Rockets
No Ballads

We continue to strike while the iron is hot with the Rockets, not the ones made in France with silver glitter, but these straightforward rockers, dressed normally, with no pretty boy in the group and absolutely zero glamour. As one would expect from people in Detroit, an ugly, hardworking city, freezing cold in winter and sweltering hot in summer; no taste for glitz and sequins around those parts.

The album is their third career offering, and we're at the beginning of the Eighties. At the helm of operations is always the drummer, composer, and inspirer John “The Bee” Badaniek, assisted by two great guitarists, different yet complementary, among whom Jim McCarty stands out the most, a real maestro. The genre remains hard rock (& roll), inevitably unpretentious but immortal for those who believe in it. The Rockets are also legitimate offspring of Chuck Berry, like many others (Stones and AC/DC the most fortunate). Nothing is created, but nothing sounds out of place in this sextet. Everything is there, just as long as you enjoy 70s rock ’n’ roll, evolved from the pioneers of the 50s with a bit of spice thrown in here and there.

“Desire” is the hopeful lead single, a short and compact rock ’n’ roll, danceable. It actually charted in the USA, though not at the highest levels. The following “Don’t Hold On” is appreciated by those who understand guitar. There’s a quick switch of the pickup towards the end of the solo, from the neck to the bridge, and a subsequent flurry of notes that is a work of art: it stuns, amazes, satisfies, delights. How much I like you, McCarty!

“Restless” doesn’t say much to me, perhaps because one looks forward with curiosity to the following “Sally Can’t Dance,” the Lou Reed one: done better than Lou’s, but for me, it’s a given. After the Reed task is completed, they dive into “Takin' It Back” which is as scholarly as it is engaging, practically an encyclopedia of the eternal licks invented by pioneer Chuck Berry, here rattled off one after another by the two guitarists with no shame, indeed with wild joy.

“Time After Time” is a… rock ’n’ roll, another one. Well executed, it introduces the valid “Sad Songs” which, in contrast, comes from another world: piano-driven, choral, laid-back, melancholic as the title suggests. But it’s an exception because then comes “I Want You To Love Me” which is truly urgent (he’s asking for it…), in the style of Little Richard, with a fierce voice and frequent stops that nail the music, only for the go to immediately restart it, even more insistently.

In “Is It True” Jim McCarty's guitar once again takes charge, freeing it from the more predictable hard rock ’n’ roll. The closing “Troublemaker” is conversely darker, semi-tenebrous, à la Steppenwolf of “The Pusher,” with a nice slide from the other guitarist Dennis Robbins (a future as a country man for him after the Rockets, go figure).

The cool music enthusiasts would say: an album outside the trends of the time. Indeed, 1980. But what is the best-selling album of 1980? Bee Gees? Police? Michael Jackson? Clash? No, the black one by AC/DC, practically the Australian cousins of these Rockets… There’s a history, and there’s a rhetoric, the Rockets nonetheless almost remained out of the first, and entirely out of the second: they weren't that good, nor clever, nor lucky.

Well, here we are in the week of small rhetoric for the Rockets from Detroit, Michigan - USA: I owed them that.