Reviewed by: CHRIS ALBERTSON NOEL COPPAGE PAUL KRESH PETER REILLY JOEL VANCE
AMAZING RHYTHM ACES: Stacked Deck. Russell Smith (vocals, guitar, harmonica); Butch McDade (drums, vocals); Barry Burton (guitar, mandolin, dobro, vocals); Billy Ear heart (keyboards); Jeff Davis (bass, vocals); James Hooker (piano, vocals). Third Rate Romance; The 'Ella B'; Life's Railway to Heaven; Hit the Nail on the Head; Who Will the Next Fool Be; My Tears Still Flow; and six others. ABC ABCD-913 $6.98, 8022-913H $7.98, 5022-913 H $7.98.
Performance: Good
Recording: Very good
The Sensible Rhythm Aces would be more like it, as this is a band that plays uncluttered music influenced by the sounds of those Tennessee spas, Memphis and Nashville. Some members of the band were involved in Jesse Winchester's Canada tour and with the inclusion of an inferior version of what was to be the Rhythm Aces' first hit, Third Rate Romance, in Winchester's "Learn to Love It" album. The version recorded here is considerably more appealing, although comparing it to your expectations might produce un easiness if your expectations have been jacked up by the promotional campaign that's been working on mine. The inertia is interesting, though: it took music-industry promoters a long time to start hyping Southern bands, and now it's going to take them a long time to stop.
The Rhythm Aces would profit from a slower, cooler build-up; this is not a very exciting album, but it's a sane and promising one.
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Explanation of symbols:
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Monophonic recordings are indicated by the symbol g
The first listing is the one reviewed; other formats, if available, follow it.
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Lead singer Russell Smith seems capable of subtler stuff than he suspects (in his other role as the group's busiest songwriter); the songs tend to be breezy and/or standardized and don't really tax him. There's a sense of groundwork being laid, though, and it carries over into the instrumentals-the discipline is there, and so is some admirable restraint, and the suggestion is planted that more imagination is on the way. The band, that is, is off to a smooth, unspectacular start. If the band caught a good case of inertia from the publicists, that could be a good omen. N.C.
BRIAN AUGER'S OBLIVION EXPRESS:
Reinforcements. Brian Auger's Oblivion Ex press (vocals and instrumentals). Brain Dam age; Foolish Girl; Plum; and four others. RCA APL1-1210 $6.98, OO APS1-1210 $7.95, APK1-1210 $7.95.
Performance: No wonder
Recording: Very good
There was a time, ten years ago, when Brian Auger was considered one of England's most promising jazz pianists, but the sudden, Beatles-provoked adult acceptance of rock lured him down the more popular path. He should have maintained his original course. After the demise of his not-too-successful Trinity, Auger formed Oblivion Express in 1971, and, if this album is any indication of the group's direction, oblivion is clearly their destination and the express will deliver them there before very long. When they don't sound like a rhythm track, they try to sound like Stevie Wonder, getting about as close as Mrs. Miller did to Petula Clark. It isn't funny. C.A.
AZTEC TWO STEP: Second Step. Aztec Two Step (vocals and instrumentals); other musicians. I'm in Love Again; Our Lives; Faster Gun; Cosmos Lady; Move Up to Love; and five others. RCA APL1-1161 $6.98, 0 APS1-1161 $7.95.
Performance: Quiet
Recording: Good
Aztec Two Step, Rex Fowler and Neal Shulman, tread very softly indeed through this quiet, workmanlike, and often engaging al bum. It's sort of early Simon and Garfunkel with the suggestion of a beaded curtain clicking softly in the background. Rex Fowler has written everything here, with the exception of Shulman's Walking on Air, and if you crave a little night music in which one band runs effortlessly into another, then you'll probably enjoy it very much. Their voices blend well, Shulman plays excellent acoustic guitar, and a couple of things (I'm in Love Again and It's Going on Saturday) certainly show that they are headed in the right direction as musicians and as performers. A little livelier material might perk things up, though. P.R.
TONY BENNETT/BILL EVANS: The Tony Bennett Bill Evans Album. Tony Bennett (vocals); Bill Evans (piano). Young and Foolish; The Touch of Your Lips; My Foolish Heart; When in Rome; and five others. FANTASY F-9489 $6.98, 8160-9489 H $7.95.
Performance: Rough and reedy
Recording: Good
Here's an album that probably sounded better in concept than it does in actual execution.
Both Bennett and Evans are formidable talents of the recent pop past. But, while the passing of time has only sharpened and refined the piano talent of Evans, it has unfortunately taken a noticeable toll on Bennett's voice as an instrument. It is now a pretty ragged thing: reedy, forced, and with a sweaty vibrato that can make for uncomfortable listening. Bennett's strong points have al ways been his warmth, his dopey sincerity, and his kind of charm. They are all still there in abundance, particularly in Young and Foolish and Days of Wine and Roses, but he's never had or developed the kind of musicianship that can pull a singer whose voice has deteriorated through a whole album. The result here is a bit grim. All of the flaws are nakedly emphasized with only Evans' piano to back up the voice, and the miking seems intent on natural sound. At this point perhaps Bennett would be better advised to get himself one of those control-room Merlins to play with the dials and a sizable orchestra and clever ar ranger to cover up the rough, raw edges. P.R.
HARRY CHAPIN: Portrait Gallery. Harry Chapin (vocals and guitar); orchestra. Dreams Go By; The Rock; Bummer; Babysitter; Star Tripper; and five others. ELEKTRA 7E-1041 $6.98, (:) ET-81041 $7.97, TC-51041 $7.97.
Performance: Boring, boring
Recording: Good
Harry Chapin is, and has been for a long time now, a windy bore. There-I've said it and I'm glad. Constantly and depressingly on the alert for new twinges of "loving feelings" ( Sandy), "social consciousness" (Bummer), or our apocalyptic future (The Rock), he be rates rather than entertains. He, also 'has a habit of seizing one specific attitude per song and blasting away "angry," "happy," "com passionate" (the worst), or "tender" through the entire length of the song.
Operating on the theory that if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all, I have nothing more to say. P.K.
COMMANDER CODY AND HIS LOST PLANET AIRMEN: Tales from the Ozone. Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Air men (vocals and instrumentals); orchestra.
