Enough Is Enough: What Really Killed Billy Squier's Career!

Like many reading this, I first became aware of Billy Squier in 1981 after hearing "The Stroke" on the local AOR station. The song hadn't broken nationally yet, but the minute you heard it, you knew it was gonna be big and, before long, it was.

Squier, like the song, seemed tailor-made for breakout success. He could sing, he could play, and, doggone it, he cut a striking pose to boot. So why on Earth had it taken American rock fans four albums to even become aware of his existence? (Short answer: negligence. Ed.)

These and other questions bounced around our heads as we soaked up every joyously rocking second of Don't Say No during the four-to-six months it took for radio to completely saturate the album, as "In The Dark", "My Kinda Lover" and "Lonely Is The Night" seemed permanently etched on their heavy rotation playlist.

Not that we minded one bit.

If hearing "The Stroke" for the millionth time meant we didn't have to listen to "Free Bird" for the billionth, by all means, "stroke" me.

Though a continuation of the Don't Say No formula in every way, there is something this record-buyer found oddly unfulfilling about Squier's follow-up album, Emotions In Motion. Sure, it gave Squier his third Top 40 hit, "Everybody Wants You", but the rest of the album left many longtime fans as cold as Queen's Hot Space had left their die-hard fan base.

Is it merely a coincidence that Mack produced both albums?

Let us not forget Mack's involvement with Sparks during this same time, as he produced the band's seminal Angst In My Pants that same year.

At the time, though, all anyone noticed was that the success of "Everybody Wants You" had propelled Emotions in Motion to platinum status, sending Squier's career into orbit in the process. but at what expense?

That answer came in the summer of 1984 in the form of Squier's fourth solo album, Sign Of Life, and its lead-off single "Rock Me Tonite".

The cheesy album cover artwork had been a dead giveaway for what lurked inside: a desperate, meandering attempt at maintaining maximum trajectory with a minimum of inspiration.

While there is plenty of bombast to be had, the album remains Jim Steinman's least obtrusive production. Known for his work on Meat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell and Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of The Heart", there is little of Steinman's usual sonic footprint here.

In hindsight, one almost wishes Steinman had gotten as obsessively involved in spicing up some of the otherwise by-the-book arrangements as he had on most of his other productions.

Aside from the obvious radio-readiness of "Rock Me Tonite", little else on Signs of Life seemed to have much of a pulse at all. Long story short, there wasn't a music video in the world that could keep "Rock Me Tonite" from becoming Squier's biggest chart hit, but there also wasn't a video in the world that could save the album's next two singles (surely you remember them) from the proverbial rock & roll dust bin.

Simply put, it hadn't been Squier's shirt-ripping performance in the "Rock Me Tonite" video that had "killed his career", it had been the arrival of Prince's Purple Rain that blocked out the sun, so to speak, and changed the radio and MTV landscape once and for all.

In hindsight, Squier had been fortunate to release "Rock Me Tonite" a few weeks before the proverbial Purple Tsunami swept in.

No, seriously, that's the photo they went with!

Squier smartly took the next two years off, but then responded to his beefy new record extension with Capitol Records by wrapping his shiny new album in a cover so hilariously bad that only the bravest among us ever dared listen. Subconsciously, what kind of message was Squier trying to send with a cover shot that seems to have captured an unshaven Squier about ten days into a three-day weekend and a title like Enough Is Enough?

If he was trying to get rid of us, it worked.