Head First

You are locked into The Zoo, the station that still treats album rock like it matters, and right now the needle is dropping on a cut that never got the credit it earned. This is The Babys, and the song is "Head First," the title track from the 1978 Chrysalis album of the same name. If you came up on freeform FM in Dallas, Fort Worth, or anywhere the AOR dial still meant something, you already know the voice. John Waite sings like a man who has decided the only way through the wall is straight at it. Wally Stocker's guitar does not decorate the track. It drives it. Tony Brock keeps the whole thing on a straight rock beat that lifts when the chorus hits. Three minutes and fifty-seven seconds, written by Waite, Stocker, and Brock, and built for the kind of radio that used to live between the ballads.

The Babys started in London, not as a marketing plan and not as a teen magazine fantasy. Founding member Michael Corby put the idea together around 1975, pulling in vocalist and bassist John Waite, drummer Tony Brock from Strider, and lead guitarist Wally Stocker. The name was a sardonic joke aimed at labels that only wanted pretty boys and singles. It was supposed to last a few weeks. It stuck. Chrysalis signed them to what was reported at the time as the richest deal ever handed to a new act, north of a million dollars, partly because the label saw the coming value of music video. The self-titled debut arrived in 1976. Broken Heart followed in 1977 and gave them "Isn't It Time," written by Jack Conrad and Ray Kennedy, a No. 13 Billboard Hot 100 hit that put the band on American radio in a hurry. Waite's voice carried a hint of England and a whole lot of ache. Stocker played with the economy of a man who had studied Free and Bad Company without copying either. Brock hit hard and clean. Corby handled keyboards and rhythm guitar and wrote. On paper they had the lineup. In the room they had friction.

Head First was the third album and the one that nearly ended them before the public ever heard it. Chrysalis put them back with producer Ron Nevison, the same hand who had shaped Broken Heart. The band set up with the Record Plant 24-track mobile at Hidden Valley Ranch in Malibu and spent something on the order of $300,000 in six weeks. Corby wanted a more progressive record. Waite was already leaning toward story songs, the kind of narrative writing he later tied to Dylan and Bonnie Raitt, with country-leaning outtakes such as "Restless Heart" and "World in a Bottle" left on the floor. Outside players came in: John Sinclair on synthesizer, Jack Conrad on bass, Kevin Kelly on piano, Robb Lawrence on mandolin. Chrysalis rejected the album in August 1978. On August 28 the label removed Corby from the group. Waite has said the darkness had already descended, that the personalities in the band were volatile enough to feel like an asylum. Brock later put the firing in blunt terms: if Corby had stayed, the deal was gone, and everybody felt bad about it, but too much work had already been done to stop. Some two weeks later the remaining trio went back in and cut the record again in stripped-down form. Corby's parts were reduced to keyboards on a few tracks. They added a swaggering opener, "Love Don't Prove I'm Right," and the gospel-backed Conrad and Kennedy ballad "Every Time I Think of You." The album that reached stores in December 1978, with some sources dating the street date into January 1979, was the second version. James Stroud is also credited alongside Nevison in the production line. Allan MacMillan arranged horns and strings on most of the record. Jimmie Haskell handled the arrangement on the big ballad. Mike Reese mastered it. Bill Murphy did the design.

"Head First" opens side two. It is the rocker the title promised. Waite, Stocker, and Brock share the writing credit. The guitar charge is straightforward, the beat is steady, and the chorus steps up without begging. AllMusic later called it typical radio rock in the same lane Journey, Cheap Trick, and Foreigner were working, and that is fair as far as it goes. What the description misses is the attitude. This is not a power ballad in disguise. The band had already handed the lead single slot to "Every Time I Think of You," finished without Corby, who happened to be friends with Conrad and Kennedy, the same team behind "Isn't It Time." That ballad matched the earlier hit exactly, peaking at No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1979. The same month the album became the Babys' highest-charting LP, reaching No. 22 on the Billboard albums chart and No. 18 in Australia, where it later went gold. "Head First" started life as the B-side of "Every Time I Think of You," then Chrysalis flipped it to the A-side of the follow-up single with "California" on the back. It reached No. 77 on the Hot 100. Waite has said the band was on FM with the ballad and on AM with the title track, that you could not turn on a television without seeing them, and that they came off the road rail-thin with too little to show for it. He has also said Head First should have been a multi-platinum record and that Chrysalis distribution never did the album justice. The re-cut, in his telling, still worked in the band's favor. The released version is a fine album, light and shade, with the title cut carrying the harder edge.

The rest of the record fills in the picture. "White Lightning," written by Billy Nicholls, is the odd one, a recounting of an LSD trip with lyrics that have not aged into poetry. "Run to Mexico" still carries a Corby writing credit. "You (Got It)" is Waite alone. "Please Don't Leave Me Here" brings Corby back on the songwriting line with Waite and Stocker and stretches past five minutes. "California" is the closer, Waite's own, later used as the flip side of the title-track single, with mandolin from Robb Lawrence and extra percussion from Bobbye Hall. Backing singers Marti McCall, Myrna Matthews, and Dianna Lee lift the ballad. Mike Japp, who co-wrote "I Was One," sings backup on that track. None of it erases the fact that the band was rebuilding in public. For the tour that followed, the trio brought in two Americans: keyboardist Jonathan Cain and bassist Ricky Phillips. Waite could finally work the front of the stage instead of staying tied to the bass. Cain and Phillips wrote and played on the next album, Union Jacks, which delivered "Back on My Feet Again" and "Midnight Rendezvous" and put the Babys on a double bill with Journey that veterans of that run still talk about. Cain would leave for Journey. Waite would go solo and score with "Missing You," then team with Cain again in Bad English, where he even worked with Nevison once more on Backlash despite the old friction. Phillips landed in Styx and later Bad English. Brock and Stocker kept the name alive in later years, with a new lineup carrying the catalog on the road. The original run ended in 1981 after On the Edge. Five Chrysalis studio albums, three real Hot 100 showings, and a permanent seat on classic rock playlists that still know the difference between a hook and a filler.

Head First itself went out of print for years and came back on May 26, 2009, via Rock Candy, remastered, no bonus tracks. The 2019 HNE box Silver Dreams: Complete Albums 1975-1980 gathered the studio run with rarities and the 1975 demo. None of that changes what the title track does when it hits a good system. It is the sound of a band that had just been told to start over, written by the three who stayed, produced under deadline, and aimed at the radio formats that actually played rock records. Waite's vocal does not plead. Stocker's lead line cuts. Brock's snare keeps the floor solid. If you only know the Babys from the two No. 13 ballads, this is the other half of the argument, the side that proves they were a rock band first. The Zoo is still the place that plays the deep cut beside the hit, the way KZEW used to do it when album sides mattered more than algorithms. Pull the whole record if you have it. Side two starts here for a reason.

Hear more of this kind of rock, freeform and commercial-free, at The Zoo. The band's official home is thebabysofficial.com. Find them on Facebook at facebook.com/thebabysofficial, on Instagram at instagram.com/thebabysofficial, and on X at x.com/TweetTheBabys.