather’s jabbing riff, Bobby Kimball’s high tenor lead vocal, is all Toto. The debut single as benchmark. Five years later, Paich, Porcaro, Lukather, and keyboardist Steve Porcaro brought the same chops to Michael Jackson’s Thriller album as its de facto house band.
BOSTON ‘More Than a Feeling’ (1976)
Tom Scholz, working as a researcher at Polaroid at the time, crafted ‘More Than a Feeling’ in the basement of his Boston home, playing all the instruments but for the drums himself and using second-hand studio equipment. Singer Brad Delp took his words of unrequited love to the stratosphere. The song that kicked off Boston’s debut album not only birthed AOR, but also an alt-rock anthem. Kurt Cobain used Scholz’s signature riff as inspiration for Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.
PAT BENATAR ‘Love is a Battlefield’
Tasked by her record label with conjuring a studio single to go with her Live from Earth in-concert album of 1983, Benatar and guitarist-husband Neil Giraldo alighted upon ‘Love is a Battlefield’, written by the hit machine pairing of Mike Chapman and Holly Knight. Experimenting with a drum machine, Giraldo radically refit the song to a danceable beat, Benatar’s typically sassy vocal did the rest. Chapman hated what they’d done to his creation and up until the moment it became a smash.
BRYAN ADAMS ‘Summer of 69’
Adams and long-time collaborator Jim Vallance wrote this sat facing each other on two stools, blank sheets of paper in their laps, trading lines drawn from both of their recollections of growing up on Canada’s west coast. The girl standing on her “mama’s porch” was Betty Donaldson, Vallance’s first schoolboy crush. Originally, they titled it ‘Best Days of My Life’ before a last-minute change of heart. “Miraculously, ‘Summer of 69’ worked,” said Vallance. “It elevated the song immeasurably.”
Further information
Raised on Radio: Power Ballads, Cocaine and Payola: The AOR Glory Years 1976 – 1986 by Paul Rees is out on 24 February (£25, Constable).
