POPULAR DISCS and TAPES: Melanie's Back with "Photograph" Paul
McCartney and Wings: Live and Flying Joni Mitchell's "Hejira": A
Little Travelin' Music The Streisand Version: A Star Is Born Ballad for Americans
Kurt Weill's Three Penny Operao
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Reviewed by---CHRIS ALBERTSON NOEL COPPAGE PAUL FRESH PETER REILLY STEVE SIMELS JOEL VANCE
ALESSI. Billy Alessi, Bobby Alessi (vocals); instrumental accompaniment. Do You Feel It?; You Can Have It Back; I Was So Sure; Big Deal (Live Without You); and six others. A&M SP-4608 $6.98, 0 4608 $7.98, 4608 $7.98.
Performance: Pastel
Recording: Clear
The Alessi brothers represent the boneless, vapid, pretentious pop music that seems to be endemic to southern California. The Beach Boys and the Carpenters (with rare exceptions), and Herb Alpert (with no exceptions) are other examples of the type.
Using harmonic techniques they've borrowed from the Beach Boys, and perhaps the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Alessis whine their cotton-candy songs while a string section wanders in and out like a breeze from Zuma Beach. Too much pap in the pop. J. V.
CHUCK BERRY: Chuck Berry's Greatest Hits. Chuck Berry (vocals, guitar); instrumental accompaniment. Roll Over Beethoven; Johnny B. Goode; Sweet Little Sixteen; Maybelline; and six others. ARCHIVE OF FOLK AND JAZZ MUSIC FS 321 $5.98.
Performance: Walk-through
Recording: Fair
These are not the original recordings of Berry's best and most famous numbers; they are ...
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Explanation of symbols:
= reel-to-reel stereo tape
= eight-track stereo cartridge
= stereo cassette
= quadraphonic disc
= reel-to-reel quadraphonic tape
= eight-track quadraphonic tape
Monophonic recordings are indicated by the symbol
The first listing is the one reviewed; other formats, if available, follow it.
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... re-creations made around 1965 after Berry left the Chess label and signed with Mercury Records, which wanted a "greatest hits" album as catalog product to compete against the Chess packages.
The reprises lack the x factor, the chemical reaction of the originals. C. C. Rider and Ramblin' Rose, included here as filler, were never Berry hits. Rose is a. rather bland reading of Nat King Cole's original version, while Rider, a cut from a live album released on Mercury in the late 1960's, is notable for the incompetence of the backing group. Poor bands were a distressing feature of Berry's performing career at this time; he used local pickup outfits and seemed to care little about their quality. I saw him perform in New York in 1966, and the combo behind him was so hopeless they couldn't follow the chord changes-all three of them-to Maybelline.
The Chess packages of Berry's originals are still available in some stores, although the la bel has closed down. Snap them up while they last, and avoid this sorry collection of an innovator imitating himself. J. V.
ELVIN BISHOP: Hometown Boy Makes Good! Elvin Bishop Band (vocals and instrumentals). Sugar Dumplin'; Sidelines; Twist & Shout; Yes Sir; Spend Some Time; and five others. CAPRICORN CP 0176 $6.98, 0 M 80176 $7.97, M 50176 $7.97.
Performance: Pointless craftsmanship
Recording: Ditto
Here's a well-made piece of fluff,. which is one of the things the music industry is-trying to teach you to want these days, something like the way the automobile industry once taught you to want tail fins. There's not a song here that amounts to a hill of beans, except for Twist & Shout, which is shoehorned and pounded into a Caribbean arrangement that doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Anyway, there's so much shouting going on every where else-practically all the vocals and instrumentals are shouted, but in a slick, facile sort of way-that the old song wouldn't have any perspective for its essence to exist in even if they got at it. Slickness abounds; only the songwriting is ragged. Given a choice, I'd rather have it the other way around. N.C.
JACKSON BROWNE: The Pretender (see Best of the Month, page 91) CATE BROS.: In One Eye and Out the Other.
Ernie Cate (vocals, keyboards); Earl Cate (vocals, guitar); Steve Cropper (guitar); Scott Edwards (bass); Steve Foreman other musicians. Start All Over Again; Can't Stop; Stuck in Chicago; Travelin' Man; Give It All to You; Music Making Machine; and four others. ASYLUM 7E-1080 $6.98, 0 ET8-1080 $7.97, TC5-1080 $7.97.
Performance: Smooth
Recording: Well produced
This is a pretty graceful try at the blue-eyed soul idea that never quite fades out of pop music. The Cate Brothers have nice, flexible, gritty voices, a batch of pleasant, low-profile songs, and, of course, a rhythm section that isn't bashful. Not much personality comes through, perhaps because everyone's too busy getting the stylized sound right. The music is affected, not in the pretentious or mannered sense but in the sense that they're consciously having to stay on it. How close they come-especially Ernie Cate, when he sings lead-to making it seem easy and natural is appealing. The other thing the album has go ing for it is the proposition that when your mind is done with it, which shouldn't take very long, you can always turn your feet loose on it. N.C.
