Just Between You & Me: April Wine's a guilty pleasure

I’m old enough now to admit to my guilty pleasures, probably because I can justify them out the ass and have more examples of credibility to weasel out of them. Take April Wine, for example.
I like April Wine. Admittedly, they only released about three good albums (notice how I didn’t say “great”) and none of those managed to change a thing on the rock and roll landscape. And I don’t expect anyone to rush out and actually buy an April Wine record because I suggest it, nor would I expect you to change your opinion about them (provided you even have one) just by simply reading this.
You don’t need an April Wine record.
It’s understandable that you’ve never heard of them.
If you have, it’s ok not to like them.
This is my guilty pleasure, not yours.
It started on shaky ground anyway. In the late 70’s/early 80’s, my musical knowledge was limited. It was formidable. It was impressionable. It was in the learning stages. To give you an idea of where I was, this would have been the time of middle school. I remember being a huge fan of The Cars, The Knack, Cheap Trick, Rush and Van Halen. I had a deep affection for “classic rock,” because it was new to me then and there was a shorter amount of distance between a Led Zeppelin cut then than the distance between a Nirvana cut today, if that makes any sense. Yes, The Beatles and The Stones were up there too, but they were Gods; a V.I.P. club that everyone respected because, well, that’s what the radio told us to do.
Radio was huge to the young, fragile eggshell mind. I remember staying up later than I was supposed to, listening to A.O.R. radio stations. Occasionally, they would play new released in their entirety, and I recorded them onto a cassette straight off of the radio. I got Van Halen’s “Women & Children First” and Black Sabbath’s “Heaven & Hell” this way. For a kid with limited allowance, you did what you could to get new music. In my opinion, this was, logistically a much more complicated task than downloading music; if Mom or Dad caught you staying up late, they would knock on the door, thereby ruining the recording, which essentially was just putting the cassette microphone close to the stereo speakers. Fidelity wasn’t much of an issue. Being able to say you had the new Van Halen album was.
Friends would become big influences on actual music purchases. I remember one such friend telling me that the new April Wine album, “Harder…Faster,” was the shit. He praised the track “Say Hello” and told me that I needed to get the record. I did. I told another friend that he needed to get Devo’s first album. I hope that this eloquently explains how fucked up I was musically.
So I purchased “Harder…Faster.” I liked “Say Hello.” I really liked “I Like To Rock.” It didn’t blow me away or anything, but it was what it was: competent classic rock designed to move the rock boat ahead rather than rock the boat.

It was good enough for me to snag a couple of tickets to go see April Wine, 38 Special, UFO, and The Outlaws in concert. This would be my first real rock concert. The first concert was actually The Spinners at Six Flags with my parents, but I didn’t count this because we went to Six Flags to ride the Screamin’ Eagle and not to hear “Rubberband Man.”
April Wine sounded just like they did on record, aside from a few extra guitar solos and a lengthy drum solo from their bald headed drummer. I was completely sober, which may have lead to my increased appreciation for April Wine; I’m not sure if the older boys sitting directly behind us smoking weed had the same impact. All I knew was that I had attended my first fock concert with the dude I recommended Devo to. The band that I went to see was April Fucking Wine. That’s my justification for this guilty pleasure.
Their performance was in support of their “Nature Of The Beast” album; the only album to chart high in the states and produce a hit single here in the States, “Just Between You And Me.” I suppose the track qualifies as one of the first power ballads, but that’s hardly groundbreaking.
The album was, again, merely good. Lots of hooks, some decent guitar work, but several songs were plagued with dorky synthesizer effects that ultimately diminish the “rock” quotient and prevented it from being referenced later on among the critical elite. Even at that age, the idea of having laser sounds during their track “Caught In The Crossfire” seemed a bit contrite. Thankfully, they had a song that featured the lyrics “the man in the back/smokes a pack and a half” to offset this type of studio defects. Because when you’re fourteen years old, smoking is cool.

The Wine made another appearance during my senior year of high school. A full four years after it charted, the school voted “Just Between You And Me” to be our Senior Prom theme. By this time I had outgrown my April Wine phase, because their follow-up to “The Nature Of The Beast,” an album called “Power Play” featured even more synthesizer noodlings and even shittier material. The band was tapped out, and I had moved on to more aggressive forms of rock music that, thematically, fit the teenage angst better than this one-notch-above-bar-band outfit from Canada.
April Wine made one final appearance in my life. In the mid-nineties, the band played, literally, in a field in the middle of nowhere minutes away from where I lived. Steppenwolf was the headliner, and I was able to score a pair of tickets to revisit a band that was a small, yet important, part of my own youth. I’d guess that well over a thousand people attend the event, and I’d guess that the majority of them were drunk. To my surprise, the Wine performed well: their set contained extended guitar solos and, yes, another drum solo from the same bald headed percussionist. It was a time-machine moment with only the performers looking a little worse for the wear.
For good reason: from the moment I started to distance myself from them, they released another, even more keyboard laden effort (“Animal Grace”) that managed to put a wedge between leader Myles Goodwyn and the rest of the band. Another album appeared (“Walking Through Fire”) which contained only Goodwyn surrounded by horrid 80’s production value and an obvious intention of fulfilling the contract obligation he had with Capitol Records. This was not an “April Wine” record, it was a Miles Goodwyn and the label-hired producer record that understood nobody would by a Miles Goodwyn record but a few might be inclined to get a new April Wine record. It didn’t work, of course.
If you’re wondering, the band (Goodwyn managed to make up with some former Wine members) continues to tour and release albums, some 35 years after they began. For a few of those years, they reached me and created some memories, so they’re a guilty pleasure only in the sense that I’ve got to explain why I have a couple of their albums in the collection and justify the decision.
In layman’s terms: because I like to rock.