While that's an interesting point of view, I have, I admit, plenty of things I would class as guilty pleasures -- often stuff that I find cheesy or obvious or of little true cultural or spiritual merit, but which I still enjoy on some base level, sometimes in spades, and which I am in no regard prepared to denounce. Some of these are dietary (what are potato chips if not a guilty pleasure?). Some of them are cinematic (I take no particular pride in enjoying the killer shark movie, Deep Blue Sea, but it didn't stop me from upgrading to blu-ray the other week). I don't feel all that embarrassed, in fact, that along with Tarkovsky and Bergman and Cassavetes and Kiarostami and Pasolini, I have space on my shelves for MCU movies or Die Hard or two different movies called Rampage, one starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and the other directed by Uwe Boll (I'll let you decide which I should feel guiltier about). Maybe it's because movies have more than one aspect to them, invite thought on more than one level -- even the cheesiest of b-movies can be subject to analysis, and even if the analysis can be reduced to, "this is ideological bunkum," it is still educational and valuable to see how that bunkum has been assembled, how it works, how it tries to appeal to the viewer's emotions or prejudices; that critical engagement can become part of the pleasure of the film, too...
Rock'n roll is a bit simpler than that, which maybe is why I have so many more things I would describe as "guilty pleasures" in my record collection. Yes, folks: between my Melodic Energy Commission and Meat Puppets records, there is a copy of Bat Out of Hell. My present collection contains not one but TWO Loverboy albums. From AC/DC to ZZ Top, there are dozens of albums in my collection that a music snob might guffaw at, a state borne maybe of a particular aspect of radio: because when you're in a car, and it's not bluetooth enabled, or doesn't have a CD player, if you want music, radio is it. And if you're listening to the radio, the choices of station can be pretty dire, unless you're lucky enough to get a good signal from CiTR or Co-Op. Which means, especially for a person of my generation, you end up on a lot of classic rock stations, hearing songs drawn from a limited pool, played so often that you end up with a relationship with them, regardless of whether you like them or not, and even if you'd never buy the record they're on. A song like "Mama Let Him Play" by Jerry Doucette is a fine case in point. Hell, I hear that often enough just being AROUND -- because it ticks a Cancon box -- that I would NEVER buy the record it's on, no matter how many thrift stores I find it in; I can get all I need of it from just ambient exposure. But it's actually a great, fun, rockin' song, a perfectly acceptable exemplar of its type, and I'd take it over anything by Max Webster (except "Battle Scar") or April Wine or the BTO (unless you count the John Otway cover of "You Ain't Seen Nothin Yet," which you don't, but note: we may see another Otway show herein 2026, folks... you have time to do your homework!). Hell, I would argue it beats anything by Bad Company, Foghat, Foreigner, or almost any of those bombastic 70s American rock dinosaurs, too -- it has some spirit to it. If Erika and I are driving up-island with The Q! on, and Jerry Doucette comes on, I'm sure not going to ask her to change the station (nor will she want to, I don't think; I would imagine she has some fondness for the song too).
Thor's new album, Rock the Universe, has covers of a few such guilty pleasures, including, indeed, "Mama Let Him Play," which Thor and Frank Soda (also on the album!) did at the Robert Dayton booklaunch the other day (I videotaped a minute of that here). I am genuinely grateful to now have that song represented on record SOMEWHERE on my shelves -- never gonna have to get the Doucette version NOW. They also did "Action," which kicks off side one; anything by (the?) Sweet counts as a guilty pleasure, by me, as it's almost pure potato chip, if you see what I mean, all crunch and mouthfeel and carb-high but close to zero nutritional value. Even "Love Me Two Times" has guilt associated with whatever pleasure I take from it, because I recognize it objectively as one of the very least of the Doors tracks -- some Doors stuff I actually like and have around in some form or other, but -- sorry, Robby, they weren't written by you! It's still enjoyable enough that I wouldn't turn it off if it came on, but TBH -- I'd say Thor's version may actually be the superior one here, has a bit more bite to it, with less of that unwelcome "cabaret" element that lurks in the background of the original version... I always imagine Vegas dancers in my mind's eye, high-kicking their way through that song... I do not have that problem with Thor's version...