JIMMY CLIFF: In Concert-The Best of Jim my Cliff. Jimmy Cliff (vocals); other musi cians. You Can Get It If You Really-Want; Vietnam; Fountain of Life; Many Rivers to Cross; Wonderful World, Beautiful People; and five others. REPRISE MS 2256 $6.98,. 0 M8 2256 $6.98, M5 2256 $6:98.
Performance: Fair
Recording: Dank
There are two traditional critical lines on Jim my Cliff, neither of which I buy. The first is that, like Toots Hibbert, Jimmy is an Otis Redding disciple, which strikes me as down right weird. Jimmy's high, pure voice is far more reminiscent of Sam Cooke or Clyde McPhatter-he's a crooner rather than a belter. The second is that he' hasn't written a de cent song in years, which is unfair, but at least I can understand the basis for it. Although there are indeed some marvelous things scat tered across the albums he's made since The Harder They Come made him a star, his early songs were just so good, and their impact on an American audience hearing them for the first time all at once was so overwhelming, that it's made it difficult for his admittedly less consistent recent stuff to get the fair hearing it deserves.
At any rate, a live "greatest hits" collection of songs covering the whole of his career would seem to be a good way for Jimmy to es tablish some album credibility now that reggae is a viable commercial commodity in this country. Unfortunately, "In Concert" isn't going to help him very much, and I can tell you why in two words: Andrew Oldham. Old ham is a great hustler, but despite his string of successes with the Stones he was always a lousy producer, and here he has absolutely outdone himself. The album sounds alarmingly like the Stones' "Got Live If You Want It," which up till now had the distinction of being the most poorly recorded live album in history; it seems not to have been mixed at all, and if I did not know for an absolute certainty that it was actually done in front of an audience, I would swear that Oldham had dubbed the crowd in-it sounds that unreal.
The bottom line on all this is: get The Harder They Come soundtrack immediately if you don't already own a copy, hunt around for Jimmy's 1968 A&M album, and wish him a lot better luck next time. You can also ponder the question of whether Bob Marley's "Rastaman Vibration" made the Top Ten over here because of its musical content or because of Marley's outlaw reputation, and hope that Oldham doesn't secretly harbor a desire to re mold Jimmy into a Jamaican Mick Jagger. S. S.
BYRON KEITH DAUGHERTY: Let My Heart Be My Home. Byron Keith Daugherty (vocals and guitar); orchestra. Cry for Mary; Valhalla; I'm Leaving You; Evil Woman; Woman for All Seasons; and five others. FANTASY F-9515 $6.98.
Performance: Good
Recording. Good
Daugherty's voice has a warm, empathetic quality reminiscent of Don McLean, and his singing and guitar playing are extremely agreeable. He sounds intelligent enough, but his lyrics, with their raindrop, snowflake, flower-by-the-wayside, placebo messages, are clichés long ago worn to the nub by others.
The title song, for instance, is an essay in self pity that is maudlin to the point of embarrassment. His Woman for All Seasons makes his morning coffee and soothes his furrowed brow with all the assured dexterity of Julia Child rolling out pie dough. As a performer, though, Daugherty's quite good, and he man ages to stay that way even in this sea of farina. It would be nice to hear him in less soulful material. P.R.
DIRTY ANGELS: Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Dirty Angels (vocals and instrumentals). Tell Me; Who Does She Do; One Time Woman; Bad Love; Alley Cat; and four others. PRIVATE STOCK PS 2020 $6.98, 8305 2020H $7.95, 5305 2020H $7.95.
Performance: Incompetent
Recording: Competent
This is a feeble kid band singing watery pop material. The group tries to growl and act tough, but it all comes out sounding like puppy yips and yelps. The photographs on the al bum cover show two members of the group doing their best to look like Mick Jagger did twelve years ago (are they possibly wearing padded lips?). There isn't much a record producer can do with this kind of group, and the producer here has done as little as possible. J. V.
ENGLAND DAN AND JOHN FORD COLEY: I Hear the Music. England Dan (vocals, guitar); John Ford Coley (vocals, guitar, piano); Jim Gordon (drums); Max Bennett (bass); other musicians. Used to You; Tell Her Hello; New Jersey; Idolizer; Mud and Stone; and five others. A&M SP-4613 $6.98, 0 8T-4613 $7.98, CS-4613 $7.98.
Performance: Pleasant pap
Recording: Very good
Four of these songs date from 1971 and are here reissued from the debut England Dan and John Ford Coley album, which was on A&M and is out of print. The remainder were copyrighted in 1973; I don't know when they were recorded. The duo's "Nights Are Forever" album containing the hit I'd Really Like to See You Tonight is newer stuff on the Big Tree label. This isn't England Dan and John Ford Coley up to date, then, but it is a well-produced album that doesn't represent them too badly. They come off pleasant and bland, the same way they still do: the latest thing in citybillies being almost indistinguishable from the next-to-latest, and so on, clear back to the Kingston Trio. So be it; there are worse things than helping keep the acoustic-guitar market going, and this kind of act does invariably improve AM radio (so would three minutes of silence every so often, but we can't get that).
