Enter Rio

Why the Rio LP has enduring appeal.

If a record collection is an addiction, then my Hungry Like the Wolf 7″ single was the gateway. I loved it and wanted more. Enter the Rio LP.

When the album first got on my radar as a pre-teen, it had endless appeal: great singles on the radio (the aforementioned HLTW, Save a Prayer and title track were all huge), exotic videos and an ultra-hip cover.

For reasons that defy logic I bought my copy while on a family trip to Vancouver in the summer of ’83. I had to wait a whole two weeks before I could play it at home, so I devoured the cover art before devouring the music.

I think it’s fair to say the “Rio girl” is a bona fide 80s icon. Created by American artist Patrick Nagel, the illustration came to be his most valuable work, with the original canvas fetching $212,000 US at auction in 2008. In writing this post I learned Nagel died at 38, just two years after Rio’s release.

Even the sleeve layout by Assorted Images was unquestionably cool: it piqued an early interest in design and kick-started a habit of reading album liner notes from front to back.

Dropping the needle

The first time I ever put the record on, I distinctly remember thinking it was broken. The jittery intro to the album-opening title track was vastly different from the version I’d heard on the radio – the song’s groove didn’t kick in for a suspense-inducing 25 seconds. Once I got past that, though, the album was a thrill ride that more than lived up to the promise of its cover.

New songs abounded – My Own Way was bold and brash; Hold Back the Rain could easily have been another single; New Religion was sly white funk; and Last Chance on the Stairway had an island-inspired breakdown, complete with xylophone solo. The only interruption to the celebratory mood was the album’s jarringly ominous closer, The Chauffeur. For 13-year-old me the sterile, robotic sounds I heard weren’t a downer, though – they were High Art.

The Chauffeur excepted, the band sticks to the same fundamental sonic palette for the whole album. For a budding young music enthusiast like me, this made Rio immediately accessible and easy-to-understand.

Labels, versions and mixes

My original Rio album is on the yellow and green Harvest label, catalog ST-12211 from 1982. I listened to it today for the first time in a long while and was surprised at how quiet it is – I needed to crank it up a fair bit to get good, full-bodied sound. Or maybe I’d just worn out the grooves in my teens, who knows.

Slightly later versions of Rio were issued on a more stylized label (my 2nd copy is an example). In addition to a nicer aesthetic, the “stylized” version also makes better musical sense because it uses the shorter 3:40 mix of Hungry Like the Wolf. Interestingly (to me, anyway), the yellow and green Harvest version uses the 5:14 night version of HLTW, making the song seem like an oddball.

Side A on both my copies feature versions of songs that had been remixed by David Kershenbaum to make Rio more palatable for North American tastes. In my opinion, his treatments were unfortunately ham-handed:

• Vocals are often way too loud
• There’s too much ambience on the drums, muddying their sound
• Guitars are often too loud (a rare complaint from me)
• Overall it dumbed the record down

Fortunately, today’s “canon” version of Rio appears to be the original UK mix. Anyone listening to it on Spotify or on CD nowaday can enjoy the slicker, tighter original mixes, as I believe they were meant to be.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I now understand that I was hearing five guys who near-perfectly bridged the gap between rock ‘n roll and electronic dance music. The recipe worked then and still holds up to this day.