Little River Band – “Cool Change”

TOP 40 DEBUT: November 10, 1979

PEAK POSITION: #10 (January 19, 1980)

Little River Band are the Australian act everyone forgets. Men At Work, INXS, and AC/DC gobbled up all the press ink in the ‘80s, while Crowded House and Midnight Oil garnered the critical plaudits, but LRB had more Top 40 hits than any of them. The group’s biggest American hit ever, “Reminiscing,” peaked at #3 in October 1978, only to finish the year behind eight different singles from quasi-Aussies like the Bee Gees (Queensland-by-way-of-Manchester), Olivia Newton-John (Melbourne-by-way-of-Cambridge), and Andy Gibb (moved back to England as a teenager). How does an outfit rack up ten Top 20 hits in six years while remaining completely overlooked? If you’re the Little River Band, you do it by staying as faceless as possible.

In January 1980, “Cool Change” became the Aussie quintet’s fourth straight Top 10 single on the Billboard Hot 100 in just over a year. That is, objectively, an impressive run. And yet “Cool Change,” like the bulk of LRB’s back catalog, left no discernible cultural footprint whatsoever. It’s a piece of pleasant and competent soft-rock that goes down easy and dissipates immediately upon fadeout. Nothing about the song screams “Australia!” Nothing in the song screams at all. Little River Band, like their similar easy-listening peers Pablo Cruise and Ambrosia, existed in a gauzy purgatory free of musical, cultural, and geographic identity. Yes, these guys hailed from Australia. But they could’ve come from anywhere.

Some of the group’s identity crisis stemmed from a lineup that was constantly in flux. Twelve different members—including three separate bass players—had already passed through Little River Band by the time 1979 rolled around. First Under The Wire, the parent album of “Cool Change,” features five core members augmented with six other musicians, including two session bassists. (LRB went through bass players like Spinal Tap went through drummers.) All three guitarists, plus lead singer Glenn Shorrock, wrote songs separately. After the first album, they also recorded separately, toured in different buses, and basically only saw each other on stage. A band originally inspired by the Eagles took just four short years to wind up every bit as dysfunctional as their American counterparts.

In the midst of these interpersonal squabbles, Shorrock wrote “Cool Change” as a “cry for help” (his words, not mine). The lyrics imagine a picturesque dreamscape far from a “life [that] is so prearranged,” the “cool change” of the title both referring to (literally) the open water and (metaphorically) removing oneself from a poisonous band dynamic. Problem is, you can’t glean any of that subtext without knowing the back story first. Whatever darkness initially spurred Shorrock is completely absent in the finished product, buried under a tidal wave of sailing references and the kind of hippy-dippy sentiments (“I was born in the sign of water/ And it’s there that I feel my best/ The albatross and the whales, they are my brothers”) that come off like second-rate Crosby, Stills & Nash.

For a more honest depiction of LRB’s infighting, simply listen to the track itself. Shorrock’s understated—and disarmingly great—vocal conveys what his lyrics can’t: the weary resignation of a man with one foot already out the door. (Two years later he would quit for a solo career, spurred by a power play from guitarist Graeham Goble.) But he’s the only one in the band proper who actually brings something to the table. The track’s wistful piano accompaniment belongs to session player Peter Jones; another studio ringer, Bill Harrower, handles the saxophone breaks. “Cool Change” is, for all intents and purposes, a Shorrock solo release billed as a group effort. And given his nightmare of a professional situation, you can’t fault the guy for deciding to craft a recording with absolutely no tension whatsoever.

At the time of its release, “Cool Change” turned out to be far more popular in America than the band’s native Australia, where the single failed to chart. Two decades later, in an ironic about-face, the Australasian Performing Rights Association selected “Cool Change” as one of the top 30 Australian songs of all time. But renewed interest in the group failed to benefit the writer of the song itself. After 1996, the touring outfit calling itself Little River Band no longer featured Glenn Shorrock in its lineup. As of the year 2000, it doesn’t include any original members at all.

GRADE: 5/10

BONUS BITS: Here’s the American Dad episode "Francine 911" where “Cool Change” soundtracks Roger’s attempts to be nice (with disastrous results).