Reviewed by: CHRIS ALBERTSON NOEL COPPAGE PAUL KRESH PETER REILLY JOEL VANCE
PAUL ANKA: The Painter. Paul Anka (vocals); orchestra. Wildflower; The Painter; Happier; I'll Help You; Closing Doors; and six others. UNITED ARTISTS UA-LA653-G $6.98, 0 UA-EA653-H $7.98, UA CA653-H $7.98.
Performance: Glossy
Recording: Excellent
Here is Paul Anka in one of his glossier ego trip albums--cover by Warhol, conducting and arrangements by Michel Colombier, super-production by Denny Diante. No grunts about having one's baby in these surroundings. Instead, there is a tasteful, and very good, adaptation from the French, Do I Love You? (Yes, in Every Way); a melancholy reflection on The Painter, one of those dedicat ed souls who will never live to enjoy the eventual high price a collector will someday pay for his work (he should have painted pictures of Diana or someone having his baby and just waited for the loot to roll in); and a couple of moody, slick ballads, Closing Doors and Living Isn't Living.
Anka is, of course, the complete pro in complete charge; his signature is all over everything in the album, and your own prejudices regarding the undoubtedly clever little devil will be the gauge of your enjoyment.
Personally, I prefer him in a less grand atmosphere--one in which he can crank out the kind of mindless, but hugely communicative, bits of pop philosophy that give teenyboppers across the world (no matter what their age) frissons of soulful recognition and Something To Think About. P.R.
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Explanation of symbols:
= reel-to-reel stereo tape
= eight-track stereo cartridge
= stereo cassette
= quadraphonic disc E = reel-to-reel quadraphonic tape
= eight-track quadraphonic tape
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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AZTEC TWO-STEP: Two's Company. Rex Fowler and Neil Shulman (vocals and guitars); instrumental accompaniment. Dance; Finding Somebody New; A Conversation in a Car; Isn't It Sweet to Think So; Pajama Party; Give It Away; and five others. RCA APL1-1497 $6.98, 0 APS1-1497 $7.98, APK1-1497 $7.98.
Perf: Mostly good
Recording: Very good
A two-man, two-guitar act, augmented with bass players and whatnot when it records, does not have as many possibilities to work with as a three-to-five-person act, yet the duo is caught in a more rigid framework than one of its members would be as a solo act. Paul Simon has demonstrated the truth of this since the demise of the two-man, one-guitar act of Simon and Whatshisname. Rex Fowler and Neil Shulman give me the impression that two incompletes are being fitted together in an at tempt to achieve a complete one. Sometimes I hear the third personality, the product they're trying for, and sometimes I hear their individual limitations refusing to be filtered out.
When they're singing together they often sound like Loudon Wainwright overdubbing harmonies with himself, but Fowler's song-writing has produced at least three entries of substance here (in order of my preference, they are A Conversation in a Car, one the driver is having with himself; Isn't It Sweet to Think So, about how one doesn't give up on love simply because one can't; and Dance, which has a fetching minor-key tune and beat), and Neil Shulman now and then tosses off a brief guitar solo that's simply a gem. The arrangements, acoustic instruments at their hub, could use a little more zip, but there's no ugliness or noise in them. There are, how ever, too many songs like Pajama Party that are awkward about being shallow. Fowler ought to consider giving up Shallowness few Lent and see how it goes. The boys could also take advantage of the extra latitude a two-singer combination has with harmonies, be more adventurous. But this album has persuaded me to keep closer tabs on them. - N.C.
JOAN BAEZ: Gulf Winds (see Best of the Month, page 82) MOE BANDY: Here I Ain’t Drunk Again. Moe Bandy (vocals); vocal and instrumental accompaniment. Here I Am Drunk Again; If I Had Someone to Cheat On; What Happened to Our Love; The Bottle's Holdin' Me; Please Take Her Home; and five others. COLUMBIA KC 34285 $5.98, CA 34285 $6.98.
Performance: Bring the antabuse
Recording: Good
Moe Bandy is shown on his album cover curled up inside a beer glass, and his voice sounds as though it's coming out of one. Consider his subject matter: a drunk who's on the sauce because his woman is cheating on him; another alcoholic abandoned at the bar of his choice by his girl because "no woman wants a man that drinks too much" ("I'm not holdin' the bottle," he explains, "the bottle's holdin' me"); another unfortunate who "walks from bar to bar in worn-out shoes" after having fallen off some wagon or other. All this is de livered in a guileless country style more suit able for ballads describing bouts with bottles of 7-Up. Can it be that Mr. Bandy is a crea ture of the Nashville branch of A.A.? What this feisty fellow can do when he's allowed a chance to change the subject is indicated in a jolly ballad about a devotee of the rodeos who finds a girl with an " Oklahoma look" whose personality melts the brim of his hat and sends him into transports of wholesome out door rapture. Let's hope she keeps him sober until after he cuts his next platter.
- P. K.
TONY BENNETT: Life Is Beautiful. Tony Bennett (vocals); instrumental accompaniment. Life Is Beautiful; All Mine; Bridges; Re flections; Experiment; and five others. Im PROV 7112 $5.98.
Performance: Too much horsepower
Recording: Very good
"Life is beautiful," sings Tony Bennett in his big voice, powered like the engine of a large, costly car that uses too much gas. "Beautiful," when Tony Bennett uses the word, has a tendency to conjure up images of a Las Vegas hotel lobby. Packaged ardor is his stock in trade, as every ballad gears up for a big, synthetic climax and the oversize orchestral arrangements come heading at you like a fleet of souped-up Cadillacs: Actually, the song quoted is an affable item with lyrics by Fred Astaire, and it would be lovely to hear him per form it in his special, offhand style.
In this album, the program is so topnotch that you keep thinking of the other singers who made famous the very ballads Bennett is busy running energetically into the ground.
Cole Porter's Experiment brings up memories of Gertrude Lawrence's sly rendition; This Funny World, such an over-furnished, unprivate place as Bennett makes of it, made this listener wish he were hearing it in the once over-lightly approach favored by, say, Bobby Short. The program also includes a story-song by Gene Lees called Bridges, a dreamy number called Reflections that Duke Ellington composed late in life, and All Mine, a Brazilian lovesong. Tony turns them all into block busters: out of the way, or he'll mow you down. It's enough to bring about a musical energy crisis. P.K.
BLACK SABBATH: Technical Ecstasy. Black Sabbath (vocals and instrumentals). Back Street Kids; You Won't Change Me; It's Al right; Gypsy; and four others. WARNER BROS. BS 2969 $6.98, M8 2969 $7.98, M5 2969 $7.98.
Performance: Flat
Recording: Good
Neo hard-rock bands tend to sound the same and to borrow frequently from one another. On this album, Black Sabbath starts out by impersonating Led Zeppelin, especially the high-decibel zip-zaps of Zeppelin's vocalist Robert Plant. They then go on to parrot Deep Purple and to ape groups like Aerosmith and Status Quo. Doubtless all these other bands will casually borrow from Sabbath when their next albums are due.
