Reviewed by Paul J Zickler
Released: June 1980 Walter Egan The Last Stroll Genre: Power(less) Pop Rating: 2.75 out of 5 Highlights: Tuesday Weld Walter Egan, the Magnet and Steel guy. Hung around with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, wrote a song about his crush on the latter, produced by the former, which became a huge hit. And… that’s pretty much all anyone remembers about Walter. Just to show how bad things got for the guy, in 1986, he appeared as a contestant on the TV game show, Scrabble, where he told the host he was a singer/songwriter. Host: Really? Have you written anything we’ve heard of? Walter: (sings) For you are the magnet, and I am steel. Audience: (applauds politely) Host: Very nice! OK contestants, here are your letters… I just made that conversation up, but it really happened, at least according to Wikipedia. The Last Stroll came out just two years after his top ten single, but it failed to chart at all. Columbia records then dropped Mr. Egan, who was signed to MCA for one album, also a complete flop, toured with the band Spirit, and then disappeared from the musical landscape until 1999. Apparently he's still making music, having released an album in 2020. But that’s not important. One song on this record I actually quite enjoyed was a dumb little slice of power pop called Tuesday Weld, which features the lyrics, “Lord Love a Duck and the Cincinnati Kid / These are a few of the movies she did,” and also “I’ve got to meet her, now don’t you see / And I wrote this song to make her notice me.” The liner notes reveal that, alas, he never did get to meet his teenage idol. Perhaps if he’d put this song on the only album anyone actually listened to, that would’ve gone better. Someone assembled a homemade video for the song, featuring lots of clips of Ms. Weld, showing just why young Walter was so into her. You can find it on the YouTubes. Check it out. One song on this record I sort of enjoyed but not quite enough to recommend was a slickly produced, dumb little pop rock mood piece called Motel Broken Hearts. “The Motel Broken Hearts / Where the fun never starts / There’s a vacancy for you,” the chorus informs us. The song features a semi-ominous bass line, some nice use of dynamics, a few wispy sound effects, and one faux dramatic spoken section. It stands out from the other tracks, not because it’s much better, but because it seems to have some ambition and thought behind the arrangement. I could see someone like Don Henley or Boz Scaggs making something more listenable out of it. Maybe. The rest of the album mostly consists of forgettable, formulaic, synth-driven, bass-heavy, hook-light power pop. It’s clear that Walter spent ’78 and ’79 listening to Cheap Trick, Rick Springfield, and Nick Lowe. Who can blame him? Sadly, his gifts were better served by trying to sound like Fleetwood Mac, Kenny Loggins, and Robert Palmer. Yes, these are far less exciting artists, but one must know one’s strengths, which unfortunately poor Walter Egan (or his producer) did not. The result was this album, The Last Stroll, which I have now listened to from start to finish. Well, except for the last minute of the last song, which is taking a long time to fade out. OK, there it goes. Still fading… and… done.
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