Hey, Billy; [1]
Yeah, I was aware of the links from Starz to Looking Glass…(One of my offbeat favorite pop tunes was “Jimmy Loves Mary Anne” (Both that and “Brandy” were written by Elliot Lurie, who was the lead vocal/guitar)) Great stuff for students of Pop. Brandy, for it’s part was another B side that ended up being the A side…(Ala Doobie’s “Black Water”) I thought it was some of the classer pop I’ve heard at the time; Still do. I think that record got a bit undersold, if you ask me.
Do you know Kenney Chesney ported ‘Brandy’ to country just recently? Weird.
But the transition from “Looking Glass” to “Starz” wasn’t all that big a transition, as you’d think; The LG we came to know wasn’t the sound the band was really chasing. In reality, Looking Glass was a bar band, and a fairly bluesey one at that, though the producers were looking for another “Brandy” all the time and basically produced all the sound out of them. t That was why they never went much of anywhere after the second single (Jimmy) which only went about the middle 30’s Billboard at the time. Trouble was, their bar band background made a real jarring difference between what the NY producers of the day came up with, and what the band sounded like on stage. Two different animals. As a result, they drew the wrong crowd to the shows.
Starz, then, was an attempt to go the direction LG should have gone.
And yesh, I guess you could call it glam rock’, if you wanted. It was certainly heavier than most of the pop of the day., Which was always the point of heavy metal at the start; it was heavier than what most folks were doing; a relative thing. Who else was working in that neighborhood? Grand Funk, (Same label) perhaps. Deep Purple, though by 77 they were losing their following with the personnel changes. Nugent, but he wasn’t drawing. Rush, who was just doing “Caress of Steel” about then. (Lakeside Park was a single, but never made it past 40 or so on the chart) Thin Lizzy, who only had one single… Rainbow, who never did hit their stride single-wise. Scorpians from the RCA days. (Speedy’s Coming came out that year… hell of a track… I even added it to my playlist for a while. Went nowhere.) And so on. Arrowsmith was just coming back, but “Draw The Line” had n singles working. Alice Cooper was running out of gas by ths time and his stuff was getting classed in the Pop racks, anyway.
Great bands, all of em… but the business was looking for the singles. Which, to turn this wandering full circle is what caused Looking Glass. And let’s not forget that about half the A&R efforts by this time had gone over to Disco.
By the way, a 12 string? Yeah, I guess that makes sense. I admit that I always thought that sounded like it’d been done in a doubler, like an Eventide or something. I learned something, there.