Programming--the sequencing of performances--also tends to be uniform for bands of Sabbath's species. The first two selections are invariably loud and pounding, the third is semi-acoustic, the fourth a mixture of the first three, the fifth a utilitarian number for dancing, et cetera ad infinitum. It is all quite predictable and damned dull. I think a better title for the album would have been "Technical Competence." - J. V.
DAVID BROMBERG BAND: How Late'll Ya Play 'Til? David Bromberg (vocals, guitar); instrumental accompaniment. Danger Man II; Summer Wages; Dallas Rag/Maple Leaf Rag; Whoopie Ti Yi Yo; Young Westly; Dyin' Crapshooter's Blues; Bluebird; Idol with a Golden Head; and eight others. FANTASY F-79007 two discs $8.98, 8160-79007 Z $9.98, 5160-79007 Z $9.98.
Performance: Good instrumentals
Recording: Excellent
David Bromberg is an accomplished country/ folk and classic blues guitarist. Though his style is not original and his playing tends to be intellectual (he's never quite gotten over his student days at Columbia University), his technique can't be faulted: every note, every riff, every solo passage, every single-string run, every relaxation and tension comes at the right place at the right time. The most satisfying cuts on this double-disc album are the instrumentals: the Fiddle Tune medley, the Dallas Rag/Maple Leaf Rag segue, the country-ish Bluebird, and the jazz-blues Chubby Thighs.
The vocal performances are less successful, though his backing band has some fine talents in it, notably mandolinist Dick Fegy, trombonist Curt Linberg, and cornetist Peter Ecklund, who excel on Dyin' Crapshooter's Blues and Sloppy Drunk. Unfortunately, Bromberg just wasn't born with a set of pipes capable of handling blues, or really anything else. When he tries to utter a lyric line with passion or savoir faire it comes out sounding like something from the ninth-grade class play. But what saves the proceedings is the obvious fun Bromberg is having playing his repertoire of Twenties blues, country dances, and mellow contemporary ballads. If you ignore his squeaky vocals and concentrate on the music and atmosphere of the performances, you'll find this a very refreshing and pleasurable album. - J.V.
HARRY CHAPIN: On the Road to Kingdom Come. Harry Chapin (vocals, guitar); vocal and instrumental accompaniment. On the Road to Kingdom Come; The Parade's Still Passing By; The Mayor of Candor Lied; Laugh Man; and five others. ELEKTRA 7E-1082 $6.98, ET8-1082 $7.98, 0 TC5-1082 $7.98.
Performance: Vapid
Recording: Good
Harry Chapin is an ambitious and garrulous hack who presents himself as the bard of the untouchables; his characters include lonely disc jockies, psycho snipers, bitterly sentimental taxi drivers, and other low folk that you are supposed to weep for on your day off.
Like Dylan and Kristofferson, Chapin's vocals are alternately nasal and bronchial. But where Dylan honked and sneezed his way into fame with buckshot sprays of words and a demagogic mastery of smarmy kid emotions, and where Kristofferson (a Rhodes scholar in English) used personal experiences to carol the lives of the dispossessed, the dimwits, and the damned, Chapin merely dispenses an ersatz sympathy for his subjects. He sets up his characters so he can blow hot at them and pummel the listener with his blowsy poetics.
Dylan is now in the history books and Kristofferson is a movie actor. Chapin at tempted a Broadway revue which quickly flopped. Like the late Phil Ochs, to whom Chapin dedicated The Parade's Still Passing By, Chapin wants to be a star. I suppose he can't be blamed for trying; I just wish he would stop singing. J. V.
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VICKI SUE ROBINSON
Ms. Robinson is a new singer with a fairly shopworn variety of borrowed styles but with a voice and an acting technique that promise more for the future. She's intermittently very good indeed in Let Me Down Easy (he's been spending time with her only to for get someone else), in which she's able at times, through her purplish voice and her acting skill, to transcend the essential mopery of the lyric and tell an affecting little story. Nice work. Unfortunately, the rest of her performances either seem buried under Warren Schatz's overstuffed arranging and conducting or fail to come out because of Robinson's lack of trust in letting herself go in her own style. She's someone to keep an eye on, though. Watch for an early move.
-Peter Reilly
VICKI SUE ROBINSON. Vicki Sue Robinson (vocals); orchestra. Let Me Down Easy; How About Me; Falling in Love; After All This Time; and five others. RCA APLI-1829 $6.98, APS1-1829 $7.98, APK1-1829 $7.98.
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Preacher Willie Welson
PAUL SIMON said God used to lean on him, and I know the feeling. That line of Simon's stuck in my mind, but what brought the feeling back was Willie Nelson's new "gospel" album, "The Troublemaker." Country stars routinely record albums of hymns, but they usually do so in a style radically different from this. I've suspected it was partly an act of penance on their part, that some feel better when such albums flop commercially, as they often do. The way such albums are usually re corded results in something sickly sweet, so inflated with angelic choruses and pious atti tudes (go back and listen to Red Foley doing this kind of thing, or Tennessee Ernie Ford) that it must turn off the God-fearingest of Presbyterian deacons in his secret heart of hearts. But Nelson has given the old church songs the regular Willie Nelson treatment, performing them in the same existential way(s) he performs songs officially designated as "commercial" or "secular." His band, one of the jauntiest and best bar bands in Texas, plays here the way it plays in honky tonks, plays Uncloudy Day with the same freewheeling aplomb it customarily brings to that old Nelson-written drinking-and-fighting-club favorite that goes, "Sometimes it's heaven, sometimes it's hell, and sometimes I don't even know. . . ."
---------- Demonstrating that you can't respond fully to life with either a turned-off head or a turned-off heart -------------
And the most important thing I may be learning-or realizing-in listening to it is that I wasn't being leaned on back there in the little Baptist church by the highway: not leaned on, but more like cleaved in twain, perhaps by something akin to that two-edged sword the preacher kept mentioning. In church was where I first got the notion that there were two forces inside us, and one couldn't em brace both at once but had to choose one or the other. Thee weren't, to my mind, "good" and "evil." One I thought of as the intellectual, or rational, or thinking part, which I dimly sensed must be the key to autonomy (something a growing boy or girl feels an imperative to assert), to self-reliance, self-control, responsibility, growth. The other I identified as the emotional, even superstitious force. Its official name, at least on Sunday, was Faith, but it seemed to me to have a dark side. Why else would the grownups let it come out only in church, a controlled environment, a holy place (they said), and try to keep it stomped down everywhere else? A big factor in the emotionalism of the church services was the music. The sharper preachers had a way of talking over the singing of the Invitation Hymn-some were slick as modern disc jockeys talking over the last bars of a Captain and Tennille single-talking in persuasive, tremulous tones about giving up thinking for oneself, controlling oneself, and turning the responsibility over to Jesus, talking about my coming down the aisle to be Saved. I was engrossed by the style of all this; even then I could see in it a rite-value in which some apparently found catharsis. On Monday, though, if one were honest with himself, the world looked quite a bit different; among other things it didn't seem to want one to be very emotional or behave as if he were under the control of someone or something else. My problem was I couldn't turn it off and on the way I thought others must be able to, couldn't swing with it on Sunday and then clamp it down on Monday, couldn't favor first one and then the other of the forces in me. If I were to have a style of my own, an identity, I'd have to favor the same one all the time.
