Thor
By All Music Guide
By All Music Guide
Amazingly, it worked, and after short stints doing everything from playing in bands to starring in a Las Vegas revue dressed in gladiator gear to working as a nude waiter in Hawaii, in 1976 Thor landed a booking on The Merv Griffin Show! This exposure proved enough to help him secure a recording contract, and, along with then-bandmembers John Shand (guitar), Terry McKeown (bass), and Bill Wade (drums), record a debut album the following year. Curiously entitled Keep the Dogs Away, its poor mans imitation of Kiss and Alice Coopers hard glam style (self-labeled as muscle rock) didnt exactly set the world on fire, and relegated Thor and his ever-changing cast of bandmembers to a club-playing existence for years to come, with only the occasional independent EP (1979s Gladiator, 1980s Striking Viking) to document their music.
In fact, Thors career wouldnt heat back up again until 1984, during an era in popular musics trajectory that was far more propitious to his over the top shenanigans and lingering songwriting mediocrity. That year, a series of singles released by the tiny Albion label generated enough press and consumer interest to draw the attention of on-the-rise metal label Roadrunner, which in turn quickly issued 1985s not-totally-embarrassing warrior metal album Only the Strong. Unfortunately, this too sold far too poorly to keep the band -- then completed by guitarist Steve Price, bassist Keith Zazzi, drummer Mike Favata, and, most memorably, backup singer Pantera -- from being dropped, and follow-up albums like the same years hastily packaged Live in Detroit, 1986s Recruits -- Wild in the Streets, and 1987s Tritonz were all released by ever smaller indie labels, and to ever greater public indifference. (It didnt help that the last two were also issued under different names: the first using the Jon Mikl Thor moniker, the second a meaningless alias of Tritonz.)
Thors career was effectively over at this stage, but he surprisingly returned to sporadic recording about a decade later, having since released 1997s Thunderstruck: Tales from the Equinox, 2001s Dogz II, 2002s Triumphant, and 2005s Thor Against the World. In addition, two collections cleverly (ahem!) named An-THOR-logy have emerged: the first, from 1997, being a CD, and the second, from 2005, a DVD collecting the sights, the sounds, and the smells of Thors first decade of existence. A year later, Thor released Devastation of Musculation.
