People who fondly remember The Eighties most likely didn't have to live through The Eighties, a time largely marked in my nape of the way by Rust Belt social and economic desiccation and devolution. With the cruel packaging of Reaganomics and deregulation and institutional racism and prosperity gospels grafted together like some horrible Marvel Team-Up designed to spark a 1% for the 1%, the crisp harshness on the wind was mirrored in the new digital audio/visual technology, designed to drag queer and shambolic rock and roll fantasies into the ordered realm of ones and zeroes, forever in the air tonight with no jacket required.
So (un)naturally, when the most cocaine-y chopped-up drums ever to be recorded exploded out of the boom boxes courtesy of "Some Like It Hot" during that sun-drenched summer of 1985, it was less an invitation to listen than a directive, an imperative to soak in all that The Power Station -- not so much a band as a corporate merger, and how Eighties was that? -- had to offer. Two parts Duran Duran, two parts Chic, with Robert Palmer handling the vocals, The Power Station was largely pieced together in the studio from which the band took their name with the deft touch of a film editor. If you squint your ears during any generic '80s action film, you could easily hear The Power Station playing over the rapid and spastic cuts of blood and guts.
Palmer took the buzz generated by the two global smash singles on The Power Station to take his solo career into a more commercial direction the following year with Riptide, but there's a peculiar joy in hearing the incipient thrust of what later became a bit formulaic and wan, which is why I keep returning to the album as a whole. However, aside from the singles -- one of which, a leaden and jaw-clenched cover of "Bang A Gong (Get It On)" by T. Rex, I sang at a summer nerd camp "talent" show in full Robert Palmer suit and slicked-back hair -- one specific track immediately grabbed my teenage heart, never to relinquish that grip to this very day.
"Still In Your Heart" is a straightforward ballad -- on a record by The Power Station, I suppose it's a Power ballad -- that has the most clearly cohesive sound of any of the songs on the album, as if the entire band got together in one smoky room at 3am, cutting the track in one go. It's as perfect a three-minute manifesto of longing and regret as you could hope for, with Tony Thompson's muscular drumming and Lenny Pickett's outro saxophone solo as clear highlights. But it's the vocal that propels the lyric away from the gutters of maudlin and pedestrian sentiment into something approaching sharp and sublime. Palmer wrings the right amount of pathos from each note without overemoting, and his harmony vocal counters his melody with simple yet knotty twists. Plus, in the days of Auto-Reverse cassettes, any temporary blues could be shaken away by the monolithic glee of "Some Like It Hot," which is as fucking unimpeachable as ever.
Postscript: At the aforementioned nerd camp -- three weeks in July at Alma College in 1985 -- there was a classic early teenage quadrangle of longing, of which I was a part. Between two boys and two girls, I liked the girl who liked the other boy instead of the girl who liked me, who ended up with the other boy, leaving me and the girl I liked out in the cold, as the girl I liked didn't like me back. Like, at all. (She was nice-ish about it, but still.) I was the DJ of our little camp-closing dance, and so, armed with all my cassette tapes cued to our favorite songs, I thought that "Still In Your Heart" might give me one last shot with the girl I liked. Not only did it most certainly not, but as it was a bit of a deep cut, nobody at the dance recognized the song, which meant that nobody danced to it. For almost three minutes, the nerd camp dance floor was empty, while I watched my dreams of a first real kiss (or a first real slow dance with a girl, for that matter) decay like the last notes of a saxophone solo, brassy and cold. But at least I still have the tape.
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