SAGA!

[cheezewiz]

Worlds Apart was one of my favorite albums of that era.

 

[Dave Siff]

"On The Loose" was my favorite song for quite a while in my mid-teens. Anyone remember the video for that one?

 

[NewWaveBasser]

Oh yeah. The singer and some chick are on an escape in the dark of the night or something like that, while the band plays on a stage.

 

[The Mighty 'V']

They'll never be big in the UK, as "SAGA" is very well-known as the company that organises holidays for old-age pensioners....

Yes, and that's exactly what Google comes up with first when doing a search there!

...But great band with great synth sound...

I think the reason why I don't really like their newer stuff is that the roles of the instruments have changed; The guitar is much more present now (at times really "heavy" sound too, power chords and all) and the keyboards have moved to the background, whereas on their first albums it was rather the other way round. And I personally liked that "keyboard avalanche with a bit of guitar"-concept more. They sound like a fatter version of the Canadian Loverboy now.

 

[PhatBasstard]

They sound like a fatter version of the Canadian Loverboy now.

Fatter? I don't know...have you seen Mike Reno lately.

 

[The Mighty 'V']

No! So they're still going?? I didn't know that. Hadn't heard anything new from them in friggin' aaages! I went to a video store here in Wellington not long ago, and their "Turn Me Loose" was playing on the radio there. They were hardly known in Germany (my home country), but I was really surprised to hear them here in NZ!

 

[PhatBasstard]

No! So they're still going?? I didn't know that. Hadn't heard anything new from them in friggin' aaages! I went to a video store here in Wellington not long ago, and their "Turn Me Loose" was playing on the radio there. They were hardly known in Germany (my home country), but I was really surprised to hear them here in NZ!

"On The Loose", "Turn Me Loose", both Canadian.....coinsidence? Hmmm

My Wife is a Hotel Manager at a major Hotel/Casino here in Vegas and they have concerts with 80's bands quite often and Loverboy has been here several times over the last few years (along with Night Ranger, Styx, Starship, Berlin, etc.).

Mike Reno has got big but still sounds good. Of course they had a different bassist due to Scott Smith's assumed death (lost at sea off the coast of San Francisco) a few years back.

 

[The Mighty 'V']

Sad to hear that. I think he was the first bassist I'd ever seen play a Spector bass (that was back in '83).

And back to this thread's topic: On SAGA's website it says that their "In Transit" was the first digital live recording on CD by a rock band! And "...In February 1982, SAGA was the first Canadian band to perform behind the Iron Curtain, by playing for 10.000 fans in Budapest, Hungary..." - I wonder if those fans were actually able to see the band behind that curtain. But maybe they used it more for the acoustics...

And do you guys remember those hexagonal electronic drums by "Simmons"? Steve Negus was heavily involved in their development, being the company's guinea pig, so to say.


By the way, thanks to this thread I've been listening to SAGA's CDs again during the last few days, and I realized that many of their songs actually don't have a bass guitar in them - quite often it's a synth bass line. I find that quite funny, since this is a bass guitar forum. In fact if I remember correctly I once saw Jim Crichton using a SynthAxe (the instrument Allan Holdsworth was frowned upon for using in the '80s) => Invalid Link Removed