January 12 – Canadian Wine Poured Into American Ears

Bands like White Snake and Def Leppard learned it in the ’80s… but a few hard rock pioneers had it figured out the decade before. None more so than April Wine, the Canadian rockers originally from Halifax. And what they knew was that you’ll do a lot better if you mix up your straight-ahead rock rollers with a few slower, ballad-y love songs for the ladies (and others who like soft rock.) They’d built a career on it at home, with rock hits like “Rock & Roll is a Vicious Game” and slow love songs like “I’m on Fire For You Baby.” In fact they even had a greatest hits devoted only to “rock ballads” that went gold there. They’d continue that formula on this day in 1981, with the release of their ninth and ultimately biggest album, The Nature of the Beast.

While some things were predictable by then – the mix of hard and soft tunes, Myles Goodwyn being the main writer (a role he’d begun to take on early in their days a decade prior, despite a couple of their earliest hits being cover songs, like “Bad Side of the Moon”) and having a hand in the production, a few changes were brought in. For one, they recorded it in Britain, with Mike Stone co-producing. Stone had made a name for himself in the ’70s working as an engineer on six Queen albums and had just finished up producing Journey’s big Escape. Soon after he’d go to work on the first pair of records for supergroup Asia. There were big plans for the band to conquer the rest of the world as they had Canada… and there, they’d already had 16 top 40 hits, getting as high as #2 with “You Coulda Been a Lady” back in 1972.

There were ten new songs on it, plus one cover song, “Sign of the Gypsy Queen”, a song which had been a minor hit a decade prior for Lorence Hud. That was the second single off it, and third radio release, after “All Over Town” and the slow-dance ready “Just Between You and Me”.

They garnered good reviews for it, including over in the UK, where Music Week and Record Mirror both gave it 4-stars. The latter even had a full-page ad for the album, enough to rival homegrown heroes like Adam Ant in the issue and the review noted that they were “a vastly experienced…Canadian quintet” and the album represented “a positive step…well-drilled, penetrative panache that makes for quality hard rock.” They particularly centred out “Sign of the Gypsy Queen” with its “switchblade lead guitar from Brian Greenway (which allmusic would compare to Thin Lizzy) and “All Over Town”, a “bracing trail of melodic melodrama that’s high on the drama, low in the ‘mellow’”. Years later, allmusic would grade it 4.5-stars, best in their lengthy career, suggesting “April Wine – like any good wine – got better with age” and noting “all-around frontman Myles Goodwyn is in top form.” They too liked the two songs mentioned by the British publication and forgave them a few missteps like “Caught in the Crossfire” and “Future Tense”(that) suffer from some cheesy sci-fi lyrics.”

Overall, the public seemed to agree although not to the extent Capitol Records and its subsiduaries that released it in different lands may have expected. “All over Town” did fine on rock radio and “Sign of the Gypsy Queen” hit the Canadian top 40. “Just Between You and Me” was an American breakthrough, getting to #21, and #11 on the mainstream rock charts, their best to that point (in fact, as singles go, that would be their American zenith). At home, it hit #22, a middling hit compared to some of their earlier catalog. The album itself got to #26 in the U.S., #11 in Canada (where they had once had a #1 album) and #46 in the UK, hopefully enough to cover the costs of their magazine ads there! It went double-platinum in their homeland, one of three to hit that pinnacle, but by going platinum south of the border, became their biggest overall seller, coming in around two million copies globally.

April Wine continued on for years and had a few more Canadian hits, but more or less disappeared from the international scene soon after this one. Myles Goodwyn passed away last month, seemingly putting the band to rest for good.