Thus I disputed church attendance and, when I became sophisticated or wily enough, phased it out. This one was a Missionary Baptist church, same strain as Jimmy Carter's, and it sat with twin driveways flanking it at the top of a small hill. The state highway department gave this young doubter a rather dazzling early look at irony when it placed, just beyond the driveways, traffic signs that read "Blind Entrance."
THE song I remember most vividly from those days, the penultimate Invitation Hymn, Just as I Am ("Just as I am, without one plea, but that thy blood was shed for me ... Oh, Lamb of God, I come, I come ... "), is not included here, but Nelson did include it in his "Red Headed Stranger" album, the one in which he identifies with a preacher torn by a more dangerous inner conflict, schism, cleavage, than I was. Willie does identify with preachers, and his singing style is influenced by church music. So is the nominal barrel house piano style of Bobbie Nelson. So these aren't, after all and strictly speaking, purely secular performances (in America's interior perhaps none can be) any more than they are conventional Sunday performances. It's all one with Willie. Both forces are embraced at once, integrated. What he does here, at least for people with backgrounds something like mine and (I gather) Paul Simon's, is give us something good and solid to contrast against the split either/or way we perceived this as kids.
Just because you're "for" your mind, Willie asserts--and he asserts it not with content but with style--it doesn't mean you have to be "against" your emotions, or vice versa.
What was then perceived as superstition can now be looked at as parapsychology; an intelligent person may conclude there's something to it. One grows up, reads about Jung and the collective unconscious, Zen, Carlos Casteneda and Don Juan, and isn't sure whether it's a thought or a feeling he has that there's something out there. And the point may be just that: to not differentiate, not divide up the inner life between thoughts and feelings.
Well! And you know what else Nelson demonstrates? He demonstrates that these old songs amount to good music. Just listen to the way the first cut takes to a relatively hot, beer-joint-perfected run on Willie's funny little guitar with a hole worn through the top.
Listen to what a bluesy harmonica can do teamed up with a spunky, inventive tune like In the Garden, or how a soaring, uninhibited steel guitar can energize Shall We Gather.
These old melodies have great and (like Willie Nelson) deceptively simple staying power and an admirable elegance born of hardscrabble economy in the words, the verses.
That last one, incidentally, Shall We Gather ("at the river," which Willie pronounces the way my congregation did, "rilver"), is a great favorite with Baptists, a must at total-immersion baptism services the country churches still hold at rivers, or, in a pinch, at ponds.
There is no real rouser of an invitation hymn here, although I have heard When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder and even the Carter family's Will the Circle Be Unbroken put to such uses (both work better at funerals), and I wonder if Nelson's failure to include some thing approaching Just As I Am in emotional fervor is itself a comment of some kind. Certainly his inclusion of the title song is. It's a different kind of song, a new, topical one by Bruce Belland and David Somerville. In it a hippie and the way he's persecuted are de scribed, and of course it is finally revealed that the hip one is Jesus about to be nailed up;
it's all told from the viewpoint of a "good" conservative conformist of the day who holds the prevailing view that something has to be done about these radicals and the way they have been threatening the establishment and the status quo.
SOCIAL comment? Yes, but again it can't easily be construed as strictly secular in nature-again, Nelson seems to be demonstrating that you can't respond fully to life with either a turned-off head or a turned-off heart, or listening to first one and then the other. You have to listen to the mix.
You really ought to listen to this album, too, regardless of whether you remember being leaned on or having your consciousness divided against itself way back when in the presence of these hymns. This piece of work froths with such music, such life, such spirit and such technique that surely it must be counted a success in purely objective aesthetic terms, whatever those might be. But if such exist-if we start cordoning that off-I'll have the feeling that this is where I came in, and from here it looks like just another Blind Entrance.
-Noel Coppage
WILLIE NELSON: The Troublemaker. Willie Nelson (vocals, guitar); Paul English (drums); Don Spears (bass); Larry Gatlin (guitar); James Clayton Day (steel guitar); Doug Sahm (fiddle); other musicians. Uncloudy Day; When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder; Whispering Hope; There Is a Fountain; Will the Circle Be Unbroken; The Troublemaker; In the Gar den; Where the Soul Never Dies; Sweet Bye and Bye; Shall We Gather; Precious Memories. COLUMBIA KC 34112 $5.98, CI CA 34112 $6.98, CT 34112 $6.98.
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RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT
ERIC CLAPTON: No Reason to Cry. Eric Clapton (vocals, guitar); vocal and instrumen tal accompaniment. Beautiful Thing; County Jail; Carnival; Sign Language; All Our Past Times; and five others. RSO RS-1-3004 $6.98, 0 8T1-3004 $7.98, CT1-3004 $7.98.
Performance: Excellent
Recording: Very good
Everybody-Bob Dylan, Georgie Fame, most of the Band, Ron Wood, Jesse Ed Davis everybody and Mick Jagger's brother (Chris) apparently contributed to this, and in spite of that it's a good one. I'm not sure why Clapton brought in such notorious help, but it could be a way to spread out the attention, keep so much of it from clotting around Clapton's guitar and hanging there to dry. I admit I bring such a bias to his albums. When Dylan is singing the song he wrote, Sign Language, when it figures that a whole generation is paying attention to the singer this time for sure, Clapton does some of his most spectacular runs as a back-up guitarist. Little things like that are in here, along with some fine singing by Clapton himself-his style is maturing attractive ly-and it might shake us into reflecting that ...
------------ERIC
CLAPTON: not a freak with a guitar growing out of his side
Clapton is not a freak with a guitar growing out of his side but a musician who's now made a little string of pretty good albums.
Sign Language, incidentally, is a winner; it could be addressed to writers ("can't you even make a sound?"), or to urban life (and, by extension, civilization) with all its actual physical signs saying don't do this and that, or to the way we sometimes expect those close to us to read our minds, or.... A good Dylan song, it is loose enough to fit your situation. Not all the fare here is that meaty, but the performances are rich yet fad-free; Clapton's affinity is for something that's lasted, the blues, and his goal seems to be music that never goes too far in or out of style. You can get a feeling for his self-respect here, and you can also get, as Gene Nobles used to say, some jollies. N.C.
BURTON CUMMINGS. Burton Cummings (vocals, piano); vocal and instrumental accompaniment. I'm Scared; Your Back Yard; That's Enough; Is It Really Right; Stand Tall; and five others. PORTRAIT PR 34261 $6.98, PRA 34261 $7.98, PRT 34261 $7.98.
Performance: Good
Recording: Very good
Burton Cummings was the lead singer of the now-defunct Guess Who. This initial solo al bum is largely designed to show that he has a good voice and handles it well; to that end it succeeds. Unfortunately, the album also sounds like an application for employment, but Cummings gives no indication of what kind of job he wants-and the star market is rather overcrowded these days.
With few exceptions, the material is by Cummings, which is to say that it's filled with murky references to persons and events that are never explained, so it is difficult for the lis tener to be interested. Several of the songs seem to have been written for no other reason than to show off Cummings' voice, but a set of tonsils does not a singer make, and leaping nimbly from range to range is not the same thing as phrasing. Cummings attempts to pass himself off as an established artist, but it doesn't work. At least not here. J.V.