Connie; Honky Tonk Music; Cajun Baby; Gypsy Fiddle; Minnie the Moocher; and seven others. WARNER BROS. BS 2883 $6.98, M8 2883 $7.98, M5 2883 $7.98.
Performance: Routine
Recording: Good
Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Air men come limping in straight out of the commercial c-&-w galaxy, and, mostly, they aren't very good. Honky Tonk Music is their high point here, and that, believe me, isn't too high. Their run-through of The Shadow Knows is more boringly typical: clumsy foolin' around by Commander Cody as lead vo calist and routine backing by his group.. The soggiest pit is reached in an attempted revival of Minnie the Moocher with a humorless, leaden imitation of the great Cab Calloway performance. Hoyt Axton, through his very smooth production work, has tried to cover up the essential triteness here, but it would take a Flo Ziegfeld to accomplish that. P.R.
RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT
JIM CROCE: The Faces I've Seen. Jim Croce (vocals and guitar); various orchestras. Country Girl; Big Fat Woman; Railroad Song; Stone Walls; Gunga Din; Mississippi Lady; Chain Gang Medley; and seventeen others. LIFESONG LS 900 two discs $11.98.
Performance: Very fine
Recording: Good
I'm sorry to say that I was pretty much out of things when Jim Croce's songs such as Time in a Bottle, You Don't Mess Around with Jim, and Operator were proving that somebody with real talent could also write and perform real hits. This lovingly assembled album (by two of his close friends and associates, Terry Cashman and Tommy West), however, gives me more than a glimpse of just how much I missed. Croce was a natural in every department. His lyrics have the gritty realism and the romantic tang of Kerouac at his best, and his music has a deeply American feel. This al bum is a collection of previously unreleased material dating back to his days in the early Sixties with a group called the Spires (and, from all accounts, fairly uninspired they were) to November of 1971. He died in a plane crash in 1973; that it was a great loss be comes particularly evident in a series of "raps," tapes of his stories to his audiences between songs. They are pure delight. Whether the subject is Carmella or The Chinese or The Army, he comes across as a warm, pre maturely wise man, with humor, sensitivity, and, most of all, a genuine affection for his audiences. Some of the early stuff is pure tyro stuttering, but as you listen along to his growth as a man and as a performer you begin to return the affection that he radiated.
This set is a must for his fans, of course, but it is also something of a revelation for those who never got acquainted with Croce's work during his too-brief life. P.R.
CROSBY AND NASH: Wind on the Water. David Crosby, Graham Nash (vocals, guitar, piano); Russ Kunkel (drums); David Lindley (guitar); Leland Sklar (bass); Craig Doerge (piano); other musicians. Carry Me; Mama Lion; Bittersweet; Take the Money and Run; Naked in the Rain; and six others. ABC ABCD-902 $6.98.
Performance: Advancing sideways
Recording: Excellent
This is touched with a certain elegance, but it is also rather ponderously tuneless. That doesn't matter so much when a mood is working, as happens in To the Last Whale, but overall it blurs some not-that-bad lyrics and gives the album an abstract, detached, disinterested feel. David Crosby, whose lyrics are slightly the more sophisticated, has written, it says here, some tunes that are so vague and rambling you wonder if even he could play them, by ear, the same way twice. Graham Nash's melodies have beginnings, middles, and ends, but-they are stale and utterly predictable. The voices, of course, sound good together (Nash sounds better with Crosby than without him), and the instrumental backing-while it won't surprise anyone who ...
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Lily Tomlin, Modern Scream Goo!) news for Tomlin fans! Lily has done it again. Perhaps nothing on her new record can live up to its lurid "Modern Scream" cover (got up to look like a copy of a fan magazine complete with those little ads telling how to add three inches to your bust and obtain a birth certificate for $1 by mail), but it's no slouch either.
As her legions of admirers know, Tomlin has at least sixty-two separate personalities, and in the course of a single show she is capable of metamorphosing without warning into a different one every minute. The present re cording is strung-rather vaguely-on a running gag which has a slow-witted reporter (Lily) plaguing our heroine (Lily) with hair-brained questions (Q. "Is Hollywood corrupting?" A. "That's why I'm here") as they splash about in the swimming pool of Lily's California residence ("Welcome to my luxurious Hollywood home").
In between the interview episodes, which grow increasingly mad as the program proceeds, there are welcome encounters with the Other Selves. Susan Sorority, the gushing undergraduate, abandons all discretion and breathlessly admits that she loves the Lennon Sisters ("I am not ashamed to play their records"). Ernestine, the phone operator with a high-school diploma, diagnoses the complaint of a physician suffering from "interference on the line" and explains cuttingly why Ma Bell cannot make house calls. Edith Ann, the brat with the chocolate-smeared lips, offers a course in sex education for adults in her com munity. A Joyce Brothers type reads letters aloud from lovelorn listeners and supplies chilling advice. A "rubber freak" reports on her shameless descent from the innocent munching of rubber bands to the ultimate disgrace of hiding Goodyear tires in her closet.
The Tasteful Lady spends a night in traffic court.
THE whole album is a bit on the frantic side, tricked out with perhaps too much by way of sound effects and studio laughter, and there's more ingenious intercutting than is strictly necessary-but I found it constant fun anyway.-Paul Kresh
LILY TOMLIN: Modern Scream. Lily Tomlin (comedian). Exclusive Interview; Rubber Freak; Suzie Sorority; Adult Sex Education; Judith Beasley Exclusive; Dear Dr. Dacey; The Trip; On Call; Bad Carma; Grrr; Boogie Broadcast; Hipigrams. POLYDOR PD 6051. $6.98, 8F 6051 $7.98, CF 6051 $7.98.
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heard Crosby, Stills, and Nash-employs some of James Taylor's associates and is clean, thorough, and nicely detailed. My impression is that it's a gentle, earnest, well meaning album that just never lights up and becomes musical. N.C.
ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA: Face the Music. Electric Light Orchestra (vocals and instrumentals). Waterfall; Evil Woman; Nightrider; Poker; and three others. UNITED ARTISTS UA-LA546-G $6.98.
Performance: Mutational
Recording: Very good
The Electric Light Orchestra, led by former Move member Jeff Lynne, is better than most groups who try to combine rock with classical motifs. At least the ELO is skillful and unpretentious. But what is the sense of mixing whiskey and wine? The powers, techniques, effects, and schematics of rock and classical music are at polar odds with one another.
