Blackfoot – Send Me An Angel

They Told the Record Company the Album Title Was a Native American Word for Togetherness — It Was Actually the Initials of “Suck It or Get Out”

By 1982, Blackfoot were facing a problem that had nothing to do with the quality of their playing. Southern rock, the genre they had helped build out of Jacksonville, Florida over more than a decade, was being written off by the music press as a spent force. The band who had opened for The Who at the Silverdome in 1979, whose Strikes album had gone platinum, whose “Train, Train” had become a hard rock staple, were being told by their label that they needed to modernise. Their solution was to call Ken Hensley. Hensley, who had spent the 1970s as the keyboard player and principal songwriter in Uriah Heep, brought a different set of instincts to the band’s sound — more melodic, more arranged, more conscious of the commercial landscape that MTV was reshaping around them. He joined in time for their sixth studio album, Siogo, recorded at Subterranean Studios in Ann Arbor, Michigan and mixed at Electric Lady Studios in New York, and released in May 1983 on Atco Records.

The album opens with “Send Me An Angel”, co-written by Hensley and songwriter Jack Williams, and the combination is immediately apparent. The track is still Blackfoot in its bones — Rickey Medlocke’s voice, Charlie Hargrett’s guitars screaming through a Marshall, the rhythm section of Greg T. Walker and Jakson Spires holding the architecture in place — but there is a melodic reach in the arrangement and a production sheen that marks a clear shift from the rawer southern rock of the band’s earlier work. One reviewer at the time called it “a gripping tale of loneliness and isolation that never lets up.” Hensley’s keyboard sits within the track rather than dominating it — a relief to fans who had worried the addition would soften what the band did. It does not soften it. It focuses it.

The Album Title Nobody Was Supposed to Understand

The title Siogo, as the band informed their record company Atco, was a Native American word meaning “closeness” or “togetherness.” In reality it was an acronym — standing for “Suck It or Get Out” — that the road crew had adopted as a sign in the front lounge of their tour bus during previous tours. Atco discovered the truth after the album was already released, when a field rep who had travelled with the band recognised the title immediately and started laughing when informed what the label thought it meant. According to Charlie Hargrett, Atco did not see the funny side. The anecdote captures something accurate about where the band and their label relationship stood by 1983: cooperative enough to make the record, misaligned enough on almost everything surrounding it.

Siogo reached number 28 on the UK Albums Chart and number 82 on the Billboard 200. “Send Me An Angel” was released as a single, backed with “Drivin’ Fool,” and peaked at number 66 on the UK Singles Chart. The video, now officially uploaded to YouTube by Rhino Records, was shot in 1983 and received some airplay on MTV before the track found a longer-running audience on the Playboy Channel, where it became a regular feature. The song appeared on the 1991 Blackfoot compilation Ratt & Roll 81-91 — an error in that title notwithstanding — and has remained one of the tracks that defines what the Hensley-era Blackfoot sounded like: harder and more direct than the criticism of the period allowed, and considerably better than the commercial results at the time suggested.

The personnel on this video represent the most complete version of the 1983 lineup: Medlocke, Hargrett, Hensley, Walker, and Spires — a configuration that would hold for one more album before beginning to break apart. Hargrett, whose guitar work is central to everything on Siogo, left the band in early 1984. Hensley followed by late 1984. Spires died in 2005. Walker and Hargrett both later participated in reunion configurations of the band, but the core of the Siogo-era lineup never fully reassembled. What the video preserves is a specific moment: a band at a pivot point, making a record that their label pressured into commercial compromise and that survived the compromise intact.