Lately, I’ve been rather focused on the year 1984, having just done my playlist based on tracks from that big year in music, but with Billy Idol releasing Rebel Yell – Expanded Edition, I find myself turning back to 1983… which I thought I was done thinking about after last year’s Playlist: 1983. I’ve been looking forward to Rebel Yell – Expanded Edition since Billy released an outtake from those sessions, the Rose Royce cover “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore.” As I thought about Rebel Yell, I couldn’t help but come to the realization we’ve become pretty big Billy Idol fans around here at B&V over the last decade or so… we’ve seen him twice in concert in both Kansas City and Las Vegas and really enjoyed some of his more recent EPs like The Cage.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way – it took me a while to get into Billy Idol. His debut solo album came out the summer of 1982 and frankly, I didn’t discover Billy until I went to college that fall when I started seeing him on MTV. Billy had come out of the punk rock scene having been in Generation X and still looked the part – buzz cut, bleached blond hair, snarling lip, leather clothes. It may come as a surprise but for Midwest kids who grew up in the suburbs, we didn’t get a lot of exposure to punk. The only punk rock I ever heard was when 60 Minutes did a piece on punk in England in the late 70s… my father was so terrified at the prospect of punk “rubbing off” on me and my brother he threw himself on the television like it was a hand grenade… you’d have thought of a nude lady had popped up on the screen. When I got to college in Manhattan, Kansas the radio was abysmal – no rock n roll, just pop and country – and so my only exposure to Idol was on MTV. Rather than listen to the music and realize that “White Wedding,” “Hot In The City,” or “Dancing With Myself” (which wasn’t on the original album) were great rock n roll songs, we were all just hung up on that punk look. The skinny guy punching his fist in the air was too much for our suburban mind to wrap around… He rocked but he just didn’t have the long hair and spandex we were used to like say, David Lee Roth.

However, when his second album came out in 1983, the landmark Rebel Yell, even those put off by his appearance in the videos – and this may be the only case of a video hurting an artist with his rightful fan base – began to come around. I remember hearing the title track in the car, away from the video, and thinking, “Damn, that’s a great song.” I found out shortly after that from our new roommate Walt (name changed to protect the guilty), that Idol’s guitar player was named Steve Stevens – perhaps one of rock’s greatest underrated players. When “Eyes Without A Face” came out as a single, I began singing at inappropriate moments, at the top of my lungs, “Steal a car, go to Las Vegas, Ooh, gigolo pool…” prompting one of my bosses at the time to ask, “Steal a car? Vegas? What the fuck are you on?”

It was indeed our intrepid roommate Walt who finally turned me fully on to Idol. He sat me down and played “Blue Highway,” and something just clicked. I’d been so locked in musical spelunking from the 60s and 70s, I was blocking out music from “now.” I immediately taped Walt’s copy of the album from his cassette to a blank cassette. Years later I picked the album up on CD… and even later, just recently, on vinyl. It is an absolute masterpiece, there is not a bad song on the album.

The anthem of a title track is a heart thumper. The aforementioned “Eyes Without A Face” is the ultimate “not love” song. “Flesh For Fantasy” just shimmered out of the speakers. Idol came with that punk rock attitude, but he combined New Wave synths – and there are a ton of synths on this record – with Steve Stevens hard rock/classic rock guitar and found gold. Even the deep tracks like “Blue Highway” or “Do Not Stand In The Shadows” or “Crank Call” are just fantastic rock songs. The only track that isn’t a complete 10/10 might be “The Dead Next Door,” the atmospheric closer.

This Expanded Edition provides us with a bonus disc that has mostly demo’s of the songs on the album. There’s the aforementioned Rose Royce cover, “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” that’s just dynamite. I guess Madonna covered the song in 1984, which I didn’t know about… clearly I’m not a big Madge fan. There was some question as to why Idol didn’t include his version on Rebel Yell, but when you’ve got nine “cooking” originals, who needs a cover? Of equal interest to me was another outtake, an Idol/Stevens original “Best Way Out Of Here.” It’s another great song… a little funky in parts, but I could have seen it replacing “The Dead Next Door” as a closing track. There’s another track, “Motorbikin’ – Session Take” – which brings to mind the Montrose song “Bad Motor Scooter” – that reads as a “live in the studio” track. I wish they’d spent a little more time developing that little rocker, I kind of liked it.

Alas, most of the rest of the bonus material are demos. I’d have loved a live concert from this era. The demos may be of interest to some folks, and there are some interesting moments, but I doubt folks are going to want to pour over Billy Idol’s creative process the way Dylanologists pour over Dylan’s early versions of songs. The exception might be the two demos of “Flesh For Fantasy.” The demo version here is a fast, sped up track. It only shares the title/chorus with the version we all know and love from the album. Then there’s a version from a “session take” which shows they’d started to go from the faster version to the slinky version and back again… Again, some of the early demo versions have different lyrics, but I was impressed at how many of the demos represent a close-to-final vision for the songs. Idol and Stevens were certainly on a roll!

Regardless of having only a handful of gems on the bonus material – and they are gems – if you’ve never bought Rebel Yell this is a nice way to pick it up. After the two main outtakes – “Love Don’t Live Here” and “Best Way Out” – the rest of this is nice to have, not need to have. But Rebel Yell remains a spectacular album and those two tracks are ones fans will certainly want. The source album is so brilliant, I have to recommend this package – on CD so it’s affordable – to any Billy Idol fan. This album plays so well it’s like a greatest hits record. Turn this one up loud and pump your fist in the air, baby!

Cheers!