Outside of relief from the boredom of playing the twang-thump of rock, there doesn't seem to be any valid reason to try to achieve this mutant sound. And, even though ELO's classical orchestrations are neatly done, they cannot disguise the basic weakness of the rock material. J. V.
THE FLYING BURRITO BROS.: Flying Again. The Flying Burrito Bros. (vocals and instrumentals). Easy to Get On; Wind and Rain; Why Baby Why; Dim Lights, Thick Smoke; You Left the Water Running; and five others. COLUMBIA PC 33817 $6.98, PCA 33817 $7.98.
Performance: Good Recording: Good You can't fly home again, but this may prove a worthwhile shakedown run to somewhere else. This isn't the Burrito Brothers the way they were-the holdover members are steel player Sneaky Pete Kleinow and bass player Chris Ethridge, and they don't figure prominently in the singing-but this band may profit by taking stock of what it has, rather than by concentrating on what its namesake had. Joel Scott Hill's singing is impressive; he has a knowing, world-weary baritone voice that seems more versatile than the ones it reminds you of-John Kay's, say, or David Clayton Thomas'. There's a touch of pomposity in it here, but that can be fixed. Sneaky Pete is one of the very best pedal steel players, but it's difficult to sneak when you're called upon to provide so much basic filling, as he is here, so the guitars are going to have to get into the game a bit more. The song selection seems too involved with formula following and image preserving; having the name and having a great steel ("country" instrument) player does not necessarily obligate a group to try to top George Jones on his own terms-and the honky-tonkers, Why Baby Why and Dim Lights, Thick Smoke, sound like rock-and-roll dilettantes are running them through a meat grinder. Hot Burrito #3 is even worse; it sounds pointless. But Building Fires is a strong cut, with some shining work by Klei now and some evidence that the other "lead" vocalists, Gene Parsons and Gib Guilbeau, ought to sing more harmony and less lead-in the interest of style if not competence-and You Left the Water Running and Wind and Fire are the kind of stock I'd be taking right away if I were this band. Hill needs to be worked harder, Kleinow needs freedom from routine work, and the vocal harmonies need more emphasis. But mostly the preconceptions need to be dismantled. N.C.
GRAEME EDGE BAND/ADRIAN GURVITZ: Kick Off Your Muddy Boots. The Graeme Edge Band, Adrian Gurvitz (vocals and instrumentals). Bareback Rider; In Dreams; Lost in Space; Shotgun; The Tunnel; and four others.
THRESHOLD THS 15 $6.98.
Performance: Okay
Recording: Elaborate
Graeme Edge of the Moody Blues and Adrian Gurvitz have teamed up to write, produce, and perform in this album, and they've come up with an amiably gaudy time waster. Edge's talent on drums remains, and he can work up a kind of vitality and energy that the material certainly lacks, but Gurvitz's work on the lead vocals is so undistinguished in every re spect that the tracks blur into a pleasant sort of background noise. Lots of good, tricky production work and excellent recorded sound make it listenable in a vapid way. P.R.
GEORGE HARRISON: Extra Texture (Read All About It). George Harrison (vocals, guitar, piano, synthesizer); Jim Keltner (drums); Klaus Voormann (bass); David Foster (piano); Jesse Ed Davis (guitar); other musi cians. You; The Answer's at the End; This Guitar (Can't Keep from Crying); World of Stone; Tired of Midnight Blue; Grey Cloudy Lies; and three others. APPLE SW-3420 $6.98, 8XW-3420 $7.98, 4XW-3420 $7.98.
Performance: His best lately
Recording: Sumptuous
My guess is that George Harrison is a hum mer. His songs have that musing quality I seem to recognize (this being the kind of thing Rust Hills calls "the schlock of recognition") from my own humming days. I used to do a lot of it and in the damndest places-in crowded elevators, in the on-deck circle, at the free-throw line. . . . It was embarrassing, but only when I noticed. The thing about humming is the preoccupation that goes with it, and that's the thing about Harrison's songs. The lyrics here, for example, could have been "I love you, to dum . . ." and "This guitar, mmmumbledebumble . . ." and so forth and you'd hardly notice the difference-you're just not motivated to concentrate on them any harder than George did. The melodies have the same glancing effect; if you don't strain your self, you don't mind so much how they run together or how they continually borrow parts from each other.
There are certain optical phenomena that, it is said, can only be seen out of the corner of the eye. A hummer's humming and George Harrison's music work the same way. That's how 1 finally learned to appreciate this album, anyway. Once I abandoned the head-on approach, I found it does have extra texture.
Keyboards by Gary Wright, Leon Russell, David Foster, and Harrison himself have been emphasized slightly, and there are some spiraling and nifty horns fitted in, just so, by such craftsmen as Jim Horn and Tom Scott.
But these are technical descriptions. What's important is that the production itself hums, gorgeously, and almost never conflicts with Harrison's musing. As long as you keep it on the periphery of consciousness, it works just fine; find yourself a few other things to think about and you won't find it necessary to castigate George for doing " All Things Must Pass" one more time. N.C.
RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT LENA HORNE: Stormy Weather. Lena Home (vocals); orchestra, Lenny Hayton arr. and cond. Just One of Those Things; Ridin' on the Moon; I'll Be Around; Summertime; Mad About the Boy; and six others. STANYAN SR 10126 $6.98 (from Stanyan Records, 8440 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, Calif. 90069).
Performance: Exquisite
Recording: Good
Gorgeous is as gorgeous does. This is a collection of prime Lena Home cuts from several years ago, now re-released on Stanyan. The conducting and arrangements are by her then husband Lenny Hayton, who had been working with her since their days together at Metro in the Forties. The album shows the collaboration at its glittering, luminescent peak.
Many of the Horne classics are here: Cole Porter's brittle, elegant, and nonchalant kiss-off, Just One of Those Things, with Lena tossing it off like she's throwing a half-empty bottle of Joy into the waste basket simply be cause it's gotten to be a bore; Alec Wilder's lovely, affecting I'll Be Around, sung with all the warmth and sincerity of a lullaby; a passionate and willful performance of Noel Coward's Mad About the Boy; a wheedlingly horny Baby Won't You Please Come Home; and her triumphant, inimitable version of Harold Arlen's Stormy Weather. Hayton's arrangements always hit exactly the right mood and the right temperature, and Horne's voice moves so easily within them that there is nev er a strained moment. This is a gorgeous al bum, one that deserves to stay in the catalog forever. P.R.
