My Bonnie Is Over The Ocean...

 ...well, so to speak. You know, that big-ass dark unknowable ocean that we all have to cross someday. Well, today was Bonnie's day. Gloria Gaynor a.k.a. Bonnie Tyler died yesterday. I knew she had been sick, and had just come out of a medially induced coma last week or so, so I figured she was doing a little better, but, uh, nope...another one of the old crew gone. And Bonnie Tyler was definitely someone I heard a ton on the radio when I was young. By that time, she was already - like her sister in roaring vocals, Tina Turner - in her MOR/AOR phase, which made her a perfect fit for my parents' preferred radio station, fitting in neatly amongst your Elton John and Rod Stewart and Bryan Adams. Her biggest smash, "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" was still played all over the radio, as were the old classics "It's A Heartache" and "Lost In France" and her frecent work  also got some air waves. 

Now, unlike for Tina - for whose comp I did serve up a number of MOR/AOR classics - I had compiled a pretty neat compilation of Tyler's early years, before the frivolous hairspray and equally frivolous production took over. There's no shame in liking that Bonnie Tyler - and I really do - but her early, grittier, earthier work deserves another look from a lot of people put off by the puffy hair, the cocaine-addled videos and the really mainstreamy production of the 80s. 

That's why you should check out Really Cool Antiques, if you didn't at the time. 20 early tracks before folks like Jim Steinman and *shudder* Dieter Bohlen got their hands on her. The two early classics, plus gritty takes on classics like "Living In The City", there's lots of stuff to like in here and remember our sweet Bonnie over the ocean... 

R.I.P. Gaynor "Bonnie Tyler" Hopkins

1961 - 2026

OBG's Antique store offers Bonnie's Beforehand's Best...

Here's an idea for a fun party game. You take some deep cuts from Rod Stewart and Bonnie Tyler, play a ten or fifteen snippet of it and then your guests have to guess. Is it Roddy? Is it Bonnie? Their voices are so alike that without being an expert in both artists' catalogue, you just might get fooled. On a visit to my parents (already a good long while ago) they played me some music in hopes that I might guess what it is. "Uh...is that Bonnie Tyler?!" I asked, which, duh, it wasn't. Turns out it was one of Rod's Great American Songbook series, which is pretty awful all in all considered. I mean, do we really need Rod the Mod soft-sing his way through Gershwin and others? 

So, here's the thing. We can all hate on Stewart's mid-career choices, starting with Atlantic Crossing. His shameless trend-chasing, disco-embracing, mainstream-caving music of the late 70s and early 80s hasn't aged terribly well. I can't hate it too much, because this is the Rod of my childhood, the Rod that would get played on the MOR/AOR station my parents would listen to in the car and at home. But yeah...at least Rod, along with his time in the Faces, still has that handful of albums on Mercury that started his solo career. These are genuinely good to great albums, as I would find out later, and even the biggest Rod-haters have to admit that he was up to some fine stuff on those discs...

I'm not sure Bonnie Tyler ever got the same benefit of a doubt. Like with the Rodster, I mainly knew Bonnie from her mid-80s to early-90s MOR hits, because that was what was played on the radio. Only much later, a couple of years ago, did I realize that Tyler also has a secret stash of early solo albums that are much better than her reputation from "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" onwards would suggest. So this is where the One Buck Record of the day, Really Cool Antiques come in. Because those old songs from good ol' Bonnie, especially the deep and album cuts surrounding the two major hits "It's A Heartache" and "Lost In France" are much better than one would think. 

If, say, you wouldn't believe that a blond Welsh woman named Gaynor Hopkins could do justice to Stevie Wonder's "Living For The City", then listen to this and be proven wrong. She also has great covers of "(You Make Me Feel) Like A Natural Woman" and "A Whiter Shade Of Pale" and even does a really lovely version of Tom Petty's "Louisiana Rain". But more than a talented interpreter of others' famous songs, it's some of the originals here that deserve attention. Her managers Ronnie Scott and Steve Wolfe wrote the lion's share of the original songs for her tenure at RCA, often also co-producing her records. None of these are necessarily great songs, but they are a very fine mix of country-ish and vaguely r&b-ish pop songs. "My!My! Honeycomb", a 1976 non-album single and the opener here, gives a good indication of whether you'll like this or not. 

So, Really Cool Antiques hopefully does for Bonnie Tyler what one of the many Mercury compilations did for Rod Stewart: Remind you that before the glitzy and sometimes chintzy stuff towards the middle of their career they had some good years, good albums and good songs. Some really cool antiques, if you will...