To paraphrase Charlton Heston in Planet Of The Apes<\/i>: \u201cDamn you, \u201980s! Damn you all to hell!\u201d<\/p>\n
Hagar Schon Aaronson Shrieve (a.k.a. HSAS) is one of those ideas that must have looked great on paper. It began with the 1983 teaming of solo frontman Sammy Hagar\u2014nine years gone from Montrose and two years shy of joining Van Halen\u2014and restless Journey guitarist Neal Schon. The two Bay Area bucks shared both management and a taste for melodic hard rock and eagerly teamed up to start writing songs together. After a false start or two, the rhythm section behind them solidified with Kenny Aaronson (Derringer, Billy Squier, Foghat) on bass and Michael Shrieve (Santana) on drums.<\/p>\n
Scheduling conflicts turned out to be a significant hurdle. With Schon tied up with a summerlong Journey tour, they didn\u2019t get serious until late fall 1983, with a window only until the winter holidays. With little time to spare, they spent a month woodshedding and rehearsing 15 new songs and then elected to record them live on stage during a brief November residency at San Francisco\u2019s Warfield Theater\u2026 except that Schon wasn\u2019t satisfied with his sound and went back and overdubbed most of the guitars in the studio later. <\/p>\n
The resulting nine-track release Through The Fire<\/i> was a mishmash\u2014a rushed yet heavily doctored \u201clive\u201d album with almost (but not quite) no crowd noise. Still, the greatest sin committed by co-producers Hagar and Schon was housing these songs inside a classic \u201980s production and mix, with guitars and vocals heavily compressed and processed, bass buried, and drums tinny and flat. Whatever good things can be said about this album, production-wise, it sounds like crap.<\/p>\n
Rant over.<\/p>\n
If there\u2019s been one recurring theme to Sammy Hagar\u2019s career, it\u2019s been the perpetual search for what it seems has always felt like home to him\u2014the power-trio-with-vocals format he first experienced with Montrose. As with Montrose, Van Halen, Chickenfoot, and his current quartet The Circle, HSAS featured a hotshot guitar player backed by a super solid rhythm section, with Sammy wailing out front. <\/p>\n
Speaking of the hotshot guitar player, HSAS was a great opportunity for Schon to get out of the ballad-heavy, melodic AOR formula that has always been Journey\u2019s stock in trade. It was obviously a successful formula, and one Schon has long since recognized as his meal ticket, but here he\u2019s freed from all restrictions and can just riff and shred. (It\u2019s worth noting that on Journey\u2019s current tour\u2014Journey by this point being a euphemism for the Neal Schon Band\u2014he\u2019s snuck bits of the HSAS song<\/a> \u201cMy Home Town\u201d into the current lineup\u2019s rendition of \u201cWheel In The Sky.\u201d)<\/p>\n Opener \u201cTop Of The Rock\u201d is just what you\u2019d expect from Hagar and Schon: alternately bruising and stinging lead guitar heroics behind a \u201cHeavy Metal\u201d-derived lyric that\u2019s laughably dim but good for a fist-pumping singalong. The best bit, though, has to be the verse where Sammy sings \u201cI may not be a business man \/ I ain’t no fast slick talker \/ But you just ask the kid in the street \/ He’ll tell ya I’m a rocker.\u201d I\u2019d love to hear the CEO of Sammy\u2019s Beach Bar Rum and the Cabo Wabo Cantina chain sing those lyrics today\u2014mostly because, being Sammy, he\u2019d probably sing his ass off and then laugh along with the joke.<\/p>\n \u201cMissing You\u201d is as close as this album gets to Journey territory, a ringing, earnest melodic rocker with abundant hooks. \u201cAnimation\u201d is where the production goes from mildly annoying to actively intrusive, a flashy number full of stunt-guitar gimmickry and heavy echo on the vocals. They\u2019re just getting warmed up, though! When they transition into the thumping, sky-hugging \u201cValley Of The Kings\/Giza\u201d suite there\u2019s so much echo on Sammy that it starts to feel like parody\u2014Spinal Tap<\/i> did come out later that year\u2014but it’s exactly as serious as the fingers-flying solos Schon lays down.<\/p>\n At this point in the proceedings you may register a certain lack of attention to the rhythm section. That\u2019s because there\u2019s basically nothing to report there; this is the Hagar\/Schon show, with Aaronson and Shrieve treated and mixed as anonymous session players, playing unobtrusive parts that never draw an instant\u2019s attention away from the principals up front.<\/p>\n The album\u2019s lead single was a cover of Procol Harum\u2019s \u201cWhiter Shade of Pale,\u201d an odd choice given that it\u2019s one of the most memorable Hammond organ-centric tunes in the Classic Rock songbook. Hand it to Hagar and Schon, though, because they actually do a nice job with it; it\u2019s a reverent cover that honors the melody, cadence and tone of the original, with Hagar singing instead of belting, and Schon both recreating and embellishing the immortal organ solo on guitar. <\/p>\n The closing trio of tunes epitomize both the strengths and the flaws of this album. \u201cHot And Dirty\u201d is a train wreck, a heap of hair metal cliches behind a sophomoric, baldly derivative lyric that makes its source material\u2014Montrose\u2019s \u201cRock Candy\u201d\u2014sound like a Shakespearean sonnet. \u201cHe Will Understand\u201d is a generic, serviceable rocker with a nice shreddy solo, which for no apparent reason is celebrated with the first appearance on the album of crowd noise. Closer \u201cMy Home Town\u201d\u2014presumably a nod to the Bay Area crowds these songs were recorded in front of\u2014is a stomping rocker where you can feel the boys having fun, the most live-feeling number here, with crowd noise again included. <\/p>\n Where HSAS succeeds is in teaming Hagar up with another ace guitar player to generate that back-and-forth creative tension, and in giving Schon a chance to rock out sans syrupy ballads. And in fact, Hagar and Schon tried again briefly in 2002, assembling the stillborn Planet Us project<\/a> with bassist Michael Anthony (Van Halen) and drummer Deen Castronovo (Journey). <\/p>\n Through The Fire<\/i> proved to be a one-off for HSAS, a fun side project for its two principals and a brief gig for the rhythm section. It leaves the listener with more questions than answers, to wit: will the six unreleased original songs ever see the light of day? Did the band cover any Montrose or Journey songs live? And what would this album have sounded like if they\u2019d put more into the songwriting and recorded it five years earlier? It might have come out sounding like a jamming melodic rock supergroup instead of a rushed jumble trapped inside egregious \u201980s production.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":34481,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[10727],"rating":[5614],"class_list":["post-46323","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-hagar-schon-aaronson-shrieve","rating-rating-c-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46323\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46323"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}