PAUL LAINE – Loan Me A Dime (The pre-Major Label Recordings) *Exclusive*
Before achieving major success as frontman for Danger Danger and The Defiants, and recorded / arranged backing vocals for Scorpions as well as the multi platinum release of Poison’s Flesh and Blood – just to mention a few – Canadian vocalist PAUL LAINE secured a worldwide recording contract with Elektra at only 20 years old.
Laines’ first solo album ‘Stick It In Your Ear’ is considered one of the best melodic hard rock albums from the early ’90s, a cult AOR classic, as a critic once said; “the greatest Bon Jovi album Bon Jovi never made”.
Having dropped out of school at the age of 15, Paul toured with Oscar Wild, a Top 40 covers band, before forming a company with two friends, Les Horn and Fran Adamson, with the intention of raising enough capital to record his first album, and then shop it around to record labels for potential release.
The irony is that the material he recorded back then, for the not-inconsiderably hefty sum of $50,000, remains unreleased (and, according to Paul, will remain so), whereas it was a four-song demo recorded later, costing a mere $1,600, that luckily caught the ear of Bryan Adams’ manager Bruce Allen. This led to a recording deal with Elektra Records and studio time with the late Bruce Fairbairn, alongside a handpicked selection of Vancouver’s finest musicians.
Here we have these songs Laine recorded in the late ’80s – ”Loan Me A Dime (The pre-Major Label Recordings)” – very well, professionally multi-track recorded demos including songs that didn’t appeared into his debut album. Sound quality is very good, and while there’s a drum machine, the guitars kill, and of course, Paul vocals shine.
Although Paul Laine is probably best known for his 10-year tenure fronting US hard rockers Danger Danger in the late 90s and early 00s, and recently with melodic hard rockers The Defiants, the Vancouver native first made his mark with Stick It In Your Ear, his stunning, Bruce Fairbairn-produced solo debut, released by Elektra in 1990. If you’ve never heard this gem then, trust me, it’s worth hunting down a copy.
It’s fairly common for musicians to say that the first time they saw, say, The Beatles, Kiss or Van Halen was the spark that caused them to rush out and buy a guitar or a set of drums, so it’s perhaps unusual that Paul’s first musical epiphany came while seeing Seattle metal band Rail open for The Beach Boys at a Vancouver music festival in the early 80s.
”Loan Me A Dime (The pre-Major Label Recordings)” showcases the talents of this gifted singer / musician, an advance of what he would create later in the melodic hard rock world.
HIGHLY Recommended
Not for sale (until someone press this on a bootleg CD)
