Theoria

Kim Mitchell “Easy to Tame” [mp3 - removed: some jackass, rather than downloading the file, is listening to it about a thousand times; I’m not paying for that.] from “Shaking Like a Human Being”

Kim Mitchell‘s 1986 album, “Shaking Like A Human Being,” would eventually go triple platinum (presumably only in Canada – but it’d be interesting to know if he ever penetrated the American market, afterall, there must have been a demand for mainstream Canadian pop-rock with the recent success of the ever-so-creepy Bryan Adams in the early to mid eighties.) The most well-known song from this album – reminiscing, as it were, of lost love and lost youth (perhaps the eighties Canadian version of John “Cougar” Mellencamp?) – was “Patio Latterns,” a song exploring that awkward time when parties consisted in drinking lemonade, Meatloaf on the ghetto blaster, and when “those patio lanterns were the stars in my sky” (c.f., “That’s when a sport was a sport / And groovin’ was groovin’ / And dancin’ meant everything / We were young and we were improvin’”).

While listening to “Patio Lanterns” brings a bit of embarassment to the listener’s ear twenty years later (afterall, this is also the man who wrote songs such as “I Am A Wild Party,” “Rocklandwonderland,” and Rock n Roll Duty”) the other single from that album, “Easy To Tame,” can only conjure a sense of nostalgia and – let’s admit it – surprise that a man famous for wearing an OPP mesh baseball cap (years before trailer park chic would become cool) and for writing “party songs” with variations upon “rock” in the title could engage in such sensitive self-reflection without a hint of shame (years, too, before Rites of Spring and Slint would invent “emo”) and some really great keyboards.