How the hell did this guy slip under your reviewer’s radar for so long? OK, I guess DAVE RAVE’S CV suggests he’s a large fish in the vast Canadian pond, but when a guy’s referred to as “the Canadian Nick Lowe”, gets produced by Daniel Lanois and Jack Richardson and has an address book featuring collaborators such as Mitch Easter (REM producer), Alex Chilton, Andrew Loog Oldham, Television’s Billy Ficca and Bill Dillon (Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon) amongst many other respected movers and shakers then this hack wants to know about him.
Since the late ‘70s, Rave has led bands such as the hugely-popular Ontario quartet THE SHAKERS, the equally influential TEENAGE HEAD, not to mention stints with THE DAVE RAVE GROUP, THE TROUBLE BOYS, AGNELLI & RAVE and THE CRASHTONES. He continues to record with a couple of these as well as take on regular session work and has recently been working on jazz pop albums with guitarist Mark McCarron. His story is far too long and fascinating to do more than scratch the surface here, but suffice it to say that this self-endorsed career overview – featuring 21 hot and kickin’ tracks – is the perfect place to start for the uninitiated. It’s shit hot throughout and makes it abundantly clear that the name Dave Rave is surely synonymous with the purveying of quality rock and power pop.
In the days prior to U2, Bob Dylan and stadiums, an up and coming Daniel Lanois produced much of The Shakers seethingly melodic early ‘80s output. Influenced in relatively equal doses by the likes of Dave Edmunds/ Nick Lowe and the classic US power-pop template (the excellent ‘Let’s Face It’ virtually IS The Knack and has been royally plundered by Five O’Clock Heroes of late), the half dozen tracks culled from their 1981-83 heyday are all pretty damn unmissable, from the pleading vocals and amphetamined cut’n’thrust of ‘Baby It’s True’ through to their fine and nervy cover of The Flamin’ Groovies’ ‘Shake Some Action’ and the amped-up Eddy Cochran-via-Rockpile raunch of ‘ Out The Door’ where Dave’s woman will have done gone unless our hero takes steps.
As those of us who were unfortunate enough to have lived through the period can tell you, the mid-‘80s were a pretty barren period for great rock’n’roll, but it didn’t seem to faze Dave Rave much, as the ’85- ’87 period is responsible for great garage staples such as TEENAGE HEAD’S ‘Dance With Your Doll’ – led by Gord Lewis’s kinetic riff motion – and the two TROUBLE BOYS contributions, ‘Fun, Booze & Corvettes’ and ‘Can’t Stop Shakin’: a pilled-up update of ‘Summertime Blues’ soon to be immortalised by Teenage Head, but with Rave’s pleading, dishevelled vocal already nicely in place.
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Ever the trailblazer, Rave’s 1990 LP ‘Valentino’s Pirates’ was given a big fanfare in Gorbachev-era Russia and the prevailing spirit of Glasnost meant he would tour it there too. The music was more than up for its’ ambassadorial role, too, if tunes like the louche’n’debauched ‘Pure Honey’ and world-weary ‘Weight Of The World’ are anything to go by. Rave’s art was surely maturing nicely and his run of form extended with his mid-90s albums, ‘Three Octave Hexagram’ (1994) and ‘The Cowboy Flowers Sessions’ (1995) with THE DAVE RAVE CONSPIRACY and AGNELLI & RAVE respectively. From these albums we get highlights like ‘Mr. Silver Tongue’ and ‘Dreamin’ After The Movies’, both of which are tense, cinematic and tinged with psychedelia. Rave’s stylistic palette was broadening, though he still found time for insanely catchy rave-ups like ‘Let’s Shake’ which comes across as the most frenetically wonderful cross between Nick Lowe and The Blasters you can imagine.
2003’s ‘Everyday Magic’ album, meanwhile, found Rave in harness with lippy upstarts THE TREWS and getting re-connected with his hard rockin’ ways via the title track and the potent ‘Love Fades’, which – despite its’ Rave/ Agnelli song-writing credit – is essentially a Teenage Head re-union, right down to a John Perry-ish guitar solo from Gord Lewis which must be heard to be believed. This album also birthed the spangly, modern-day psych-pop of ‘Madeleine Says’ which is as heavenly a four minutes as anything that’s hi-jacked radio in recent years.
The album is book-ended by two freshly-minted tunes from 2006 in the shape of the Glam-my stomp of ‘Nicki’ and the pure Ramones hit of ‘Rock The Party’ where Rave is in harness with a new project called THE CRASHTONES. Encouragingly, these recordings show that after almost three decades Dave Rave is still scaling peaks and rocking harder than many of the young disciples lurking in the wings.
‘Anthology Vol.1’, then, is a wonderfully vibrant and impressive story-so-far collection, but clearly only the tip of a very sizeable creative iceberg indeed. Is it too late to ask the chap with the white beard for more Rave come the morning of December 25th?
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