ELTON JOHN: Rock of the Westies. Elton John (vocals, piano); Ray Cooper (drums);
Davey Johnstone (guitar, mandolin); Kenny Passarelli (bass); other musicians. Yell Help/ Wednesday Night/Ugly; Dan Dare (Pilot of the Future); Island Girl; Grow Some Funk of Your Own; Street Kids; and four others.
MCA MCA-2163 $6.98, MCAT-2163 $7.98, MCAC-2163 $7.98.
Performance: Disgusting
Recording: Casual
This should be quite useful to anyone re searching just how cynical a performer can
------------- THE FLYING BURRITO BROTHERS Left to right, Kleinow, Hill,
Ethridge, Guilbeau, and Parsons
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Anne Murray: Together
“TOGETHER" brings the number of ways producers seem to view Anne Murray up to two. By producers I mean to include Murray herself, not to single out individuals so much as to contemplate how the power is balanced in studio decisions that collectively determine what kind of impression a recording makes. The one who's called the producer has to take the rap, of course, but sometimes you wonder. Brian Ahern produced the previous spate of Murray albums and has to take the blame for leaving the impression that she would rather be popular than deal with the question of whether she owed something to her talent. It was the song selection primarily that said this, a casual mix of the familiar with the catchy-but-shallow. Yet that same Brian Ahern produced Emmylou Harris' "Pieces of the Sky" and allowed it to be packed with the kinds of songs Harris-a newcomer we would expect to lose any serious power struggle with a veteran producer-likes, including some hard-core country ones without a ready-made broad-based pop-rock audience. And he let her band play its own way throughout. In view of that, it seems unlikely that Ahern is the sort to have stood over Anne Murray with a bullwhip ordering her to Think Bubblegum.
Popularity was achieved, in any case, and with all kinds of audiences. Publicists beamed different versions of Anne's image out in all directions: she appeared, from back home in Nova Scotia, a fairly pure Canadian on a for ay into the States; she was fashionable and up-to-date for the rock audience, turning up curly-headed and patchy-dressed at just about the right time; and her name was kept in the pot in country music-partly because she had a natural affinity for the straightforwardness of it and partly because someone bothered to learn how to pitch an ad for Music City News. Through all this, she was using her voice, a marvelous instrument to begin with, with in creasing skill; the question was whether she was taxing her emotions the least bit.
"Together" is an improvement and at the same time a slight frustration. Murray, if you can concentrate on just her and the musicians ranged close about her-the cat-like rhythm section anchored by drummer Jim Gordon, the soloists and back-up singers-definitely seems engaged this time. The songs she, or they, or (nominal) producer Tom Catalano or someone-selected seem to interest her individually and intrinsically as something beyond potential singles for various thoroughly researched markets. But the album's sound goes beyond that in the way it presents Mur ray. It has very few moments that don't bulge with old-fashioned orchestration, and the drift I get from this is that someone in power this time construes Murray to be a rich man's singer to be institutionalized in time-honored ways, as Sinatra and Streisand have been.
This strikes me as an overcorrection, basically political in nature. The orchestrations speak of dressing up, being formal, going uptown.
JUST a bit beyond that is the Streisand/Minnelli show-biz-to-the-core image, and I suspect the real Anne Murray is no closer to being that than she is to being the lightweight, carefree hit-maker just off campus. She does not put herself above the songs in "Together," but the orchestral arrangements seem de signed for the Big Star who would do just that. As a listener, I receive conflicting information, then-except in the rare case where the orchestration is lithe and spontaneous, as it seems to be in If It's All Right with You (some subtlety with cellos works wonders there)-as I perceive in Murray's singing the naïveté and dignity and caring of the folkie approach, which is not at all formal.
What we--I, anyway--have been wanting from Murray was an album that would last longer than the fads that figure so prominently in the writing of many songs. That seems to have been in the minds of those responsible for putting this one together, too, but where the earlier ones seemed to ignore just how special her talent was, this one perhaps stands a little too much in awe of it. It is taken seriously to the point of being overproduced although Catalano, or whoever, did seem to t, be trying to keep the vocals up where they could be fully appreciated and to use the supporting sounds as a sort of neutral wash, like lighting. Ironically, neutrality is a quality that calls attention to itself.
Murray seems to be keeping her sense of perspective, however; she seems to enjoy needling the nostalgia craze with Everything Old Is New Again and gives it a virtuoso vo cal-invoking her surprising range, her feel for pacing, a smoother-than-Dynaflow modulation-but she neither overwhelms the song nor allows its inherent cuteness to become arch. She does not join the strings in further sweetening up the romanticism in David Gates' Part Time Love, nor does she let Blue Finger Lou ("My woogie wants to boogie with you," indeed!) surrender to its own basic hokiness. Her singing of the title "standard" is understated and wistful, and the orchestral wash behind her there is sympathetic and unobtrusive; this version of this over-record ed song will last.
“TOGETHER" makes new and impressive technical demands on Anne Murray's abilities but essentially it liberates her from one set of conventions only to chain her to another.
What she needs, I think, is an existential approach. She has an exceptionally responsive and versatile vocal instrument-start from there and take nothing else for granted. Does a song need an orchestra or two acoustic guitars and a bass? Depends on how Murray relates to the song; Sunday Sunrise got just what it needed . . . and then got an orchestra piled on top of that. So it goes.
Some talents are so impressive, of course, that producers-all that word implies-are eternally afraid of them. This may be one, but "Together" does illuminate a host of good intentions and a willingness to change categories. The truth, as it pertains to accurately representing Murray, still seems stubbornly un-categorical. It lies, as a big voice from the sky said in a New Yorker cartoon, Somewhere In Between.-Noel Coppage ANNE MURRAY: Together. Anne Murray (vocals); orchestra, Lee Holdridge, Michael Omartian, Artie Butler, arrs. If It's All Right with You; Sunday Sunrise; Out on the Road Again; Part Time Love; The Call; Everything Old Is New Again; Lady Bug; Player in the Band; Blue-Finger Lou; Together. CAPITOL ST-11433 $6.98, (1) 8XT-11433 $7.98, 4XT-11433 $7.98.
