Saga
Wildest Dreams

With their seventh album, Saga have the opportunity to fully ride a big chance to join the ranks of the greats: the good sales of the previous three works in Europe and Canada, as well as the group's willingness to increasingly come to terms with success (at the cost of significant internal defections, specifically the keyboardist and drummer) convinced the record giant Atlantic to invest heavily in them.

The goal is to finally penetrate the US market, which has remained quite indifferent to the call of the formation's refined (too much?), inventive, instrumentally excellent hard-pop-rock proposal. That's why for the new recordings they head to Los Angeles, to the esteemed (and costly) producer Keith Olsen, who does not lack his typical treatment for this music: maximum sound clarity, maximum definition of the various instruments and voices, power, and elegance galore but at the expense, however, of feeling and spontaneity.

The surviving trio has an internal solution ready regarding the defection of keyboardist Jim Gilmour, since singer Michael Sadler and bassist Jim Crichton can also handle the pianos and synthesizers (but it's not the same thing...). As for the drummer, to replace the defector Steve Negus, an exceptional specialist of the hi-hat and long rolls on the rototoms, the German session man Curt Cress provides, who proves as Teutonic in style as in origin since his drumming, strong but monotonous and especially anonymous, certainly meets the stiffening and simplification objectives identified by the producer to universalize Saga's musical proposal.

The work inevitably comes out engaging, brilliant, well-packaged, pleasant, catchy... It is immediately and powerfully promoted by an extensive and appropriate US tour, while the music video for the single "Only Time Will Tell" resides in (well-paid) heavy rotation on MTV... nothing is missing for even a significant portion of that distracted and trendy multitude of record buyers, remote-controlled by the marketing of music multinationals, to finally be convinced...

Instead, the album sells less than its predecessors, the US proves it can continue to do without Saga on a large scale, even in this almost entirely pop-rock version, while the old aficionados vividly regret the virtuosic-progressive repertoire of the old records... and maybe the defectors Negus and Gilmour even have a bitter laugh. The matter further deteriorates when the multinational record company terminates the contract with the group, arrogantly safeguarding its own interests, essentially withholding the musicians' royalties for the work in question to recover more quickly from the significant expenses and necessitating a lawsuit to restore the financial rights.

"Wildest Dreams" is the first Saga collection without memorable songs, although none of the eight tracks present is less than pleasant. It sounds great, but it fails to be loved, it is cold, calculated, reasoned, polished, assembled piece by piece by an ambitious trio without a drummer and without much soul, what remains of a cohesive, multi-faceted, and instinctive quintet of sparkling performers. Ian Chricton still imposes his imaginative and resounding lead guitar, left orphaned from the duets with the keyboards and, therefore, the only support to Sadler's singing. He works hard in all the tracks to be convincing and pleasant, dealing with clean and linear (choruses), filled with deliberately cheerful and carefree lyrics.

That same year, Keith Olsen had worked, together with Mike Stone, on "1987" by the quarrelsome Whitesnake (over ten million copies sold), while shortly thereafter he would even manage to work miracles for the far less talented Scorpions, taking care of their best seller "Crazy World"... Amen, this record turns out to be a misunderstood failure, and thus a big regret, especially for this celebrated producer, whose esteem for the Canadian formation will never wane. In the future, indeed, his Los Angeles recording studios "Goodnight L.A." and his resources and knowledge will always be at the disposal of Saga, who will make a point of mentioning and thanking him promptly in the booklet of each of their CDs.