Back from my guitar lesson which
interrupted the Boston/Toronto overtime.
I taped it, which means at this very moment I do not know who won the
game, but will be watching it when I’m done this review. It’s a little distracting, but I’ll do my
best to focus on the music.
Disc 512 is…. Johnny the Fox
Year of Release: 1977
What’s up with the Cover? This is one of those covers from an era where you
could do a lot more with album art, because vinyl was so much bigger. Reduced down to compact disc size it gets a
little hard to sort out. Near as I can
tell this is some sort of ancient alien artifact, no doubt unearthed by ancient
Celts (who subsequently decorated it with some of their fancy knot-work) and
then used it as a wildlife viewer.
Currently, they’re looking at a very mangy fox who – we must assume – is
named Johnny. What, you have a better
theory?
How I Came To Know It: As I noted when I reviewed “Jailbreak” back at Disc 360, my friend Spence is heavily into Thin Lizzy. When I really loved “Jailbreak” I asked him
for his next Thin Lizzy recommendation, and he suggested “Johnny the Fox.”
How It Stacks Up: When I wrote my last Thin Lizzy review it was
January 2012 and since that time I’ve bought four more of their albums,
bringing my total to five. Of those five
I’d put “Johnny the Fox” second, close behind “Jailbreak.”
Rating: 4 stars
While my
journey through Thin Lizzy’s music is far from complete, my favourite albums so
far (“Fighting”, “Jailbreak and “Johnny the Fox’) are all in a glorious row in
the middle of the seventies.
The
subject matter of Johnny the Fox covers the usual Thin Lizzy range from the basic
struggles of the working class man through to the fantastical. It doesn’t really matter what these guys sing
about, because Phil makes it all sound good.
Believe me when you can make “Cocky
Rocky, the rock and roll star” resonate as a lyric, you’ve fully committed
to a song.
Of
course, it is helped by Phil Lynott’s talent.
Lynott’s voice is smooth, smoky and instantly recognizable. It is a voice made to sing rock and roll. Grounding
Lynott’s bluesy, hard rock/lounge lizard voice in something edgier is guitarist
Brian Robertson, who plays a lick with the best of them, doing so in an era
where the best of them were all still hard at work.
All
that, and that song (“Rocky”) isn’t
even one of my favourite tracks on the album.
For a true masterpiece of Lynott’s rap-rock stylings and Robertson’s
guitar, I recommend track five, “Fool’s
Gold.” This song has everything guitar
riffs, Lynott telling a tale of the hard done by working class Irish, including
a weird spoken-word intro about the terrible famine in that nation’s history.
When I
first heard “Fool’s Gold” it sounded
oddly familiar, and after a while I realized how much the initial riff sounds
like the hook for Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me
With Your Best Shot.” This didn’t
really bother me because a) imitation is the highest form of flattery and b) I’ve
got a soft spot for Pat Benatar. In
fact, I am missing the album with “Hit Me
With Your Best Shot” – I’ll have to get that…but I digress.
Back to
the awesomeness that is “Johnny the Fox,” which builds on “Fool’s Gold” with the gratuitously yet gloriously titled, “Johnny the Fox Meets Jimmy the Weed.” This song infuses proto-rap, and R&B-inspired
grooves with the guitar licks, showing yet another side of the always versatile,
but ever-rocking Thin Lizzy. This is a
song about the urban underworld of drug dealers and dangerous neighbourhoods.
It connects
nicely with the album’s final track, “Boogie
Woogie Dance” which has a frenetic flower-power feel to it. Here we have the end customer for Johnny the
Fox’s illicit activities, dancing with wild abandon under the influence of
God-knows-what. The production on this
song has a deliberate fuzziness and lack of focus, as Lynott sings about
popping pills and freaking out.
The
album also has a softer side, with ballads like “Borderline,” “Old Flame”
and “Sweet Marie.” Remember AM radio? All those sappy and saccharine ballads about
love? Those were songs that made you
think about long days in the summer, cruising around town, meeting girls and
hanging out at the beach with your radio on the hood of your muscle car.
Well –
imagine if those AM radio songs didn’t suck.
Imagine instead they had some substance beyond just their melodies, with
some tasteful guitar licks and a guy singing who actually sounded like he knew
something about heartache that he hadn’t learned about from a Harlequin
romance. If AM radio had love songs as
good as the ones on “Johnny the Fox” I might never have turned my back on the
radio.
I’m glad
I did though, because turning my back on the radio is what encouraged me to get
into buying complete albums, and that in turn one day helped lead me to delve
into Thin Lizzy when given the suggestion by a good friend. It led me to great records like “Johnny the
Fox” that North America has sadly forgotten; records that desperately need to
be remembered. But how will people ever
hear about an album like this, so they’ll go and better their music collections
by buying it for themselves?
Well, if
you’ve read this far, I think you’ve just answered that question. Now get out there and do yourself that
favour.
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