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... get. You may think such people have enough to study already, with Bob Hope's monologues, David Bowie's choreography, and Howard Cosell's syntax already threatening us with data pollution on the subject of what some celebrities think they can get away with, but here it is, anyway, a monotonous, muddy, slapdash, utterly rotten album. Elton John is not musically illiterate-you can easily tell he's not when you listen to any of his other recordings, whether you like them or not-so he must have been up to something when he contrived this mess. I can't imagine what it was if it wasn't to test the frontiers of gullibility. His other albums have a certain sound to them; regardless of how preposterous Bernie Taupin's lyrics were at times and regardless of how exploitative and glittery and cute a figure John cut at times, you had to admit he was al ways stylishly melodic. Not this time; anyone exposed to fifteen minutes of chord change patterns could have written these "tunes," and they are run through what sounds like a road band being broken in (or rehearsed for the first time) gently on the easiest, most obvious routines. There is, fortunately, a limit to how far Elton John or anyone else can take this kind of thing: the most gullible audience possible is the youngest audience possible, all other things being equal, and it isn't very far from this album to the cut-off point-a recording that already exists, thanks to the wonders of modern science, of the sounds a fetus hears inside the womb. N.C.
RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT
GLADYS KNIGHT AND THE PIPS: Second Anniversary. Gladys Knight, Bubba Knight, William Guest, Edward Patten (vocals); instrumental accompaniment. Money; Street Brother; Part Time Love; At Every End There's a Beginning; Georgia on My Mind; and four others. BuDDAH BDS 5639 $6.98.
Performance: Excellent
Recording: Good
Okay, I surrender. Maybe Gladys Knight and the Pips have been this good all along and I couldn't hear it, or maybe they are finally being themselves even though it takes half a dozen people to produce and gather material for them. Whatever it is, this is a delightful al bum, full of sparkle and class. There is nothing like hearing professionals being professionals and having a good time about it. J. V.
LEO KOTTKE: Chewing Pine. Leo Kottke (guitar, vocals); Bill Berg (drums, percussion); Bill Peterson (bass); Bill Barber (piano); Jack Smith (organ). Standing 'on the Outside; Power Failure; Venezuela, There You Go; Don't Witt Think; Regards from Chuck Pink; and six others. CAPITOL ST-11446 $6.98.
Performance: Diffused
Recording: Good
Since I am a fan and admirer of Leo Kottke and have a high regard for him personally, it makes me uncomfortable to say that this is a disappointing album. Some of the material, like The Scarlatti Rip-Off, is first-rate, and his version of Wheels (recorded by the Ventures in the Fifties and written by Buddy Holly's producer) is another example of Kottke's ability to move from the near-sublime to the cheerfully mundane with no qualms. Trombone is pensive, and Can't Quite Put It into Words contains one of those startling gimmicks of which Kottke is so fond and which he uses to real musical effect.
But the programming of the album is slop py. The weakest material is all on the first side, while the strongest material is crammed onto the second. Side one opens with a vocal, Standing on the Outside, written by Kottke and his wife. So far, so good. It is followed by his version of Procol Harum's Power Failure, which he devised while on tour with the group in Europe. His vocal is strained and the mix is poor. The charming and harmless Venezuela, There You Go is followed by Don't You Think, a standard c-&-w robber written by Marty Robbins, which is given an undistinguished reading. Side one closes with Regards from Chuck Pink, so similar to Venezuela that it renders both invalid.
It is possible that the album might have been better if more attention had been paid to the sequencing of performances. "Chewing Pine" is worth having if only for its high lights, but I advise you to start with side two of the album and stay there. J. V.
------- LITTLE FEAT Disciplined, expert blending of rock, country,
blues, and jazz
RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT
LITTLE FEAT: The Last Record Album. Little Feat (vocals and instrumentals). Down Be low the Borderline; Somebody's Leaving; All That You Dream; Mercenary Territory; and four others. WARNER BROS. BS 2884 $6.98.
Performance: Outstanding
Recording: Evocative
I am mightily impressed by Little Feat, captained by Lowell George (he is the composer of Willin', one of the many fine songs from.
Linda Ronstadt's "Heart Like a Wheel" al bum). A clinical description of why this album works so well would include the way the band expertly mixes the better aspects of rock, country, blues, and jazz; the discipline of the group; and their dramatic understatements, of which only fine musicians are capable. Emo tionally, it's one of those few albums where you're convinced by the middle of the first track. Listen only two or three tracks at a time-superior wine is best sipped. J. V.
TAJ MAHAL: Music Keeps Me Together. Taj Mahal (vocals, banjo, mandolin, guitar, piano); instrumental accompaniment. Music Keeps Me Together; When I Feel the Sea Beneath My Soul; Dear Ladies; Aristocracy; Further On Down the Road; and five others. COLUMBIA PC 33801 $6.98, PCA 33801 $7.98, PCT 33801$7.98.
Performance: Very good
Recording: Good
Taj Mahal has won a loyal following with his accomplished acoustic guitar playing, his iconoclasm, and his careful/carefree mixing of folk, blues, jazz, rock, and Carribbean styles. He projects himself as a very private, suspicious man who does not allow anyone to get too close. It is as though he were sending unsigned letters to the huts and castles of the world, all addressed to "Occupant." This current disc is heavily influenced by reggae and is most notable for two fine instrumentals, When I Feel the Sea Beneath My Soul and Why? . . . And We Repeat! The other performances are mostly collages of the various styles mentioned above. But, despite its charm and force, there is something eerie and disturbing about Mahal's music. He seems to be a man compulsively in search of an identity and yet fearful of what it might be-a private eye who puts himself on his own case and may have to turn himself in. J. V.
DAVE MASON: Split Coconut. Dave Mason (vocals, guitar); Mark Jordan (keyboards, da vinet); Emil Richards (marimba); David Crosby, Graham Nash, the Manhattan Transfer (supporting vocals); other musicians. Split Coconut; Crying, Waiting and Hoping; You Can Lose It; She's a Friend; Save Your Love; and four others. COLUMBIA PC 33698 $6.98.
Performance: Very good
Recording: Clean
This charming and harmless album is a pleas ant way to pass an hour. Mason and his gang are lighthearted about the Caribbean rhythms they use, which is all to the good and just the way it should be. Crying, Waiting and Hoping is from the Buddy Holly catalog and proves once again what a minor master he was of simple, direct, and sentimental pop writing.
You Can Lose It has a persuasive "hook" and would probably dowel as a single. "Split Coconut" is a pleasure--Mr. Mason, for this relief, many thanks. J. V.
