Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

This one brings back the memories. Rachel Sweet was a 16 year old junior at Firestone High School in Akron, Ohio, when FOOL AROUND was released. I had lived in Akron for fifteen years at the time, and something was in the air, the feeling that the town, a truly miserable place to live, was going to break out musically, with bands like Devo and Tin Huey and The Bizarros getting major label deals and expatriate Chrissie Hynde waiting in in the wings. Rachel Sweet, in such esteemed company, was almost an afterthought to the self-consciously hip among us, given that her pop stylings never approached the avant guard, cutting edge groove that groups like Chi Pig were able to toss off. It is accordingly remarkable to listen to FOOL AROUND, some three decades later, and to be floored by how good it sounds from beginning to bonus-track(s) end.

A good deal of credit has to go Liam Sternberg, a triple threat musician/composer/producer who was able to convince the folks who ran Stiff Records at the time that there was actually this huge wave of music coming out of a northeastern Ohio industrial city that had forever sat in the shadow of Cleveland, it’s big brute of a brother to the North. Talent, we had; sales…well, no. FOOL AROUND, like a number of the Akron projects released by Stiff and others, were critically acclaimed but did not sell. Listening to FOOL AROUND now, it is difficult to figure out why it was not huge. Certainly “Stay Awhile,” Sweet’s cover of a Dusty Springfield hit from a decade or so before, was worthy of airplay, as perhaps, was “Just My Style” (a Sternberg composition which he later reworked into “Yankee Wheels,” which was recorded by Jane Ashley, another Firestone High alumnus, under the name Jane Aire and the Belvederes) and Sweet’s immortal “B-A-B-Y” cover. It is also unfortunate that Sweet’s cover of Del Shannon’s “I Go To Pieces” (another mid- 1960s hit, this time by Peter & Gordon), was not included on the original release of FOOL AROUND. That mistake is rectified here, and it’s slightly rocked up arrangement is just perfect for Sweet’s adolescent angst, which runs through this disc like water off of a shingled roof on a rainy Akron Saturday afternoon.

Part of Sweet’s problem was the quasi-Lolita aura she exhibited; if she was just coming of age now, she'd be more than holding her own against the Disney Channel crowd (talk about your Lolitas!). And with Sternberg at the helm, she'd still be musically respectable. No matter; FOOL AROUND stands as a chapter in the large volume of the rock ‘n’ roll’s unwritten history.