Chilliwack - Wanna Be A Star

You’ve never heard of Chilliwack?
That doesn’t surprise me; a lot of us had no idea who they were even back when they were an active, hard-working rock outfit from Canada. And to be honest, I had very little knowledge of the band until I went to my very first high school dance.
Yes, my appreciation for Chilliwack is entirely nostalgic. I don’t expect anyone to run out and pick up a Chilliwack album after reading this. Hell, even I didn’t run out and buy a Chilliwack album. From what I understand, most of their output is out of print and, indeed, the copy that I downloaded for this review is riddled with surface noise, scratches, and even a place where the record skips.
In other words, it’s perfect for such a nostalgic consideration.
As a Freshman in high school, the idea of the Homecoming dance was a little discouraging for a newbie student. By the time of the dance (early October), the upperclassmen had already started to cherry-pick the chicks from our class (“Freshman=Freshmeat” read some graffiti in the library) and leave the majority of the male ninth graders with little opportunity for any middling with the opposite sex.
We were, however, fairly resilient, and we kept our plans and made our way (via shoe leather express and strategically distanced drop off points by Mom and Dad) into the high school gymnasium for our first taste of how high-schoolers boogie down.
Understand that we, meaning us guys, had no real experience with dances or, indeed, dancing. Sure, there were dances in Middle School, but we usually tried to get high on shitty weed beforehand and then socialize among our peers until a chick came up and asked us to slow dance.
Dancing to a song that wasn’t a ballad was completely forbidden.
But then I made my way into the Homecoming dance doorway and started to look for other friends. I saw a circle of them at one corner of the basketball court and proceeded over.
The song that was playing was Chilliwack’s “My Girl (Gone, Gone, Gone),” at the time (1981) a minor hit because of its new-wave sheen, catchy fingersnaps, and the line “A-gone-gone-gone she been gone so long/She been gone-gone-gone so long” repeated over and over with a reverb soaked baritone voice. It was a neat little piece of top 40 pop rock, and it was the soundtrack playing when I walked across the gymnasium. My memory plays it like a movie, with the gym’s only lights coming from the colored gels hovering on an overhead rig and the obligatory mirror ball.
People were dancing to it. That didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was that dudes were dancing to it. And they were dancing to any song that was playing, occasionally stopping to get their dates a tasty beverage, but nonetheless, they were dancing.
I scanned the dance floor and saw the quarterback of our school’s football team, fresh from their Homecoming victory against the rival Fort Madison Bloodhounds, dancing to this Chilliwack tune with his old lady.
I believe that both were also the Homecoming King and Queen, which makes the scene more like Carrie than you can even imagine.
It dawned on me: rather than hanging around in a circle with dudes my own age, talking about Atari games, we should swallow our pride, start dancing, and then we’d have a better chance at making out with the chicks.
By this time, the DJ had moved on to a slow song, and the quarterback put both of his banana hands on his girlfriend’s ass and began to slip his tongue in her mouth.
The proof was now undisputable; we had to boogie.
So I associate the band Chilliwack with this epiphany, but not to the point where I recognized it until a few weeks ago when I searched for the album that originally held “My Girl (Gone, Gone, Gone).”
That album, Wanna Be A Star, is actually a concept album that’s storyline is essentially a hardworking band that’s trying to make a name for themselves. The plot itself isn’t very intrusive and there’s relatively little, aside from the first few songs, that actually attempt to hold the plot together.
Musically, Chilliwack moves from hard rock numbers into polished and intricately arranged pop rock numbers with layers of synthesizers and biting guitar solos. Almost immediately, I thought of comparing them to another Canuck band, Loverboy, if Loverboy had decided to become a lightly progressive outfit instead of a red leather pants wearing rock band.
Wanna Be A Star is a fairly enjoyable effort, but one that could provide a variety of different opinions depending on the listener. As far as this listener is concerned, I’ve had to come up with a rating that would have been higher if I’d let my own nostalgia take over completely.