JONI MITCHELL: The Hissing of Summer Lawns (see Best of the Month, page 75) RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT SAM & DAVE: Back at 'Cha. Sam & Dave (vocals); instrumental accompaniment. Come into My Life; When My Love Hand Comes Down; A Little Bit of Love (Cures a Whole Lot of Bad); There's a Party in My Heart; Un der the Boardwalk; Shoo Rah, Shoo Rah; and four others. UNITED ARTISTS UA-LA524-G
$6.98.
Performance: Fabulous
Recording: Excellent
Deanie Parker, head of publicity for Stax Records almost from the beginning, once told me: "Honey, you can talk all you want about the Memphis sound, the Muscle Shoals sound, the Florida sound-it's all the Southern sound!" She was right, of course, but within the "Southern sound," I think the " Memphis sound" (a biracial product) is and always has been the best of the lot. We have heard very little of it recently, so I am happy to report that it has made a glorious return with this Sam & Dave album.
"Back at 'Cha" is a comeback album for Sam & Dave (Hold On, I'm Comin' and Soul Man), who were part of the original artist roster of Stax/Volt Records' early, superb days.
The duo have lost none of their power and expertise-it has been there all this time, just waiting for another chance. And the people surrounding them here add their own wonderful bits of Memphis: Steve Cropper, the producer/guitarist, bassist Donald "Duck" Dunn, and drummer Al Jackson, Jr. were three-quarters of Stax's Booker T. & the MG's (organist Booker is now in California misusing his great talent). Wayne Jackson and the Memphis Horns are also cherishably present. As a guitarist, Cropper is always spare and precise, knowing exactly when and where to put the right lick. He has also written two fine tunes in the great Memphis tradition, Give It What You Can and Don't Close the Curtain (Before You See the Play).
Everyone here has a marvelous time, an old-home, down-home time. And Memphis you will hear it if you listen-is paradise. J. V.
RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT
LEO SAYER: Another Year. Leo Sayer (vocals); orchestra. Bedsitterland; Unlucky in Love; Moonlighting; Only Dreaming; Another Year; and five others. WARNER BROS. BS 2885 $6.98, M8 2885 $7.98, M5 2885 $7.98.
Performance: Good-and getting better
Recording: Very good
Little Leo's growing up fast and creatively. He still shows a certain spitball irreverence in things like Moonlighting, a funny, touching story about a runaway couple and their elaborate plans, and The Last Gig of Johnny B. Goode, the tale of a rock star on the skids.
But even these songs have novelistic insights and touches of perception that set them well apart from Sayer's previous work. The strongest piece of material here is a song titled Bedsitterland, harsh and stinging and saturated with moodiness. It probably will have more impact in England, where it is more pertinent and where there will be instant recognition of the situation in which so many people live out vacant, empty existences in those old mansions and townhouses that have been converted into bed-sitting rooms, each person tucked into a cell-like room, each surrounded by his own wall of indifference, apathy, and, often, despair. Not precisely an upbeat subject, but it's beautifully and sensitively handled by Sayer. He chooses as his protagonist someone who's been out on the streets, who has finally found a place of his own, no matter how dreary, but who is beginning to wonder if the fight has been worth it, surrounded as he is now by the chilly silence of unlived lives.
Powerful, gutsy stuff and, I hope, a harbinger of a big, big talent about to erupt. P.R.
NEIL SEDAKA: The Hungry Years. Neil Sedaka (vocals); orchestra. Crossroads; Bad Blood; Stephen; Baby Blue; Tit for Tat; The Hungry Years; and five others. ROCKET PIG-2157 $6.98, PGAT-2157 $7.98, C) PGAC-2157 $7.98.
Performance: Excellent
Recording: Very good
During the tumid height of rock, the arbiters of pop culture would, every once in a while, cast a snigger or two back over their shoulders at the then-recent past (the late Fifties and early Sixties) when trying to sum up something as beneath notice and would label it "Neil Sedaka stuff." They, of course, had a copy or two of the Berkeley Barb or Stone around and knew that at last the Lumpen proletariat had found their real means of musical expression, and that most of what had gone on before was, au fond, only a commercial rip-off of these little people's little hopes and dreams and fears (meanwhile grandly ignoring in their midst such prole-pleasers as the Monkees). It was during this period of Heavy Thinking-and even weightier prose that Sedaka's reputation and record sales began to resemble those of Kate Smith's.
--- NEIL SEDAKA Master of the really popular song
But lo! The last couple of years have seen Sedaka not only bounce back but almost shazam back to the top of the charts with one hit song after another. (Well, things aren't quite the same at Berkeley as they were a few years ago, either. It's interesting to note that whereas psychology was the most sought after degree for almost a decade, economics has now replaced it. Hmm.) Sedaka's new al bum is almost a textbook exercise in the art of the really popular song. His viewpoint has toughened a little (Tit for Tat), in one song (Bad Blood) chillingly so, and he skitters lightly over some social issues (New York City Blues), but he still remains a vastly gifted pop entertainer. Even his wistful, sad-sweet The Hungry Years, a song about the closeness that hard times can bring to a couple and the regret of success ("With everything and nothing too/It wasn't worth the price we had to pay"), has the universal appeal of a soap opera situation. Corny as hell, but also damned true. He finishes up here with his golden oldie from 1962, Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, and he sounds exactly the same as he did all those years ago-when I couldn't stand him. (Yes, dear reader, I too went through a Meaningful Phase.) The voice-well, let's just say that it's unique, couldn't be anyone else but Sedaka, and seems to suit his communicative purposes, and let it go at that. But don't let this album go by-it's worth several listens, if only to hear Sedaka's self-effacing mastery of his own material. P.R.
PATTI SMITH: Horses (see The Simels Re port, page 42) RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT SPLINTER: Harder to Live. Bill Elliott, Bob Purvis (vocals); Earl Palmer (drums); Bill Dickinson (bass); Chris Spedding (guitar); Tom Scott (horns, synthesizer, percussion); other musicians. Please Help Me; Sixty Miles Too Far; Harder to Live; Half Way There; Which Way Will I Get Home; Berkley House Hotel; and four others. DARK HORSE SP-22006 $6.98, 22006 $7.98, 22006 $7.98.
