is that they were hugely successful.

Their first two albums are total AOR/MHR classics. The third album is very good. Lovin' Every Minute of It is just barely OK. Wildside was decent. VI sounded washed up and out.

Imagine for a minute that they had never achieved commercial success. Imagine that the first two albums were released in the US and were completely overlooked and that subsequent albums were only released on a limited basis in Canada. In this scenario, the AOR illuminati would be praising the band as Canada's best kept secret, their albums as lost treasures, their solo efforts as impossible to find pure gems, etc etc etc blah blah blah. Little AOR lemming goobers would be placing triple digit eBay bids on their crappiest and hardest to find disc simply because it would be a rarity.

I remember when they came out. I loved pop and rock in the early 80's. Their sound was absolutely perfect for the times. Calling them dated would be like calling Balance or Touch or Leroux dated. Loverboy doesn't sound any more or less early 80's than any other bands that came out at the same time. Turn Me Loose is still like the coolest song of the year. I saw them in concert in their heyday and they were excellent. They had the just about the best hooks in rock music at the time.

Their big problem is that they were popular. Their bigger problem is that they were very popular among the hot young teen-aged chicks that aroused guys of the time. They were a chick band. Many guys didn't like them because they liked Loverboy. They liked them to get laid. Why else would any self respecting hetero teenaged male buy some album with a dude's ass in red leather pants. Every guy who bought that album told everybody they knew that they either bought it for the music or for their girlfriends. My wife - another child of the same generation - had two copies of this album. Their concerts were like them old Beatles movies or Backstreet Boy concerts - packed with underaged teenage girls screaming so loudly that you couldn't hear a fucking thing. I can bet you that 90% of the chicks in Harley Hall at Shippensburg U had this album in their dorm room, and that roughly 50% had the album cover masking-taped to their walls. My wife has photos of her and her high school friends hanging around their tour bus when they came to her town.

Journey and Foreigner and Styx all had the excess popularity problem, too, but not to the same degree. Loverboy's popularity was from the cheerleader and majorette crowd, and that doomed them to perpetual disdain among many manly men. Ask the guys on this board what the worst songs were by those other three bands and the answers are sure to be Open Arms, Waiting For a Girl Like You, and Babe, respectively. Popularity kills, and ballads suck.

Loverboy kicked ass, but too many people let their testerone clog their ears and cloud their judgment. No self-respecting AOR lover should be without their first two albums.

Joe