Reviewed by Julia Talbot
Released: June 15 1981 Robbie Dupree Street Corner Heroes Genre: Yacht Rock (Except that the term Yacht Rock wasn’t invented until 2005. In 1981, it was considered Adult Contemporary/Easy Listening. Indeed, you’d be hard pressed to find anything easier to listen to. Unfortunately, in this case, it also means forgettable.) Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (but I wish it was higher) Highlights: (hearing Robbie Dupree’s name evokes some of my more pleasant junior high school memories) I vividly recall the summer of 1980 when Robbie Dupree’s one hit, “Steal Away” was the seventh song played on rotation on any top 40 radio station, which in 1980 was pretty much any station that wasn’t NPR or a college/independent radio station. That summer, I spent a couple of weeks in Cincinnati, Ohio, as I did every summer, visiting my dad where he and I perfected the art of my shifting the gears on his melon orange Toyota Corona (he worked the clutch). When I wasn’t doing that, I played canasta with my friend Paige, stopping only to make Cool Whip/(lime) Jell-O pies with a graham cracker crust, French braid each other’s hair, entertain her two cats - Captain and Tennille - and occasionally venture outside to walk to the 7-Eleven a few sweaty blocks away. After dinner my dad and I would walk to the Graeter’s Ice Cream shop in Hyde Park on Madison Rd. and I would get a mint chip cone and we would walk around the strip. Sometimes his recently divorced and hella bitter friend, Terry, would join us and complain about his ex-wife (they eventually got back together) specifically and marriage and women generally. The school year prior to this summer had been a shit show as I had front row seats to the messy explosion of my mother and stepfather’s crazy-to-begin-with marriage. Quite frankly, the rest of the summer and following year was equally trying as the trials and tribulations of adolescence begin to assert themselves sucking up whatever bandwidth I had left after navigating life with those two nut cases but oh, those two weeks in Cincinnati with Steal Away on the AM radio and CoolWhip pie setting in the fridge were halcyon. Its no wonder I moved to the Midwest as quickly as I could after turning 18. Street Corner Heroes, was Robbie Dupree’s second album. It is devoid of any such sentimentality or panache, although one could assert that the genre that would be one day known as yacht rock is reminiscent inherently. Nothing on this album charted. Except for one song covered by the Asian artist, Sandy Lam, nothing has been sampled, covered, or as far as I can tell even noticed. The one review of the album I found was written about the re-release of the album in 2018. In a desparate attempt to be thorough and somewhat well informed, I was left with no further choice or guidance but to read the eight Amazon reviews written in English (the remainder were in Japanese except for one, the longest of them all which was in French which, thanks to Google Translate, I actually read. Thank you, Joe Roberts, you by far had the most thoughtful and best researched things to say about this album, including that the album ranked 169th for 1981 and that All Night Long was a cover song of a Chessmen original). Of the reviews in English, the one that resonanted the most globally was this: “I had forgotten all about Robbie Dupree, and this album, until I found it in the tape player of my 1986 Buick I've had in storage for twenty years. This album is the quintessential example of how good melodies and lyrics are timeless. The songs on this album seem as fresh today as they did then. I'm enjoying the tape, and have bought the CD. Great singer.....” Emphasis on the forgotten all about Robbie Dupree and this album for twenty years… This album seems to have been forgotten almost as soon as it was released. Robbie Dupree has a great voice and knows how to sing. He’s an adept songwriter, basically there is nothing really wrong with this album besides that it is now 41 yeasr old and that hindsight being 20/20, it wasn’t his best work. All that being said, it is not a bad listen, just not a particulalry memorable one.
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