EARTH, WIND & FIRE: Spirit. Earth, Wind & Fire (vocals and instrumentals). On Your Face; Saturday Nite; Imagination; Biyo; Burnin' Bush; and four others. COLUMBIA PC 34241 $6.98, PCA 34241 $7.98, PCT 34241 $7.98, El CAQ-34241 $8.98.
Performance: Fatuous
Recording: Good
Earth, Wind & Fire is one of those mediocre groups that require the listener to accept, a priori, their possession of some deep, mysterious spiritual knowledge and strength that automatically make whatever they play valuable. The conceit puts the blame on the listener if he fails to catch and fawn over the supposedly indisputable emotional purity of whatever the band offers, and this type of psychological poker bluff is especially effective on a youthful listener who believes in whatever his peer group does and lives in terror that he will be left out of anything.
A television commercial running over New York stations shows film clips of Earth, Wind & Fire leaping about (literally) while the narrator asks what is supposed to be a rhetorical question: "Is this the finest group in America?" My answer: "Hell, no!" Maybe the members of the band are sincere in their beliefs, but they come across here as a sappy group with hackneyed arrangements, fey vocals, and songs loaded with the usual hey-baby-let's-get-it-on-in-the-cosmos twaddle.
- J. V.
ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA: A New World Record (see Best of the Month, page 83)
FIREBALLET: Two, Too. . . . Fireballet (vocals and instrumentals); vocal and instrumental accompaniment. Great Expectations; Chinatown Boulevards; Desiree; Flash; and three others. PASSPORT PPSD-98016 $6.98, 8167-98016H $7.98, 5167-98016H $7.98.
Performance: Preposterous
Recording: Very good
It is a mistake to approach music as an applied science, as this clinical quintet does. It is worse to gussie things up with exotic and cute instruments (such as the Chinese zither and sleigh bells), to drag in woodwind and string sections, to write turgid material, to sing it as.
if it were important stuff, and to present the whole mound of sludge as mousse for the connoisseur. The proceedings on this waste of vinyl amount to something a high-school orchestra might pull off in order to win the county musical achievement award. J. V.
ELTON JOHN: Blue Moves. Elton John (vocals, piano); vocal and instrumental accompaniment. Your Starter for . . . ; Tonight; One Horse Town; Chameleon; Boogie Pilgrim; Cage the Songbird; Crazy Water; Shoulder Holster; and ten others. MCA/Rocket 2-11004 two discs $13.98, MCAT2-11004 $13.98, MCAC2-11004 $13.98.
Performance: Directionless
Recording: Good
Every now and then Elton John records something that represents the state of the art of pop-music craftsmanship-material, performance, arrangement, production-such as the superb Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road. But in between these happy occasions, though he is a star and has many hits, he tends to paddle about in a sea of sparse or puffy orchestrations, to sing beyond his range, and generally to sound busy.
This double-disc album could have been a single-disc album had John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin been able to get their technical ability into focus. But being technicians their approach to music is quite as clammy and bloodless as that of any hack Tin Pan Alley duo of fifty years ago-they have to tinker endlessly to come up with something that appears well constructed and can give the impression of emotion. Lord (or Moloch) knows, they try hard enough here, but it's still fuzzy around the edges.- J. V.
LED ZEPPELIN: The Song Remains the Same. Original-soundtrack recording. Led Zeppelin (vocals and instrumentals). Rock and Roll; Celebration Day; Rain Song; Dazed and Confused; No Quarter; and four others. SWAN SONG SS 2-201 two discs $11.98, 0 TP2-201 $9.98, CS2-201 $9.98.
Performance: So-so
Recording: Good
This is the soundtrack album of what a usual ly reliable source calls another boring concert movie, a good-quality recording job of a pro gram that makes the chair seem awfully hard before it's over. I suppose albums like this are of some use to someone, but there are plenty of better examples of what Led Zeppelin can do. Stairway to Heaven, the best piece the band ever came up with, is much better served by the exacting environment of the studio recording than by the looseness of this one. The band has enough taste and discipline problems under ideal conditions. There's also the problem of their simply having played, say, Whole Lotta Love too many times; the version here doesn't seem to say much of anything else. And, of course, the inevitable drum solo puts its usual pall on things. I may yet go to see the movie, but not with a whole lotta enthusiasm for listening to it. - N.C.
JACKIE LOMAX: Livin' for Lovin'. Jackie Lomax (vocals, guitar); vocal and instrumental accompaniment. More (Livin' for Lovin'); Peace of Mind; Blue World; (Put Some) Rhythm in Your Blues; On the Road to Be Free; Our Love; and four others. CAPITOL ST-11558 $6.98, 0 8XT-11558 $7.98.
Performance: Bland
Recording: Good
Jackie Lomax, as the press material accompanying this lackluster album stresses, is some thing of a cult figure. He was a member of the Undertakers, a British pop group of the Six ties who dressed in morticians' outfits and rode to their engagements on putt-putt motor bikes. Lomax's first solo album was produced by George "Where Have I Heard That Melody Before?" Harrison in the early days of Apple Records. He has had several albums out since then, some of them group efforts, some of them solo.
-------- ELTON JOHN: a bit fuzzy around the edges
Lomax is a fair songwriter (by today's de based standards), a guitarist of some skill and technique, and a vocalist who resembles James Taylor in listless delivery and comatose tone. Why he should be a cult figure is beyond me, but cultism has a streak of lunacy that passeth all understanding. J.V.
THE LOST GONZO BAND: Thrills. Gary Nunn (vocals, piano, bass, guitar); Robert Livingston (bass, piano, guitar, vocals); John Inmon (guitar, vocals); Kelly Dunn (key boards); Donny Dolan (percussion). Write a Song; Relief; Wilderness Song; Sweet Little Lilly; Dead Armadillo; Daddy's Money; and six others. MCA MCA-2232 $6.98, MCAT 2232 $7.98.
Performance: More like spills
Recording: Good
These are Jerry Jeff Walker's associates. Of course they have been dominated by his personality, and understandably they don't quite manage to define their own collective personality with which to front this thing. One might expect of them a bit of a songwriting show case, and they seem to approach that but then hedge. The Last Thing I Needed, by Gary Nunn and Donna Ciscel, is a dandy spoof of country-song word play ("The last thing I needed the first thing this morning was to have you walk out on me"), but it works best as satire; nothing else is particularly impressive standing up straight. Some tunes are pleasant enough, but too many-of which the most blatant examples are Dead Armadillo and Ain't No Way-are built exclusively of parts from the pop-country junkyard. The playing doesn't show much sense of style either, following a lot of conventional decisions about what "type" a song is and digging into the corresponding bag of cliches. This isn't a physical or mechanical problem, exactly, but the presence of one strong, authoritative vocalist would have gone a long way toward easing it. As it is, it's useful mostly to those studying the pop history of Austin. N.C.
BOB MARLEY AND THE WAILERS: Live! Bob Marley and the Wailers (vocals and instrumentals). Trenchtown Rock; Burnin' & Lootin': Them Belly Full; Lively Up Yourself; and three others. ISLAND ILPS 9376 $6.98.
