It’s not as easy as you might think to find a band that truly, truly sucks. I decided the best way was to throw a bunch of names into a hat and drew April Wine, but not only do they not suck they’re great. How could they not be when they released a song called “Don’t Push Me Around” that includes the lines, “I got an old Cadillac/I like to sit in the back/And flog the dog between the covers of Sexteen.” Sexteen magazine? Oh, they’re great all right. Greater than the Stones even.
So I tried again and bingo! I drew the name of Donnie Iris, who as you may remember was at one time a member of Wild Cherry. But he wasn’t with the band when they released “Play That Funky Music” so you most likely don’t remember him, except perhaps for his subsequent work with his band the Cruisers, whose name you won’t find on 2001’s The Millennium Collection: The Best of Donnie Iris. Problem is you probably won’t remember Iris for his solo career either, because he only recorded three singles that made the Billboard Charts’ Top Fifty. And from this desultory track record comes this best of compilation. But cut Donnie a break. That “best of” may sound like false advertising, but isn’t when you keep in mind what his “worst of” must sound like.
Donnie doesn’t even look like a rock star. He looks like a New Wave dweeb and nice guy, although he could be a total dick. That’s the way it is with some people. They look like nice people but they’re total dicks. But enough with the “is he or is he not a total dick” stuff. What’s undisputedly true is that Donnie is one of those mystery meats of New Wave–you’re not sure what his music takes like (it could be worse than gefilte fish!) but you’ll try it if you get desperate enough, as in every other record in your record collection just spontaneously combusted, and this compilation is all that’s left.
The compilation opens with Donnie’s first single “Ah! Leah!”, which hit the record shelves in 1980. If I’m going to be honest with myself—and there’s no one I’d sooner lie to—the song ain’t bad. Catchy melody, some unexpected metal crunch, and Donnie doesn’t even sound like a dweeb. But he rectifies things with the dorky Elvis vocals on the surprisingly brawny “I Can’t Hear You,” on which the guys behind Donnie sing, “Stop all your bitchin’/Back in the kitchen!” Way to strike a blow for Women’s Lib, Donnie!
“Agnes” is one of those up-tempo numbers that come straight off the New Wave fax machine, and is distinguished solely by its sudden reversal on the feminism front—in the song bad guy Louie threatens to shoot Donnie and even yanks him out of his car because Donnie’s been fooling with Louie’s gal Agnes, and things are looking pretty ugly when here comes Agnes holding Louie’s pistol. Which proves that behind every great man stands a woman holding a firearm. “Sweet Marilee” is a fast-paced love song with a disco vibe and can be found on Iris’ 1981 LP King Cool, which just goes to show you some people see completely different people when they look in the mirror.
“Love Is Like a Rock” is anonymous ’80s rock and could be a Huey Lewis song except it’s a bit too tough and has nothing to do with golf. “That’s the Way Love Ought to Be” is a bad Hall and Oates song that walked into a bar and picked up a bad Utopia song sitting at the bar and the pair of them had unsafe sex resulting in the birth of “My Girl,” an upbeat and happy-go-lucky number that actually climbed to No. 25 on the U.S. Billboard charts, making it the closest thing Iris ever had to a hit.
“Tough World” is the Cars following a head-on collision with an 18-wheeler, although the chorus does have its allure. The generic “Do You Compute?” has the band going “R-r-rock!” like that crime dog while Iris sings “She’s So European/For an American girl,” which isn’t a bad lyrical hook actually. The album closes with the 1970 chestnut “The Rapper,” a No. 2 hit Iris wrote and recorded with the Jaggerz, a band he founded in 1964. Talk about your desperation moves—including a song that basically belongs on the nostalgia circuit and wasn’t even an example of Iris’s solo work is hardly an endorsement of the career as an independent artist.
Donnie Iris is a journeyman rocker whose journey hasn’t taken him to very few interesting places, and The Millennium Collection: The Best of Donnie Iris is the proof. Maybe if he’d tossed in some lines about flogging the dog to Sexteen magazine? No, not even that would have saved him.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D-
