...while wondering what ever happened to Bowser

Commander Ruth Wedster has a pretty good job, as Director of the Chicago Police Academy. The job comes with a driver, a spacious office and more than a few perks. Unfortunately, meeting celebrities is apparently not one of them. Billy Joel and Elton John flew into Midway airport last month, to play Wrigley Field. When the two got off the plane, Wedster was at the bottom of the stairs to greet them. She had arrived at the airport about fifteen minutes earlier, showed her badge and went right out onto the tarmac to meet the plane. One problem: she was not working that day and had no business reason to be there. The department has suspended Commander Wedster, pending investigation. In light of the crack job done by the security folks at Midway, don't you feel safe flying now?...All the proof you will ever need that some people are beautiful, no matter what you do to them -- right here...This just in from the Irony Department: Robin and Louie Starr got into their car at 8am on 19 August of this year and headed to work. Robin is the CEO of the Richmond, Virginia SPCA. When she went back to her car at around noon, to go to lunch, she found Louie dead in the car. Louie was her 16 year-old blind, deaf dog, who she had left inside, with the windows rolled up. She still has her job, but we wouldn't count on that remaining the case...In other dog-related news, the drama that has played out in the city of Philadelphia since the Eagles signed Michael Vick played out on a much smaller scale than was expected at the Eagles/Jaguars game last Thursday night, as only a few dozen protesters showed up at Lincoln Field. Guess it's preseason for PETA, too...Well, we introduced a new feature, the vintage album review, in the last post. But we got to thinking, how do we differentiate between one "great" album and another? One "bad" one from another? We decided we have to have a ranking system of some sort. So we started listing the things that we feel make an album good or bad, then weighted them to emphasize the categories that have more bearing on overall quality. What we ended up with are 8 categories, totaling 50 potential points. To get to a five-star system, we total the points from each category and divide the total by 5. The categories:

~Music Quality 5 points -This is self-explanatory.

~Lyric Quality 5 points -Although there is no point deduction for instrumentals.

~Authorship* 4 points -Did they write their own stuff?
*There are two exceptions to this. First, remakes. Second, the Sinatra Exception. In short, if you don't write your own stuff, you better sing or play the hell out of it if you expect to get any points here.

~Production Value 3 points -Does it sound like they had a plan going into the studio or is it just a bunch of songs thrown together? Is the sound quality good? Is there any unintentional bleeding or feedback? Allowances are made for production styles. For instance, if they were going for a rough, unfinished sound, then they followed through with their plan and get the points. Also, greatest hits compilations get some leeway for not sounding like all the material belongs on the same album.

~Packaging 2 points -Did they include lyrics? Interesting liner notes? Some pictures? Or did they just throw the LP in a plain white sleeve and ship it out? Bear in mind, the albums we will be reviewing are from our digitally-converted vinyl collection, so by definition, are predominantly pre-1990, so there was no internet. If the lyrics weren't included in the packaging, you had to sit there and write them out as you listened. And yes, we did just that.

~First Blush 2 points -What did we think when we first heard the material?

~Aging 3 points -How does the album sound, some 20+ years later? Now, sounding as if an album is clearly from a certain era is fine; what we're looking at here is whether the material seems stale. Whether it could be played in public, without irony or shame.

~Videos 1 point -We went back and forth on this. On the one hand, videos are not part of the album and should not factor into a review. On the other though, we defy you to listen to "Stuck with You" and not think of Huey Lewis on a beach or "Keeping the Faith" and not visualize Billy Joel in court. Most of the albums we'll be reviewing are going to be from the '80's. In the '80's, Mtv ruled. So we have to factor it in. If no videos were made for an album, then we're not going to withhold a point but if videos were made, it's a simple up/down vote: either they helped or harmed the overall album experience.

If an album maxes out in all categories, it gets all 50 points, which, after the math, equates to five stars.

Based on this criteria, last week's selection, Robert Palmer's Riptide scored as such:

Music: 4 (of 5)
Lyrics: 3 (of 5)
Authorship: 2 (of 4)
Production: 3 (of 3)
Packaging: 1 (of 2)
First Blush: 2 (of 2)
Aging: 3 (of 3)
Videos: 1 (of 1)
TOTAL: 19(of 50)
Stars: 3.8 (of 5)

This week's Vintage Album Review

Journey
Raised on Radio
1986

Track Listing:
-Girl Can't Help It (3:50)*
-Positive Touch (4:16)
-Suzanne (3:38)*
-Be Good to Yourself (3:51)*
-Once You Love Somebody (4:40)
-Happy to Give (3:49)
-Raised on Radio (3:49)
-I'll Be Alright Without You (4:49)*
-It Could Have Been You (3:37)
-The Eyes of a Woman (4:32)
-Why Can't This Night Go on Forever (3:43)*
* - singles

What in the hell happened in the studio when this album was made? David Letterman had a line once, regarding the Buffalo Bills losing four Super Bowls in the 1990's, that basically speculated that head coach Marv Levy's halftime speech consisted of, "ok, now let's get out there and start sucking!" This sounds like a Levy-produced album. Listening to it, it's almost as if the songs were placed on the LP in the order they were recorded and, after side one was done, Steve Perry, who gets a Producer "credit" for this train wreck, stood up and announced, "that's it, I'm taking over. Now I need you all to give me your testicles."