Performance: Good
Recording: Outdoorsy
All right, all right. Linda Ronstadt persuaded me to give reggae another try. I've been listening a little more carefully to Jimmy Cliff, and I've been impressed. But I'm still less impressed with Bob Marley and the Wailers. In part, that may be because the thing of theirs I'm listening to-this-was recorded live in a big place, the Orpheum in London, which has sopped a lot of brightness out of the sound. In part, it's something else. I don't mind Marley's being political-I don't mind anybody's being political-but there's cultural politics as well as political politics. It's the style he brings to the extra-reggae parts of the music that impresses me about Cliff, whose lyrics and melodies aspire to be graceful. Marley's seem to want to be assimilated by the greatest number possible, so that while he may not have emulated the most sure-fire commercial elements of the popular song, he might as well have in many cases. The part of the result that bothers me most is the slickness that creeps in around the edges. I like this version of I Shot the Sheriff, though, a song I'd underestimated, and I like this version of No Woman, No Cry, in which Marley shows that a clean but fairly ordinary rock guitar solo can fit nicely into his format. There's still too much repetition of what I'd call banalities through much of it, but I do see possibilities in Marley I hadn't seen before. Surely, for one thing, he's got more in the way of words to say-even if one does have to drum political slogans into people's heads-and maybe now that he's got the floor he'll say them. - N.C.
GEOFF MULDAUR: Motion. Geoff Muldaur (vocals); Klaus Voorman (bass); Jim Keltner (drums); Dr. John (keyboards); other musicians. Let It Out; Since I've Been with You Babe; What Do You Want the Girl to Do?; Motion; When You Touch Me This Way; and four others. REPRISE MS 2255 $6.98.
Performance: Good
Recording: Good
Oh, I suppose I like this for what it is. At least I'm not bored with it. It does sound, though, like a pause between commitments. At times, they fall to showcasing Muldaur's versatility as a vocalist, which is the kind of thing that can happen when you don't have something better to do, such as putting across some songs you really like. This material swings from being relatively cold-blooded, emotion ally uncommitted, to being so all-out sentimental as to seem stylized, as happens with Allen Toussaint's contrived but oddly affecting title song. (Interesting to compare Motion to the hit It Ain't the Meat, It's the Motion that Maria Muldaur had.) Muldaur does get his singing into the grain of a song now and then, as in I Don't Want Talk About It. In such moments his work compares to what for me are the album's best moments, provided by guest-singing Bonnie Raitt in Since I've Been with You Babe. Mostly, Muldaur seems to be fishing for the instantly recognizable Geoff Muldaur song and going a long time be tween bites. Sure, he's got a voice, and sure, it's versatile, but he doesn't have to play Captain Eclectic. Still, I sort of like it. N.C.
OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN: Don't Stop Believin'. Olivia Newton-John (vocals); orchestra. A Thousand Conversations; Compassionate Man; New-Born Babe; Sam; and six others. MCA, MCA-2223 $6.98, MCAT-2223 $7.98, MCAC-2223 $7.98.
Performance: A bit of .a bore
Recording: Good
Although Olivia Newton-John has the aphrodisiac qualities of one of my fantasy air line stewardesses (the one on Air Gomorrah), she is a bit of a bore once secured to the turn table. She's still murmuring sweet nothings breathlessly into the mike, and that's okay for the likes of Hey Mr. Dreammaker or Love You Hold the Key. But when she girlishly at tempts to "act in song" through such things as Every Face Tells a Story and Compassion ate Man, the results have an itty-bitty, pouty quality in place of any real dramatic mood.
Her fans love it all, of course, and she's such a complete pro at dishing out the glop that it's relatively painless and pleasant in a sugary sort of way. What happens when she hits thirty is anybody's guess. P.R.
ROBERT PALMER: Some People Can Do What They Like. Robert Palmer (vocals); orchestra. One Last Look; Keep in Touch; Hard Head; Off the Bone; Spanish Moon; and five others. ISLAND ILPS 9420 $6.98, Y81 9420 $7.98, ZCI 9420 $7.98.
Performance: Forced
Recording: Fair
Robert Palmer tries mightily to force some excitement into this, particularly in such reggae inflected things as Man Smart, Woman Smarter and What Can You Bring Me, but it just ain't here. Certainly it's not in his voice, which has the carefully uneven quality of distressed wood, and mostly it's not in the production by Steve Smith, which is generally shrill-that is, when it isn't clumsily labored. An ungainly record. P.R.
MARY KAY PLACE: Tonite! At the Capri Lounge, Loretta Haggers. Mary Kay Place (vocals); Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Anne Murray (back-up vocals); other musicians. Vitamin L; Streets of This Town; Gold in the Ground; Settin' the Woods on Fire; Good Old Country Baptizin'; and five others. COLUMBIA PC 34353 $5.98, CA 34353 $6.98.
Performance: Good-natured
Recording: Good
Well, honey, ah wuz happy as a pig in a wailer when ah heard that Loretta Haggers, despite trahl an' tribulation, had finally made the recordin' that would be her ticket to superstardom. Raht now, I mean right now, it's as difficult for most viewers of the TV soap opera spoof Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman to distinguish the character, Loretta, from the per son, Mary Kay Place, as it is for me to resist falling into the broad "Southern" accent I affect whenever speaking of her. The title of her album only serves to emphasize this confusion of identities.
Sides one and two each begin with a song actually written by Ms. Place, but closely associated with the TV Loretta. These two, Baby Boy and Vitamin L, are widely accepted as happy parodies of the c-&-w style. The listener's expectations are thus primed for humor, and when the remaining selections prove straight Nashville grist, a readjustment of perspective becomes necessary. The mental grin brought on by Baby Boy's lyrical image of Loretta and her honey sharing "chunky tuna" and kissing "under the moona" at the local Tasti-Freeze wavers uncertainly through the straight-faced Get Acquainted Waltz, picks up eagerly at the "bowling trophies on the TV set" in Coke and Chips, then sags and disappears permanently.
And yet it's so goshdarn difficult to take this record seriously, despite the impressive sup porting cast of professional c-&-w musicians and Mary Kay's emphatic denial that "Tonite !" is a novelty effort. Her delivery throughout is just as bright and good-natured as can be. Her pleasant voice with its authentic Southwestern twang (just love when she sings "settin' the woods on fahr") bounces through these predominantly up-tempo tunes with uniform affability, so uniform that all sense of emotional involvement is lacking.
We might as well be a-whoopin' and a-hollerin' at the Capri Lounge on a Saturday night.
Ambivalence is the kicker here. The popular Loretta image may sell albums, but it's the real Mary Kay Place who's got the talent.
Well, ah'm jes gonna set back awhile and wait fer the real woman to come out. Honey, ah got faith 'n' tahm.
-Paulette Weiss
LOU REED: Rock and Roll Heart. Lou Reed (vocals, guitar); vocal and instrumental accompaniment. I Believe in Love; Banging on My Drum; Follow the Leader; You Wear It So Well; Ladies Pay; Rock and Roll Heart; and six others. ARISTA AL 4100 $6.98, 8301-4100 H $7.98, 5301-4100 H $7.98.
