by Richard Skelly » Sun Feb 11, 2018 7:05 am
Girls’ Night Out was supposed to be the US breakthrough album for Toronto. With a strong-piped vocalist (Holly Woods) and a flashy female co-guitarist (Sheron Alton), Toronto seemed poised to emulate Heart. Toronto’s previous 1982 release, Get It On Credit, yielded the Top 10 Canadian hit Your Daddy Don’t Know. It also triggered enough American action to reach #77 on Billboard.
No such luck with Girls’ Night Out. The first foreboding event was the death of the band’s sound engineer Robert Whelan in a car accident. The second wound—this one self inflicted—was the decision by Woods and three other band members to not release What About Love. Written by Alton, lead guitarist Brian Allen and band adviser Jim Vallance (also Bryan Adams’ main collaborator), the song was axed by a group vote.
Rightly miffed, Alton and Allen soon exited Toronto. Working with their song publisher, the pair then pitched What About Love to their artistic role model Heart. Voila, Ann and Nancy Wilson soon saw Heart get a second life as What About Love became their biggest hit in years. (The Toronto version of What About Love was eventually included in one or two Canadian reissues of their old albums.)
Minus founding members Alton and Allen, Woods and original keyboardist Scott Kreyer opted to continue, albeit under an altered name. Henceforth, the band became Holly Woods and Toronto. They continued for one more studio album—Assault and Flattery—until upended by the 1985 collapse of the Solid Gold label. (A final studio album, recorded in Atlanta, was eventually released in 2007 as, until then, Woods and Kreyer had faced threats of litigation from Solid Gold creditors.)