Performance: Excellent
Recording: Excellent
Bobby Purvis and Bill Elliott put Tom Scott in charge of the sound of their second Splinter album (George Harrison, who produced the first one, co-produces one track), and the result is a sad and elegant paradox. Purvis' songs tingle with quiet desperation behind an amiable, occasionally smiling, front; there is in them what someone said it takes to be middle-aged these days, a little hope and a lot of cope. John Lennon used to create the same feeling sometimes, before he left the Beatles and his desperation became not so quiet, and Paul Simon knows it well. Scott, without doing anything radical, has worked with the al ready well-scrubbed singing of Elliott and Purvis to keep the thing sounding more optimistic than it really is. The metaphor Purvis uses and reuses is travel, movement, and just under that is a yearning to Get Home, wherever that is-the Berkley House Hotel is all but deserted, its furniture covered up, but, Purvis says, "something is telling me to stay." At least he knows the place and he's here; it gets to be called home, at least temporarily, by default. A couple of the songs don't work so well if you pull them out of the album's interlaced thematics, but the better ones, including Sixty Miles Too Far and Which Way Will I Get Home, say enough to carry the others and have the melodic grace and pacing that help you separate the inspired songwriters from the hard-working ones.
Purvis and Elliott are going to need grace, particularly, if they're to keep on grinning and bearing it, cursed with this awareness. N.C.
STARRY EYED & LAUGHING: Thought Talk. Tony Poole (vocals, guitar, keyboards); Ross McGeeney (vocals, guitar); fain Whit more (vocals, bass); Mike Wackford (percussion); other musicians. Good Love; One Foot in the Boat; Since I Lost You; Down the Street; Fool's Gold; Believe; and four others. COLUMBIA PC 33837 $6.98.
Performance: Under the influences
Recording: Very good
Rock doesn't seem likely to regain its old vitality until something diverts attention away from it so some relatively untainted youngsters can develop where the shadows aren't so long and the influences aren't so pervasive.
Folk music performed such a service for rock by way of the Beatles once, and another breather is needed now. Here's another new rock band demonstrating that need; this one comes on with an electric twelve-string guitar as its main visual gimmick and a penchant for airy vocal harmonies, but it doesn't simply copy the Byrds-it just copies in general. The songs have that ninety-ninth-time-this-has been-done quality about them, and the instrumental sound is what you'd call light metal.
Technically, there's no hint of incompetence here; these youngsters have done a respectable job, but no cigar, for their work is, through no fault of theirs, tainted. N.C.
THE STATLER BROTHERS: Songs of The Old Testament. The Statler Brothers (vocals); instrumental accompaniment. In the Beginning; Eve; Noah Found Grace in the Eyes of the Lord; Have a Little Faith; The Dreamer; Led Out of Bondage; The Ten Commandments; Samson; Song of David; Song of Solomon; The Fourth Man; The King Is Coming. MERCURY SRM-1-1051 $5.98.
THE STATLER BROTHERS: Songs of the New Testament. The Statler Brothers (vocals); instrumental accompaniment. Who Do You Think?; The Kingdom of Heaven Is at Hand; Beat the Devil; The Brave Apostles Twelve; The Teacher; The Lord's Prayer; There's a Man in Here; How Great Thou Art; Lord Is It I?; The King of Love; The King Is Coming. MERCURY SRM-1-1052 $5.98.
Performance: Good-humored gospel
Recording: Excellent
That old-time religion gets a lively going-over from the Statler Brothers, a team of siblings with a flair for turning Biblical tales into contagiously tuneful gospel songs with a country-music cast to them. In two beautifully pro duced albums, they manage to scan the con tents of both the Old and the New Testaments and to come up with pleasant and unforced, if cornpone, musical commentaries as they go.
Their version of the Good Book may not have the wit of Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures, but the Statler Brothers do manage most of the time to sidestep the curse of cute ness that too often blights such undertakings.
Things begin at the very beginning with the Creation, liven up as soon as Eve enters ("You were only a rib and look what you did . . ."), and never flag through the stories of Noah, Moses, Samson, David, Solomon, and Daniel. Samson is twitted gently with the ...
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Simon and Garfunkel, Soloists
INEVITABLY, whenever a critic, be it the late Ralph Gleason (check his liner notes for "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme") or Stephen Holden (check back issues of Rolling Stone), wants to make a case for rock as poetry, the example that is trotted out is Paul Simon. To be fair, it's not completely Simon's fault. True, he tends to wear his higher education on his sleeve, has been through analysis, has been known to write lyrics that on a few occasions almost stand up as honest-to-god, well-thought-out poems, and generally divorces himself from the rest of the pop hierarchy (his backing musicians have included such esoteric types as the Jamaican studio band that backed Jimmy Cliff-several months before reggae was anything more than a funny word to American audiences-and aging jazz cats like Stephan Grappelli). But, at least in person, he seems much less the Serious Artiste than his devotees claim. The guy just writes songs.
Which is not to say that his reputation isn't considerably inflated, that the bulk of his work isn't just a wee bit less significant than it's made out to be. His Sixties stuff, by and large-I have, of course, the benefit of hind sight-strikes me as vintage kitsch. The Sound of Silence is every bit as sophomoric as its title (Freshman English Poesy to be sure oh alienation! oh loneliness!), and, strictly as music, most of his work before his breakup with Art Garfunkel remains cotton candy, fluff. Catchy and attractively crafted, certainly, but basically lacking in, uh, glands. Wit ness that overripe piece of soap opera cum gospel Bridge over Troubled Waters. Pure corn.
There are a few wonderful exceptions, of course. Fakin' It is a masterpiece; subtle, poignant, with marvelous shifts in emphasis, it has a truly spectacular arrangement that for once bears some relationship to the lyrics.
There are a few others that good (most notice ably The Boxer), and some that succeed simply as records if not as songs (a distinction I truly wish more of the critics who fawn over that dreariest of creatures, the Singer/Song writer, could grasp). But for me his finest hour remains that superb first solo album, one of the great records of the Seventies. I don't think there's a single cut on it that is less than inspired, and the overall impression it leaves is of a glorious musical eclecticism and a concise, probing, and funny lyrical awareness.
The follow-up, "There Goes Rhymin' Simon," was a lot more ambitious and a lot less satisfying, the eclecticism giving way to an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach and an over-reliance on the Muscle Shoals side men who play exactly the same way for Paul Anka. But there was at least one cut on it so good that it validated the whole album (American Tune, a just-about-perfect poem, song, or record).