Performance: Comatose
Recording: Good
Lou Reed is touted in some quarters as a serious artist, but there is nothing on this album to support such a fantasy. He seems deliberately mediocre and dull. He is an anti-musician, much as his mentor and former employer Andy Warhol (from their Velvet Under ground band association) was an anti-artist and anti-film director. Now, the theory that justifies being an anti- is that calculated non-achievement in a given art form is a rebellion against the limits and content of that form.
Thus, just as Warhol's silk-screen facsimiles of Brillo soap-pad package designs and his film Empire, where he trained a camera on the Empire State Building and simply let the film run through for eight hours, were once held to be significant by certain art and film critics, Reed's monotone vocals and non-songs are considered deceptively simple statements with deep underlying meanings.
The truth is that Reed and Warhol are, consciously or unconsciously, con men. Like all con men, they hold their victims in contempt and their pleasure comes in seeing just how gullible their audience can be. Warhol's Brillo silk-screens were sold at New York art galleries for considerable amounts of money, and he became a national figure. Some people took him seriously, some saw through him but thought he was cute, and all admired his get ting away with his game. The same has been true of Reed; his albums have been steady sellers, and he himself has come in for some heavy "analysis" and a certain amount of prestige among the denizens of Critical Cuckoo Land.
Since he is an anti-musician, it is impossible to judge Reed on the basis of music. Sample:
on three of the selections here, the titles of the tunes are the only lyrics, and they are repeated over and over to the accompaniment of a not more than competent band. It would be comforting to dismiss him as a rascal, but that cannot be done. Even as a conman he has no flair, and his contempt for his audience is ugly. - J. V.
PHOEBE SNOW: It Looks Like Snow. Phoebe Snow (vocals, guitar); David Bromberg, Steve Burgh (guitars); Sonny Burke (key boards); Reggie McBride (bass); James Gadson (drums); other musicians. Autobiography (Shine, Shine, Shine); In My Girlish Days; Don't Let Me Down; Shakey Ground; Teach Me Tonight; and five others. COLUMBIA PC 34387 $6.98, PCA 34387 $7.98, PCT 34387 $7.98.
Performance: Very good
Recording: Excellent
At least with Phoebe Snow you don't have to stare at the album jacket to remember who it is. I think I once called her style bizarre, and it is bizarre in the sense of being pinned to a series of exaggerated mannerisms, but here that's throttled back a bit and she seems more concerned with what the words and melodies say. She takes the oldie Teach Me Tonight and turns it into what people with dirty minds would call a dirty song, and you realize that aspect of it has been there all along; she's convincing. But there are excesses-she can't seem to end a certain kind of song without a drawn-out, repetitious parading of grunts and shouts and stuff I assume is supposed to enhance her credibility with a certain presumed kind of audience. I like the high note she hits, trumpet-like, at the end of Stand Up on the Rock, but I was bored with the Queen-of-Soul scatting that went on and on before that.
Some songs are a little thin, too, although there are interesting lines scattered through most of them. Her technique, of course, continues to be dazzling. It still does get in the way of communication, now and then, but I think less often than it used to. The backing is splendid, Steve Burgh again prominent in it, and the recorded sound puts a nice sense of transparent space around each instrument without isolating it emotionally from the others. Somehow the album gives me the vague impression that what Snow really is, is a caricaturist of some kind; I'm already eager to hear the next one and see what it does to that. This one, meanwhile, is worth some of your time. N.C.
RINGO STARR: Ringo's Rotogravure. Ringo Starr (vocals, drums, percussion); John Len non (piano); Eric Clapton, Danny Kortchmar, Lon van Eaton (guitars); Jim Keltner (drums); Dr. John (keyboards); Klaus Voorman (bass); Melissa Manchester, Paul McCartney, Linda Eastman, Harry Nilsson (background vocals); other musicians. Cookin' (in the Kitchen of Love); Pure Gold; I'll Still Love You; This Be Called a Song; Cryin'; Hey Baby; Lady Gaye; and five others. ATLANTIC SD 18193 $6.98, TP 18193 $7.98, CS 18193 $7.98.
Performance: Endearing
Recording: Good
Whenever I hear a Ringo Starr solo album I think of Billy Shears, a mild and modest entertainer who doesn't have much of a way with a song but who sings to please and takes life pretty much as it happens to him. The Shears character was invented by John Len non and Paul McCartney when they wrote With a Little Help from My Friends as a speciality number for Ringo on the "Sgt. Pepper" album. Some years later, after the Beatles breakup,. Lennon contributed I'm the Greatest, again about Shears, to a Ringo solo LP.
The alter ego is, I think, very close to the original, and, since I like Shears, I like Ringo. His quavering baritone sometimes lists dangerously to either port or starboard of the tune he is singing, but his performances are fresh and zesty and straightforward, and his albums are consistently entertaining.
I have yet to hear any comment so poignant and openhearted on the Beatles smashup as Ringo's song Early 1970 (available on "Blast from Your Past," Apple SW-3422); he was sending a message of affection and conciliation while the other three indulged in petty squabbling. Today, he is the only ex-Beatle that the other three regularly write for and play with.. This time out Lennon contributes Cookin', McCartney offers Pure Gold, and the Harrison entry is I'll Still Love You.
Viewed over his past three solo albums, Ringo's own material (he is most often a collaborator) contains some very singable items; an example here is Cryin', which shows his fondness for American country music. The outstanding cut is You Don't Know Me At All, which has a vaudeville feel, and in which Ringo and good old Billy Shears are one. Billy may sing out of tune now and then, but this listener will never walk out on him. .J. V.
------- STUFF: The timeless flavor and spirit of hot music
AL STEWART: Year of the Cat. Al Stewart (vocals and guitar); orchestra. Lord Grenville; Sand in Your Shoes; On the Border; Broad way Hotel; Midas Shadow; and four others. JANUS JXS-7022 $6.98, 8098-7022 $7.98, 5098-7022 $7.98.
Performance: Good
Recording: Good
Here's a bunch of sentimental, softly pack aged songs by Al Stewart. None of them are helped at all, however, by Stewart's hissing sibilant "s"s, which give even the elegiac Lord Grenville a prissily comic, Paul Lyndish quality. When he is set loose on something like the gloweringly melodramatic On the Border, with such lines as "Smuggling guns and arms across the Spanish border" to be gotten through, the results are downright hilarious. Aside from Stewart's distracting speech (or recording) defect, though, this is a nice enough low-key collection with a warm, easy atmosphere. And, luckily, he ssstill playsss dynamite guitar. P.R.
STUFF. Richard Tee (keyboards); Eric Gale and Cornell Dupree (guitars); Gordon Ed wards (bass, percussion); Christopher Parker and Stephen Gadd (drums, percussion).
Foots; How Long Will It Last; Happy Farms; My Sweetness; and six others. WARNER BROS.
BS 2968 $6.98, M8 2968 $7.98, M5 2968 $7.98.
Performance: Good Stuff
Recording: Very good
You may have caught Stuff on NBC's live Saturday Night show or at one of their many appearances in an Upper West Side New York night spot called Mikell's. If not, the odds are strongly in favor of your having heard the group's individual members propel onto the charts some of the most celebrated names in today's popular music. Stuff is a sextet of musically articulate East Coast session men, a super rhythm section hatched in the shadows of the great, the near great, and the ne'er great. Under the leadership of bass ist Gordon Edwards, these men have now decided to step out of the shadows as a unit (guitarists Cornell Dupree and Eric Gale have previously recorded as leaders for the Atlantic and Kudu labels, respectively), and after listening to this, their first album, I think it was a wise decision.
