- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- Women of Rock is a K-Tel Records release that, for the most part, collects major hit songs by female artists and woman-fronted new-wave bands.
Women of Rock (Various Artists) (1986): Women of Rock is a K-Tel Records release that, for the most part, collects major hit songs by female artists and woman-fronted bands that are in the new-wave category. Many of these recording artists are represented on albums provided to you earlier, and often these songs as well: Pat Benatar, “Hit Me with Your Best Shot”; the Go-Go’s, “Our Lips are Sealed”; the Motels, “Suddenly Last Summer”; Patti Smith Group, “Because the Night”; Blondie, “Call Me”; Olivia Newton-John, “Let’s Get Physical”; and Missing Persons, “Words”. Other well-known hits on Women of Rock include “Gloria” by Laura Branigan; “The Warrior” by Scandal Featuring Patty Smyth; “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler (the song gained new exposure during the coast-to-coast total solar eclipse in August 2017); and “Harden My Heart” by Quarterflash. American vocalist Laura Branigan is primarily known for “Gloria”, but she has had other hits over the years and contributed songs to two prominent soundtrack albums of the 1980’s: Flashdance (1983), “Imagination”; and Ghostbusters (1984), “Hot Night”. Not to be confused with Patti Smith – the two names are not even pronounced the same – Patty Smyth is the front woman for the band Scandal and also has a long solo career; “The Warrior” was a Top Ten hit and an MTV favorite. She had another Top Ten hit song in 1992 with “Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough”, a duet with Don Henley of the Eagles. After being married briefly in the mid-1980’s to punk rocker Richard Hell – she is in the background in the album cover photograph for the second album by Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Destiny Street (1982) – Patty Smyth married legendary tennis player and commentator John McEnroe in 1997, and the couple has two daughters. McEnroe is also a major rock music fan and an accomplished musician who fronts a band called the Johnny Smyth Band; during the 2022 Wimbledon fortnight, John McEnroe played a song on stage with Pearl Jam during a London concert. Patty Smyth has released two solo albums during her marriage, a holiday album called Come on December (2015), and also It’s About Time (2020). I have the Bonnie Tyler album Faster Than the Speed of Night (1982) that includes her biggest hit song “Total Eclipse of the Heart”; Tyler is a Welsh singer with a productive career that includes several other hits, notably “It’s a Heartache” and “Holding out for a Hero”. I also have the first album by Quarterflash, Quarterflash (1981) that includes their biggest hit, “Harden My Heart”; but neither that album nor Faster Than the Speed of Night are yet available to be cleaned up from Hurricane Katrina. Quarterflash was founded in 1980 when two of Oregon’s most popular rock bands were combined; lead vocalist Rindy Ross also plays a mean saxophone, and her husband Marv Ross is on guitar. Quarterflash released four albums in all and had several other hits during the 1980’s. I probably purchased Women of Rock because of its least familiar song; the name Romeo Void probably doesn’t ring a bell, but you might remember the lyric “I might like you better if we slept together” from their 1981 hit “Never Say Never”. However, there is a lot more to this band – and to “Never Say Never” for that matter – than that salacious lyric. Native American lead singer Debora Iyall formed Romeo Void in 1979 with three men that she met at the San Francisco Art Institute. Romeo Void released three albums, and fairly recently, I managed to find all three of them, along with a Debora Iyall solo album. “Never Say Never” comes from their second album, Benefactor. On their last album, Instincts, Romeo Void reached the Top 40 with the single “A Girl in Trouble (is a Temporary Thing)”; according to Debora Iyall, this song is intended as an answer to Michael Jackson’s mega-hit “Billie Jean”.