One Big Day

Just about every place in the country has some regionally well-known band that tears up the local clubs and commands a devoted following amongst the locals. These days they are far more likely than not to have some kind of indie release going on -- a Spotify playlist if nothing else. But in days of yore, the ability of a local act to get signed by a label and release a record, let alone an actual Top 40 song, was a much rarer thing.

So when New Hampshire-born, Boston-based quintet Face to Face hit #38 with "10-9-8" in 1984, that was quite the deal for them. Principal songwriter Angelo Petraglio's dissection of the way two people in a relationship danced around their countdown to ultimatums had, in the famous words of the American Bandstand quote, a good beat that you could dance to. Laurie Sargent's powerful assertive vocals gave it a different sound than a lot of other new-wavy dance tunes and things looked like they might pay off for the group, who had been playing clubs and shows -- mostly in New England -- since the late 1970s.

But the Arthur Baker-produced Face to Face was not the best representation of how the band sounded, they felt. Edgier rap numbers like "Under the Gun" were quite different from the bulk of their material, so they drew back from that sound on 1985's Confrontation. It did poorly enough that Face to Face and Epic Records parted ways, and the band signed with Mercury records for what would turn out to be their final disc together, 1988's One Big Day.

Day continued the trend of Sargent co-writing songs with Petraglia and other band members, as well as moved towards a more country-rock sound that anticipated No Depression magazine and the alt-country scene by several years (After the band broke up, Petraglia went on to produce and co-write with Kings of Leon -- winning a Grammy in doing so, in fact).

The different sound gave Sargent the chance to use different textures of her voice and feature more of guitarist Stuart Kimball in a more traditional way than had the dance-styled numbers of the first two records. The stretching served the band well -- the opening track, "As Forever as You," puts both of those tools at the service of some excellent poetic imagery for a song that should have kicked in the doors of every AOR radio station in the United States. Sargent belts "Change in the Wind" into as much urgency as she can manage and helps create the clear sense of impending change the title implies. "Never Had a Reason" ruefully recounts the moment when a separating couple parts ways and the major change they both now face in this new solitary life. "The Day I Was Born" warns listeners that the narrator/singer may seem trustworthy and loyal but in truth has a more selfish and less idealistic agenda, and "She's a Contradiction" suggests the same thing about a friendship the narrator has with a woman whose first interest will almost always be herself.

Although the same record company official who signed the band to Epic worked with them at Mercury, the label did not have a clue about how to market this kind of hybrid of literate roots rock fronted by a powerful and expressive female singer. They weren't alone: Geffen Records never knew what to do with Maria McKee and Lone Justice after signing them, either. Face to Face disbanded just a few months after Day was released, playing a final show in front of a rowdy club crowd in Boston in October 1988. Petraglia went on to produce and write as mentioned above, Kimball joined Bob Dylan's touring band, Sargent burrowed deeper into the emerging alt-country scene with other bands and reflective, low-tempo solo records and bassist John Ryder and drummer Billy Beard continued to work in the Boston music industry.

My exposure to Face to Face happened when I one day caught the video for "As Forever as You" on MTV, sometime in the early spring of 1988. Sargent, who was (and pretty much still is) as arresting a performer visually as she is aurally, along with the fountain-of-youth theme of the video, held my interest immediately. In the pre-internet days, only a trip to the record store could help you unwrap your new potential music interest and mine did exactly that -- when I heard the rest of the album and read the primarily Sargent-Petraglia-penned thoughtful lyrics, I was hooked.

I used to view with anger the failure of the music business to make hits out of quality and deserving artists while shoveling out literally ersatz gunk like Milli Vanilli. If the combo of label, music press and radio stations could put copies of Starship's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" into the hands of hundreds of thousands of listeners, it was almost criminal they couldn't do that with stuff that was played better, sung better, written better and maybe even said something thoughtful into the bargain.

As I aged, though, my whine diminished. The "industry" was designed to favor image and pose over substance and it still is. Even the current review of One Big Day at the online database Allmusic suggests that the album "needed" a cover from some other local Boston act that was trying to break out in order to "get them out of their formula." I still wish that Face to Face, along with a host of other bands that crowded the edges of notoriety in the mid to late 1980s, had made it big, but I stopped being angry about that sort of thing awhile ago, as it didn't have much purpose. Now, I'm just a little melancholy over all of the good stuff people never got to listen to, and all of the artists who had to -- and still have to today -- keep their day jobs while mokes who tattoo their own faces amass fortunes they blow through in about 18 months.