Stuff's music is infectiously rhythmic, as one might expect, and often downright nasty in its funkiness. Sure, the guitars are electric, but they are in such capable hands that it is the players rather than the instruments we hear. There are no profound musical statements here, nor, I'm sure, were any intend ed-just good down-to-earth sounds that have the timeless flavor and spirit of what we used to call hot music. C.A.
ROBIN TROWER: Long Misty Days. Robin Trower (guitar); James Dewar (bass, vocals); Bill Lordan (drums). Same Rain Falls; Long Misty Days; Hold Me; Caledonia; Pride; Sailing; and three others. CHRYSALIS CHR-1107 $6.98.
Performance: Derivative
Recording: Good
Robin Trower plays-and his bassist sings very much in the style of Jimi Hendrix. Al though the late Mr. Hendrix was an audacious and occasionally brilliant technician of the ...
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Patti Smith's "Radio Ethiopia"
PATTI SMITH'S much-awaited second album, "Radio Ethiopia," is here and will probably cause as much fervent discussion as her sensational debut album, "Horses." Well, what now, rock fans? If Janis Joplin, Jim Morison, and Jimi Hendrix brought all the goodies of surrogate self-destructiveness to you, will you settle for Patti Smith's second act in her drama of a lamb of the Seventies being led to martyrdom? Her second bid to be come the King or Queen (whichever you feel comfortable with these days) of Rock is unquestionably a first-rate album. It is always professional to the nth degree and a thoroughly involving emotional and musical experience. What's lacking in the album is what's lacking in Ms. Smith's timing. She is attempting to re-heat the anger and narcissism of the Sixties in the cooled-off Seventies. The result is an eerie, uneasy nostalgia for a time that tragically burned out too many of the best.
As did Joplin, Morison, et al., Smith is at tempting to be much more than a mere musician performing rock-and-roll: she seeks instant elevation to secular sainthood. It must be remembered, however, that it took death itself to so elevate Joplin and the others.
Smith seems to think she can sidestep that little exercise and achieve super-stardom simply by sledge-hammer image projection. This image includes her self-proclaimed liens on our attention as a poet of our time (yet she will not trouble herself to make more than one or two lines per song intelligible to even the careful listener); her deliberately intimidating work in, for instance, the title song in which she and the band create a menacing tidal wave of sound to engulf the speakers, the room and anyone in it; the overt shock and terror of her spoken monologue in the macabre oh-God-the-sickness-of-it-all Poppies; and her sexual exhibitionism, at least as heard in something such as Ain't It Strange, which comes across not only in her pants, groans, and bellows they drip with pre-, during- and post-coital blues-but also in an oddly impersonal note of undertow that conveys sex as power and power as sex.
Smith's version of the mirage of the Sixties, when rock stars were taken as seriously and as religiously as a daily acid dose and were regarded as messengers of The Truth and of Life, is in this day and age a pretentious, one dimensional effort to revive yesterday's gospel. Joplin and Morison were rock idols who exemplified and personified the attitudes and the life style of a whole youth culture that tried desperately to get out from under the consequences of reality. They lived as their audiences wished they had the hell-with-it-all recklessness to live. Joplin both outraged and delighted with her revolt against the middle class. Morison's bizarre expressions of his own pain and anger mirrored perfectly his audience's pain and anger. Naughty Jim Mori son. Devil-may-care, boozy Joplin. Both burnt out much too soon. Both trying, toward the end, to get out of the pact they had made with their audiences and neither succeeding.
Smith's performance distance, her proscenium reticence, may be her defense against being consumed by the unfocused hungers of her admirers, but her driving ambition to place herself in the Rock Pantheon may also, paradoxically, lead to the same end. And there's no need for that in the Seventies. Human sacrifices have gone out of style-way out of style. Those times are lived-through and gone, and, no matter how often Smith runs through the room with her hair on fire, she won't be able to convince us they aren't.
THAT said, it must be added that "Radio Ethiopia" is, on almost all musical levels, the kind of album we've been waiting to hear for a very long time. Smith's work has all of the vital, urgent excitement that caused the rock explosion to ignite in the first place. The quality of the "poetry" she's provided here will have to remain something of a mystery, at least until she picks up the rudiments of English-language communication. Her group per forms around her with beautiful, controlled abandon, and the production, nominally by Jack Douglas, is as flattering to her as a pink light bulb.
Patti Smith is already an important artist of the Seventies, bound to become more important. But it is something of a chore to be a fan of hers. Neither of her albums seems yet to have captured the unique potential that the listener senses seethes under the actual performances-and that's frustrating. Even more frustrating is her self-held conviction that it's flashback time to the days when rock was the medium of The Message and that she is now its First Apostle. In short, she's an abundantly talented woman still trapped in a stereotype. But get the album. There is some thing there that you're not going to hear any where else these days.
-Peter Reilly
PATTI SMITH: Radio Ethiopia. Patti Smith (vocals and guitar); orchestra. Ask the Angels; Ain't It Strange; Poppies; Pissing in a River; Pumping; Distant Fingers; Radio Ethiopia. ARISTA AL 4097 $6.98, 8301-4097H $7.95, 5301-4097H $7.95.
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... electric guitar, there was more sound than substance to his music (as he realized shortly before his death), so that a Hendrix emulator--even one as skilled and comfortable in the role as Trower-doesn't have much to build on. Hendrix intended to try playing jazz, and had he done so-as Jeff Beck has successfully done-his career might have been more artistically rewarding; at the least it would have been more challenging. But Trower is content to stay in the place Hendrix wanted to move away from: limbo. J. V.
TOM WAITS: Small Change. Tom Waits (vocals and piano); orchestra. Step Right Up;
Bad Liver and a Broken Heart; Pasties and a G-String; Small Change; The Piano Has Been Drinking; and six others. ASYLUM 7E-1078 $6.98, 0 ET8-1078 $7.98, TC5-1078 $7.98.
Performance: Actor-y
Recording: Melodramatic
Tom Waits looks, on the cover of this album, as if he's on the near side of thirty and caucasian, but he contrives, on the recording, to sound on the far side of sixty and black. His songs are uniformly designed to depress, something they succeed at completely. He's dreary all right: Bad Liver and a Broken Heart, Pasties and a G-String, and the title song ("Small change got rained on with his own .38") all have the joie de vivre of a tango with a corpse and the overpowering bad breath of a wino.
Waits' delivery, unfortunately, is so crisply clear that he makes sure you don't miss one obscenity or one belching groan of disgust about all this Nelson Algrenish squalor. He recites in a deep, gravelly voice that sounds so artificially produced that all he needs to do is throw in a few "ho-ho's" to be mistaken for a scatalogical Santa Claus. After about twenty minutes of wallowing around in all of this back-alley-derelict chit-chat, I realized that I was listening to a very silly album by a very untalented actor. -P.R.
