JUST MY STYLE

When I learned recently that Stiff Records in the UK was reissuing Rachel Sweet's 1978 debut album, Fool Around, I made a beeline for eBay and gobbled it up immediately. I popped it into my car CD player one recent morning during my daily commute to Santa Monica, and I instantly turned teenaged. It was odd -- Rachel was my first rock and roll crush. I was 14, and she was 16 when Fool Around came out, so I rationally allowed myself to dream. I'm not really sure what it was, though KROQ (probably Rodney) played "Who Does Lisa Like," which is a bizarely addictive song, all about high school gossip, done with weird yet snappy time signatures (it was written by Liam Sternberg, who I'm convinced is one of the most underrated songwriters of all time). I could relate to her, and so I took the RTD bus from my Granada Hills home to Moby Disc down on Ventura in Sherman Oaks, the only shop in the Valley that carried a plentiful variety of Stiff releases (it wouldn't be released in the U.S. for some nine months, and only then remixed -- badly -- and with different tracks).

She wasn't a conventional beauty -- a short, curvy girl from Akron, Ohio -- but what a fucking voice. She was compared a lot to Brenda Lee and I could see that. What was odd is that she was a Stiff Records artist; her material was pretty mainstream by Stiff standards -- she covered Dusty Springfield and Elvis Costello, as well as belting a handful of Sternberg compositions, the best of which -- "Lisa," "Cukoo Clock," "Just My Style" were just slightly loopy. It was so not your typical new wave stripes and spandex girl.

I was obsessed enough to drag adult family members to her L.A. gigs -- to the Whisky in 1979, where she opend for 999; to the Roxy a year later, where she headlined. I cherished the bootleg Rachel Sweet live shows I bought in the dead of night at the Capitol Records swap meet. I took the bus from the Valley on a school day down to Licorice Pizza on Sunset, where Sweet was doing an in-store to promote her second album, 1980s Protect the Innocent. After that record, I'd moved on to other girl-oriented pop groups -- the Go-Go's, Blondie, Jane Aire and the Belvederes, Kirsty MacCall. But my reverence for Rachel Sweet was such that I felt physically ill when she did a duet with Rex Smith of "Everlasting Love" a few years later. It bruised my soul to know that she could sell out so branzenly with a teen schlock merchant like Rex Smith. There may have been a record company gun to her head (both artists were recording for Columbia).

Fool Around remains a great listen, a reminder of a time when music really meant everything to me, when I began to realize that Billy Joel's The Stranger was actually not the best album of all time.