Raised on Radio start off solidly enough, with Jonathan Cain's keyboards giving way to Neal Shon's guitar and Perry's belting voice, resulting in a loaded first side, containing hits Girl Can't Help It, Be Good to Yourself and Suzanne, the lattest of which remains our favorite Journey song. Even the unreleased cuts were strong, with Positive Touch featuring solid work from Cain and Once You Love Somebody sounding like an updated, if poor-man's Send Her My Love.

But then the wheels fall off. Some people say you can buy one Journey album and pretty much get the entirety of their versatility. In this case, you can buy one song from the second half of this album and you've got the whole thing. Other than a failed attempt at nostalgia on the title cut, the last six songs on this album are like variations on a theme. Unfortunately, that theme is not very interesting. Drawn-out ballads, sappy lyrics and formulatic, start-slow-and-quiet-and-end-in-a-crescendo-of-blaring-guitars-and-Perry's-yelping production make the rest of this album a sheer beating to listen to.

And history has not been kind. While most of the singles have held up, the unreleased material has only gotten worse. There is no reason to purchase this album, as all of the salvageable material is available on Greatest Hits. It's clear in listening to Raised on Radio that Perry was moving in a different direction than the rest of the band, and his lack of success since is all the evidence needed to see that that direction was a fatal blow to Journey.

What started out as a crisp, update to the Journey sound quickly and irrevocably devolved into a death knell for one of the most popular bands of the 1980's.

Music: 2 (of 5)
Lyrics: 2 (of 5)
Authorship: 4 (of 4)
Production: 1 (of 3)
Packaging: 1 (of 2) Good liner notes and content, but no lyrics.
First Blush: 2 (of 2)
Aging: 2 (of 3)
Videos: 0 (of 1) Formulatic live videos, with studio track overlays.
TOTAL: 14
Stars: 2.8

All things good and bad eventually come to an end and Scattershooting is no exception. When we first started this blog, back before such a thing as a blog existed, we would scrabble together various oddities, interests and news items and e-mail them to our friends. We shamelessly copped the format, name and even, occasionally (ah, [fill in recently dead guy], we hardly knew ye), the verbiage, of former Dallas Morning News columnist Blackie Sherrod's excellent column. Blackie was retiring around the time we started up and we thought it a nice, if lazy, tribute. Through the years, we've considered changing things up, but we like some of the basic elements of what we do and didn't want to lose them. We like having a person as the subject of the post and the challenge of working them in to the body of it. We like rapid-fire blurbs, covering as many topics as possible in the shortest period of time. So while we wanted to keep many of the elements, doing so without seeming like a cheap knock-off of the original was difficult. So we kept it going. Over the last several months though, we've felt the format has run its course. First, technology has caught up to us. When we pick a subject for the title of each post, we typically hit up Google images for a picture of them. And if we truly are, "wondering what ever happened to...", then we simply Google them and find out. Whereas when we first started, we would occasionally get word from a reader that they had ferreted out a target or two, it doesn't happen anymore. Everything is available right here on the internet. So the tag line simply doesn't make sense anymore. Second, our writing style has evolved somewhat. While we still throw out some one-liners, our postings are tending to be longer. There's not as much scattershooting happening. Our aim is getting more focused. So we had pretty much decided to shut this thing down, but were wondering when the right time would be. Should we wait for Sherrod to die? Stop at 100 posts? Wait for some other nice, clean breaking point? Well, in the end, what we realized is that sometimes it's just time. So with this post, we retire Scattreshooting. It has served us well and it's been a really fun blog to write. We can only hope it's been half as enjoyable to read.

This doesn't mean you're rid of us (me). With our next post, we'll be introducing a new format. We'll be keeping what works, getting rid of what doesn't and hopefully producing a better, more enjoyable, more readable blog. We'll still name the posting after a person of focus and we'll still have a section for rapid-fire postings. We'll still speak in the first-person plural (sorry, Waldo) and we'll still publish the annual NBA Preseason Spectacular. But we'll also be adding some new features and changing the layout to one we hope is reader-friendly. So we bid Scattershooting a fond farewell.

We hardly knew ye.

Paz