WENDY WALDMAN: The Main Refrain. Wendy Waldman (vocals, guitar, piano); Ken Edwards (bass); Andrew Gold (guitar, key boards, vocals); Michael Botts (drums); Waddy Wachtel (guitar); other musicians. Eagle and the Owl; The Main Refrain; Soft and Low; Is He Coming at All; West Coast Blues; and five others. WARNER BROS. BS 2974 $6.98.
Performance: Improving
Recording: Excellent
This is more like it. I wasn't impressed with the last Wendy Waldman album, but where that one seemed the indulgence of a self-declared creative person this one shows some interest in craft. Her voice is nothing special aesthetically but it's taking on more personality, and her writing, especially in the lyrics, seems more concrete. She still has a tendency to take melodies through awkward, unmusical turns, but here you have a better feel for the elusive quality she's trying for-particularly in Is He Coming at All and Prayer for You and an inkling or two into her growth as a craftsman. She still has a tendency to settle on dull tunes, too, but here that's softened by the fine back-up she receives, mostly from Linda Ronstadt's people and from Ronstadt herself in no fewer than four songs. The instrumentation is at least clever everywhere, and sometimes it's considerably more than that. Eagle and the Owl is my favorite, I guess, although it doesn't color in the hues of her developing style as faithfully as some of the others. The album has some dull spots, but it also has some nice surprises. -N.C.
------ WENDY WALDMAN An album with some nice surprises
ANDY WILLIAMS: Cindy. Andy Williams (vocals); orchestra. Sailin'; My Lonely Room; Since I Fell for You; Groovin'; The Poem; and five others. Cottiminix 34299 $6.98.
Performance: Very good
Recording: Elegant, expensive
Andy Williams, who in personal appearances and TV shots always goes for the homespun projection and the boyish manner, returns here in another of his albums, an album which is, as always, and however paradoxically, as elegantly tooled and luxuriously crafted as a Cartier cigarette case. The arranging and con ducting by Barry Fasman fold about Williams as comfortably as a vicuna coat, and the production by Larry Brown keeps the key-light securely and flatteringly on the star at all times. Total pro that he is, Williams handles all of this fuss with a disarming ease and charm. Even in a gasping weeper such as The Poem he never loses his nice-guy appeal.
By now Andy Williams is really the Cary Grant of the record business (and oh, how the movie business needs a new one). No single piece of material that he does is ever all that interesting, much less innovative, but his enormous casual grace and style mark it immediately as his own-much in the way that any part Grant played became a Grant part. Those were not bad parts; neither are these. P.R.
BILL WITHERS: Naked & Warm. Bill Withers (vocals); orchestra. Close to Me; Dreams; I'll Be with You; My Imagination; Where You Are; and three others. COLUMBIA 34327 $6.98, PCA 34327 $7.98, PCT 34327 $7.98.
Performance: Very good
Recording: Excellent
The best thing about any Bill Withers album has always been the expansive presence of the man himself. He has a big, roomy, cushiony voice and delivery, a facility for writing direct songs that keep simple ideas simple (Close to Me and Where You Are, in particular, in this album), and an easy, innate musicianship that glides him over any rough spots.
For this album he's collected a dynamite back-up group that includes Don Freeman on electric piano and Jerry Knight, who is exceptionally good, on bass. His best effort here is the title song ("Heaven makes love to me and I feel/Naked and warm ... "). It's a little heavy in the "expressiveness" department but still a fine, richly detailed performance.
--------- BILL WITHERS---Easy, innate musicianship
Withers is an Old Dependable who really is, album after album, dependable-and these days that's a lot. P.R.
COLLECTIONS
SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK. Music rolls played on the General, a Wurlitzer Model 164 band organ. The Natchez and the Robert E. Lee; Toot, Toot, Tootsie!; After the Ball; Mother Machree; A Little Bit of Heaven; When Irish Eyes Are Smiling; Livin' Sam (Sheik of Alabam); Sidewalks of New York; and eight others. COLUMBIA M 34159 $6.98.
Performance: Too long at the fair
Recording: Good
On this disc of nostalgic music rolls ground out on an elaborate band organ known as the General, the band plays on-and on and on.
Paul Torin, the gentleman who acquired this mammoth Wurlitzer, restored it, painted it red, white, and blue, and lends it out for openings of banks and supermarkets, is rather obsessed with it. He possesses twenty-five music rolls for it, with ten tunes per roll; the six teen vintage samples on the record were quite enough for this pair of ears. Even so, the arrangements of Toot, Toot, Tootsie!, and Goodbye, Mother Machree, are so redolent of old-time carnivals, merry-go-rounds, and state fairs that it would take a flinty heart in deed to respond to the program with no affection at all. The organ, which weighs 2,500 pounds, is a formidable piece of machinery with 252 wooden pipes, 64 brass pipes, a 22 bell glockenspiel, a brass drum, a snare drum, and cymbal. All this for The Sidewalks of New York and Sweet Rosie O'Grady. Somebody ought to turn it loose on something more elaborate than After the Ball. Why, it might even replace the Moog!
-P.K.
WHEN WOMEN SANG THE BLUES. Lillian Glinn: Shreveport Blues; Cravin' a Man Blues; Shake It Down. Bobby Cadillac: Car bolic Acid Blues. Emma Wright: Lonesome Trail Blues. Chippie Hill: Christmas Man Blues; Weary Money Blues. Bessie Tucker: Bogey Man Blues; Key to the Bushes; Mean Old Stropper Blues. Bessie Jackson: B.D.
Woman's Blues. Georgia White: Your Worries Ain't Like Mine. Memphis Minnie: I've Been Treated Wrong. Willie B. Huff: I've Been Thinkin' and Thinkin
ARHOOLIE BLUES Classics 26 $6.98.
Performance: Down but never out
Recording: Good restoration job
The blues is a peculiarly American form where melancholy sometimes merges with an undercurrent of subversive mirth. The women in these blues songs are beaten, abandoned, left to die; I've Been Treated Wrong is a typical title. But the singer has the last word. For Christmas, if she can't get a good one, she'd like at least "a full-grown man." The collection of blues songs here stems from the South of the Twenties and Thirties.
Most of the singers represent the lesser-known ranks of theater and club performers whose records never made it big but sold well enough to a substantial audience of mostly black customers. Some, like Bobby Cadillac, Emma Wright, and Bessie Tucker, favored a country vocal style. Others, like Bertha "Chippie" Hill and Memphis Minnie, made a measure of success in the big cities, and their voices have a harder edge. The influence of Bessie Smith is strong on most of them; a few, like Georgia White, have such strapping voices that it's hard to believe they were ever put upon the way it says in the songs.
Producer Chris Strachwitz has put this program together from old discs dating back all the way to the early Twenties; the dubbings are remarkably clean and preserve the quality of the well-played accompaniments. Even so, it's a little startling to suddenly hear, un blurred and full, the voice of Willie B. Huff, recorded in the Fifties when high fidelity had arrived; it had begun to seem by then that all blues singing had to be heard through a sonic haze. By the time Huff came along, the blues had quit the stage and slunk off to the bars.
Still, like the women who sang it, down but never out, the blues always comes back. P.K.
Also see:
WHO WRITES ALL THOSE ROCK LYRICS? Including advice from an expert on how to write a hit, by RICK MITZ
Source: Stereo Review (USA magazine)