Starz - One of the First Pop-Metal Bands?

The weathered newspaper clipping still sits in my file cabinet back home - a review of a rock show at the Aargon Ballroom in Chicago in 1977. The featured bands included four relative unknowns - at the time, who remain "cult" bands even today. Angel, Starz, Runaways and Piper. Piper was fronted by Billy Squire, we all know what happened to him) The Runaways proved a training ground for Lita Ford and Joan Jett. Angel copied Kiss' costume shtick, except they dressed all in white. All of these bands provided their own brand of sleazy '70s hard rock, it could be said that each had a gimmick. In the Runaways case they were teenage girls, Angel had their costumes and fog machine, and Starz, well, they really didn't have a gimmick, unless you counted the singer Michael Lee Smith's lips and pouty demeanor (A curious sidenote- Michael Lee was teenie bopper idol Rex's brother).A controversy did ensue over their song "Pull The Plug", a bluesy, sexy song about-euthanasia? Based on the breakthrough case of Karen Anne Quinlan, it received the most publicity.

The band consisted of Smith, guitarist Richie Ranno, drummer Joe Dube, bassist Pete Swerval, and guitarist Brendan Harkin. (Swerval and Harkin were replaced by Orville Davis and Bobby Messano, respectively, on Starz' last studio album.) Visually, Starz were not far removed from the hair bands that proliferated a few years after their demise.

Most of Starz' songs were likable in a 70s AOR kind of way - Detroit Girls, Live Wire, Night Crawler capitalized on the preening lead singer sex appeal in vogue at the time, a precursor to the hair band explosion to come. A band like Starz would have been virtually indisguishable from any of the Poisons and Bon Jovis of the mid/late 1980s.Subsequent Starz albums produced by Jack Douglas did not deviate much from this formula. With the exception of their third album Attention,Shoppers, which temporarily abandoned Kiss-lick guitar machinations for a brighter, self-produced pop sound, all Starz' albums were cut from the same "party all night" cloth. Coliseum Rock the bands last shot at stardom, flopped, despite good, solid rock songs like So Young, So Bad and Take Me.

Although garnering little airplay and no kudos from critics, the band had a loyal underground following right up to their break-up in 1980. A great retrospective is Brightest Starz:Anthology released last year on England's Heavy Metal Records. The 1970s Starz albums have been rereleased on Metal Blade. Founder Brian Slagel is a Starz fan, as are Tom Kiefer of Cinderella and Jon Bon Jovi.

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