Simon's newest, "Still Crazy After All These Years," is, I'm afraid, just terrible, a totally uninspired rehash of lyric and melodic ideas he has used far more profitably in the past. The insights are more like cheap shots than anything else ("Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town," indeed), and al though there are a few clever lines, the bulk of this study is totally predictable. Most lamentably, the album is dominated by the kind of supper-club cocktail jazz so many of our older stars seem to think is "mature" (it makes the latest Joni Mitchell album, for me, unlistenable). Simon has flirted profitably with the genre in the past, for what I took to be ironic purposes, but here he seems to be deadly serious. The results are so vile that they have cast a retroactive pall on some of his earlier work.
Art Garfunkel's new album (which contains, like Simon's, My Little Town-their one-shot reunion effort) is even easier to dismiss. "Breakaway" (from what?) is simply producer Richard Perry's latest MOR greeting card, and Art is as overwhelmed by Perry's depressing slickness as Ringo Starr is. Fans of his humorless choirboy soprano will doubtlessly lap up such miscalculations as his ver sion of the Beach Boys' done-to-death Disney Girls, or his resuscitation of the Flamingo's Fifties approach to I Only Have Eyes for You. There is a great comfort in preaching to the converted.
-Steve Simels
PAUL SIMON: Still Crazy After All These Years. Paul Simon (vocals, guitar); Hugh McCracken (guitar); Richard Tee (piano); David Hood (bass); Roger Hawkins (drums); other musicians. Still Crazy After All These Years; My Little Town; I Do It for Your Love; 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover; Night Game; Gone at Last; Some Folks' Lives Roll Easy; Have a Good Time; You're Kind; Silent Eyes. COLUMBIA PC 33540 $6.98, PCA 33540 $7.98, PCT 33540 $7.98, 111 CAQ 33540 $8.98.
ART GARFUNKEL: Breakaway. Art Garfunkel (vocals); orchestra. I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever); Rag Doll; Break Away; Disney Girls; Waters of March; My Little Town; I Only Have Eyes for You; Looking for the Right One; 99 Miles from L.A.; The Same Old Tears on a New Background. COLUMBIA PC 33700 $6.98, PCA 33700 $7.98, PCT 33700 $7.98, CAQ 33700 $8.98.
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... lines "Tell me, Samson,/If these things are true/How could you let a woman/Get the best of you?" (one gathers that the Statler Brothers are not particularly ardent women's-libbers). What's good about their work is its easy handling of gospel themes and rhythms in a tradition that has about as much of the Mills Brothers in it as of the church. The character studies may be somewhat oversimplified, but I find it very easy to believe their description of Solomon (he "had it all together") and Joseph ("God made his dreams come true") and even the exhortation to Moses in the desert ("Go and climb that mountain, Moses").
When they get to the New Testament, though, the Statler Brothers tend to trade in their good-humored close harmonies for rather preachy ballads about the miracles of Jesus ("There's a man who turns water into wine . . .") and a syncopated version of the Lord's Prayer that turns devotion into unadulterated old-fashioned molasses-covered mush. Yet even at their stickiest, the Statler Brothers seldom smother us in solemn pieties.
Instead, they rejoice in their appreciation of Jesus as, to quote their own liner notes, "the greatest Christmas gift of all time." P.K.
BARBRA STREISAND: Lay Afternoon. Bar bra Streisand (vocals); orchestra, Rupert Holmes arr. and cond. My Father's Song; Shake Me, Wake Me; By the Way; You and I; Moanin' Low; and five others. COLUMBIA PC 33815 $6.98, PCA 33815 $7.98, fie, PCT 33815 $7.98.
Performance: Good
Recording: Holmesian
Another outing on the Streisand starship. This one's a little hokier, a lot broader, and a good deal less satisfying than usual because she's let herself be upstaged (almost) by her newest producer, Rupert Holmes. Rupert, as he's shown in some of his previous albums, believes in stupendous, tricky arrangements and the kind of production sound that rolls out of the speakers on casters.
Even Streisand, believe it or not, seems to be running a bit winded as she tries to keep up with Rupert's hot flashes of inspiration in his "disco" version of Shake Me, Wake Me, with the result that she sounds cross-eyed from the effort of trying to get the meaning across-up, through, and around his effects. But, as usual, Streisand is able to work her particular magic on several of the other bands: a sensitive but gutsy reading of the old Libby Holman torch hit, Moanin' Low; a beautifully modulated and surpassingly well-sung version of Stevie Wonder's You and I; and, best of all, a deeply felt and wonderfully acted new song, by Holmes, called My Father's Song-one of those tour-de-force performances that can raise the hair on the back of your neck and that fully justifies Streisand's place as our finest actress-singer. (It even justifies her own obviously high opinion of herself, something that seems to infuriate so many of her critics.) Her potentially exciting version of Lazy Afternoon is, however, hamstrung by Holmes' bloated approach, and the definitive recording of that loveliest of songs remains the one by Marlene Dietrich.
The liner notes, supposedly by Streisand herself (the Holmes weakness for purple prose is all too apparent), are mildly hilarious as an exercise in The Care and Feeding of a Super-egotist. But who really gives a damn? Streisand's been proving over and over again in her recordings that she's one of the genuine dramatic and musical phenomena of our time.
So what if the kid's a little cocky?
- P.R.
RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT
TOOTS AND THE MAYTALS: Funky Kings ton. Toots and the Maytals (vocals and instrumentals). Time Tough; In the Dark; Funky Kingston; Love Is Gonna Let Me Down; Louie Louie; and five others. ISLAND ILPS 9330 $6.98.
Performance: Terrific
Recording: Good
Reggae has had mixed success in this country.
It was touted to be The Next Big Thing a few years ago, which it wasn't for various rea sons. Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley are beginning to have some commercial success, but both of them have made adaptations in the music to cozy up to black American pop. As a writer Cliff is erratic, and Marley's music is almost entirely subordinate to his politics.
But Toots! He is undiluted and treasurable.
Toots and the Maytals were one of the groups featured in the now-famous The Harder They Come soundtrack album, where their recordings of Pressure Drop (reproduced here) and the saucy, zany Sweet and Dandy were stand outs. "Funky Kingston" is surely the reggae album of the year, one of the very few re leased here that is low-down, sweaty, funny, direct, and human. Sheer delight. J. V.
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