And of the possible guilty pleasures that Thor covers on the album, "Highway Star" is maybe the song I love most on this, one of my most pleasurable guilty pleasures of all time, which I didn't even feel that guilty about loving until an opinionated, respected senior local punk (who I guess I will leave nameless, since he's enjoying being out of the limelight of late) went on a rant about how shallow and empty the lyrics are. I mean, I couldn't argue the point -- it IS shallow, and that does register as I listen to it (it's no "Pictures of Home," say -- one of the more content-rich Deep Purple tunes, or at least the only one that reminds me of a passage in Nietzsche); but that guitar solo rocks. the riffing is pure propulsion, and, hey, what could be better than a song about driving fast if you're listening to it on a car radio? "Highway Star" is, like, "Sonic Reducer" for morons, but sometimes, moronic fun is what you need! And how you gonna write an intelligent song about speeding, for fucksake?
Guilty pleasures or not, each of these songs on Thor's new album, Rock the Universe, fills me with joy -- especially because, kinda sorta, Thor is a bit of a guilty pleasure himself: he's unsubtle, a bit silly, wielding his Thor-hammer and singing catchy glam-rock-cum-hair-metal while sincerely invoking the powers of rock. He doesn't appear to have great ironic distance from this material, but how could you, and still be, like, Thor? There is no ironic distance in muscle rock. You cannot ironically explode a hot water bottle with your lungs. You cannot ironically bend metal bars. You're going to do it, or you're going to fail, but there is no way to do it and be above it at the same time.
So if you were going to pick a Vancouver musician to cover a song like "Highway Star," THOR IS IT. He's perfectly suited to all these songs, in fine voice (and Frank Soda plays the solo for "Highway Star" with the utmost reverence, a note-for-note rip-through -- tho' it's on the Muddy Waters tune, later on side 2, where he really starts takin' no prisoners).
Not all of the album counts as a guilty pleasure, mind you. I have no guilt at all about liking Eric Burdon's "Sky Pilot" or the Yardbirds' "Heart Full of Soul" or the Beatles' "Back in the USSR." I also don't especially need to hear them covered, but Thor does the songs no violence, and "Heart Full of Soul" in particular works very well for what it is. There is also one perfect deep dive that befits Thor's reputation as a bit of an eccentric: "I'm Not Like Everybody Else," originally done by the Kinks, which doesn't really require that much re-working to become Thor-worthy; the original was already more muscular than your average Kinks song, and while Thor does ADD some muscle to it -- how could he not, being Thor? -- it's still remarkably faithful and effective.
There are some songs I like better than others, mind you. Side one of the record is the side I will tend to gravitate to, because I don't really care one way or another about Ronnie Montrose's "Rock the Nation," James Taylor's "Steamroller Blues," or Muddy Waters' "I'm Ready" (with the aforementioned killer Soda solo) -- not because they're bad songs, but because I don't know or have an investment in the original. "Steamroller Blues," in fact, we gather was originally intended as a parody of cheesy 70s blues, which maybe is not something that comes across in Thor's delivery (the only parodic element is that it is being done by Thor at all; I am sure James Taylor would wince at the thought, if he was really trying to make fun of hyperbolic blues-rock, which is how the song here presents). But you know what, I can't really hear the parody in the James Taylor version of it, either: he does "bad 70s blues bombast" so convincingly it can be mistaken for the same. Some might say that that is not the stuff of effective parody; they might have a point.
I'd still rather hear Thor do it than James Taylor. In fact, there's not a song on the album I don't enjoy. It's at Neptoon. They might even have some signed copies kicking around? I actually went to the in-store feeling a bit sheepish to be asking Thor to sign his first record, because my copy of it was pretty beat-up -- not really signature-worthy, scrounged out of a cheap bin, mostly because I have some fondness for "Sleeping Giant." I'm pretty glad to have been able to do Thor right and get this record, and very happy that my investment has paid off. I've listened to it three times through since Saturday, which is two more times than any of the other records I bought at the launch.
Now if someone wanted to release Thor Against the World on vinyl, I'd probably get that too...
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