It had been a long journey for Y&T through the first ten years of the band’s existence after forming in 1972. The quartet of Dave Meniketti on lead guitar and lead vocals, Joey Alves on rhythm guitar, Phil Kennemore on bass and Leonard Haze on drums had recorded two initial albums as Yesterday & Today, before shortening the band name to Y&T. Having changed record companies, these initial albums were followed by two much more focused albums in the early 1980’s with “Earthshaker” and “Black Tiger”, where the band brought to the studio the sound and attitude they had cultivated on the road. This resulted in the band receiving critical acclaim for their work through Europe, but little commercial success in their native US, despite a plethora of tracks that were worthy of attention. On the tour to promote “Black Tiger” the band supported some of the biggest bands in the world such as Ozzy Osbourne, Motley Crue, Alice Cooper, Iron Maiden and Dio, and were playing in bigger stadiums and garnering more attention as a result.
What was needed to continue their ambitious push was a breakthrough on the American commercial radio stations. Fellow long-term American battlers Twisted Sister and Night Ranger were beginning to attract this kind of attention, and for Y&T to reach the next level they felt that they needed to find a way to crack that market. Their problem was how to do it without being accused of selling out, while pushing forward in their hard rock artform rather than folding back into the less raucous sound of their first two albums in the 1970’s. The basis of what they were chasing appeared to be in the songs of “Black Tiger”, but could they push further forward in that direction on their follow up to that album?
The band couldn’t have done too much better in their quest to gain higher approval of the commercial rock gods than with the opening track to the album, the title track "Mean Streak". This is still the star of this show, with its mercurial guitar riff, hard hitting drums and spitting lyrics. This song goes hard from the outset, delivering great vocals, super drums from Haze and Meniketti blazing away on guitar and vocals. It’s a beauty and a great opening to the album itself. In some ways, the opening is so good that the rest of the album has a hard time trying to keep up, but there is still plenty here to enjoy. The following track tries for the same biting lyrics as the album opener. “Straight Through the Heart” doesn’t flow as pleasingly as the opening track but it has a hard pitch to it that works on most levels with another solid solo driving this through the back half of the song. For the most part though, the rest of the album is an either 'take it or leave it' proposition. Some will find that it probably tends to repeat itself most of the way through, with lyrically similar themes cropping up and not a huge amount of variety in the song writing and taking the album just on the surface that could be seen to be a fair enough comment.
However, I can forgive the majority of that for two main reasons. The upbeat style of the songs keeps the album moving without getting too bogged down in complicated timings and technicalities. The musicianship is good, and Meniketti's vocals always smooth over anything that might be remotely out of the ordinary. "Lonely Side of Town" and "Hang 'Em High" are two great examples here. A number of the songs are very middle of the road, almost 'easy listening' kind of material, in the way that some hard rock albums just get into a groove and never seem to leave it. Songs like "Take You to the Limit" and "Sentimental Fool" fall into this section, which doesn't make them unlikeable, it just makes them come across as though they have been written a bit too close together and as a result have some similar facets to their composition. “Midnight in Tokyo” probably falls into this section of the album as well, but given that it acted as one of the songs that began to get the band noticed, there seems to have been a necessity for it to appear here. Then there is “Down and Dirty” which closes out the album in a similar fashion to “Straight Thru the Heart”. These are good songs that build the solid core of the album. And that does bring around the second reason for forgiving any noticeable traces of triviality. And that is that, despite the fact that the band craved a commercial breakthrough, they have not allowed that to infiltrate the quality of the overall tracks and album as a result. What comes here on “Mean Streak” is a solid hard rock album that utilises the best skills that this quartet has, and puts it out there for you to listen to. They have not gone down the glam metal route, they have not bowed to a soft rock ballad in order to gain acceptance. They have stuck to their guns and brought out the kind of album their fans would have wanted, and that is what is the best part of this album.
Back in 1986 when the fabled weekend of the "Music Video Hits" program on Channel 10 on Australian TV was dedicated to heavy metal music videos, one of those that became a favourite for me was the video for Y&T's "Mean Streak". The song and video both caught my attention immediately, and from that point the song became a hit for me. However, it wasn't until a little under two years later, as I rummaged around in one of my favourite haunts, Illawarra Books & Records, that I came across a copy of the album of the same name, and my hand couldn't get to my wallet fast enough to pay for it.
To be honest it was as much a surprise to me that I loved this album as much as I did at that time, when my main focus was the giants and heavier bands such as Iron Maiden, Metallica and Megadeth. But it was my first year of university, and my wide-ranging search for new music and new bands was incorporating subtle differences in genres. Y&T, and "Mean Streak” in particular, fitted very nicely into this bracket, the kind of album I could put on and just let flow across whatever mood I was in at the time. It wasn't straight out aggression. It had those wonderful Meniketti vocals layered over the terrific rhythm section of Kennemore and Hazes and the great guitars of Alves and Meniketti himself. This blended their 1970's roots as found on their eponymous debut album with the harder sound specified in the drums and guitar that had been building over each album.
Y&T is one of those bands that, like Night Ranger, could and should have been bigger than they have ever become. Both have albums that should be considered classics, but perhaps just lack those last vital ingredients that could make them timeless. “Mean Streak” is like that for me, an album I still love to this day, and enjoy anytime I put it on, but taking away my biased joy of the album, perhaps it just needed something else in the mix which may have propelled it to a higher plane. Despite that, it is still a great favourite for me. It got a hammering when I first bought it, and was on heavy rotation for at least a two year period, so all of these songs are ingrained in me to a level where I don't really hear anything that I don't like. It's an historic relic for me, and one I love as much for the nostalgia it brings whenever I listen to it now, as to the actual music itself.
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