There are also worse qualities than blandness, as your local loudmouth jock and his mostly obnoxious records constantly demonstrate. N.C.
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MELANIE's Back
"THEY looked at my heart and they looked at my head . . . They pulled my words apart and left them for dead," Melanie says, perhaps to clue us in that "Photograph," her new album for Atlantic, is an elaborate, purposeful answer to her critics of the early Seventies. It is also, I think, a work her old friends will love. Melanie always threw her heart into her music, but in winding up to do that she sometimes got her foot dangerously close to her mouth. Most of the bitching about her was unfair, though, and this album is going to make some people sit up and take notice.
She's been away for two years to be with her kids (let's not feel too sorry for someone who can afford to do that), and she's back with penetrating and courageously sentimental lines and with a richness of melody and atmosphere that may remind you of what you took to music for in the first place. The al bum-partly because echoes of the music hall are just naturally a part of Melanie-seems to have connections to several aspects of the pop-music past, but they are not there for gimmicky or exploitative purposes; it's just the way she is, and it is her voice today.
The best song in the album, one of the best songs of the year in fact, is Photograph, which says more (and says it better) about the longing for The Way We Were than did the movie by that name. Melanie is an unreconstructed romantic, bless her heart, and she hasn't gone against her own grain to mollify her old detractors. Quite the opposite: the al bum projects intelligence but in a cryptic way; Melanie won't mess up a scrumptious melody just to get a few more insightful words in. The album is grandiose, melodramatic, even a little schlocky, but it's how it's all those things that counts. I'm glad she's back. We need more people with the guts to be and to remain themselves.-Noel Coppage
MELANIE: Photograph. Melanie (vocals, guitar); Louis Shelton (guitar); David Paich (key boards); Jay Wolfe (bass); Jim Gordon (drums); other musicians. Cyclone; If I Need ed You; The Letter; Groundhog Day; Nickel Song; Photograph; I'm So Blue; Secret of the Darkness; Save Me; Raindance; Friends & Co. ATLANTIC SD 18190 $6.98, 0 TP-18190 $7.97, CS-18190 $7.97.
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KINKY FRIEDMAN: Lasso from El Paso. Kinky Friedman (vocals and guitar); Eric Ciapton (dobro); Rob Stoner (bass); Howie Wyeth (drums); other musicians. Sold American; Twinkle; Ahab the Arab; Catfish; Ol' Ben Lucas; and seven others. Eric PE 34304 $6.98, PEA 34304 $6.98.
Performance: Home on deranged
Recording: Okay
With this new album, Kinky Friedman seems to be moving into Shel Silverstein territory.
Having exhausted the potential of his Sage brush Semite routine, he is working on be coming the Rusty Warren of country-rock.
(One of the great stories of the music business is that Warner Bros. president Mo Ostin passed on him because he was afraid to tell his mother that he had signed a band called the Texas Jewboys.) The result of this shift is an album that you don't listen to as much as you pull out for friends to listen to-a party record, in other words.
On that level, "Lasso from El Paso" has more than enough moments. There's a drunken updating of Ray Stevens' novelty classic Ahab the Arab; a thoroughly obscene Waitret, Please, Waitret; a charming children's choir and a piquant Eric Clapton solo embellishing the thoroughly disgusting tale of Ol' Ben Lucas (who "had a lot of mucus"); and, for grouches like Peter Reilly who think Bob Dylan has no sense of humor, the premiere of the Hibbing Minstrel's great baseball/soul/ protest song, Catfish (that's Catfish Hunter, of course). It's all pretty silly stuff, and some of it is in really colossally bad taste, but authentic wildmen like Kinky are a vanishing breed in rock, and they need our support. Be sides, how can you help but love a guy who sneaks a perfectly serious, affecting version of The Ballad of Ira Hayes between two of the rankest bits of bathroom humor imaginable? They should have let him sing at the Inaugural. S.S.
FRANNIE GOLDE. Frannie Golde (vocals); orchestra. Love Is; I'm Hypnotized; All You Need Is Love; Just for Tonight; and six others. ATLANTIC SD 18196 $6.98, TP-18196 $7.97, CS-18196 $7.97.
Performance: Musicianly but contrived
Recording: Good
In her new album Frannie Golde comes on like an Upper East Side Bette Midler with a bra. It's scarcely what the pop world has been waiting for, but, as she goes on her fastidious, silky way, singing her own songs (the only exception being the Lennon-McCartney All You Need Is Love) in her big, carefully controlled voice, she does communicate a basic musicianship rare in young, white female singers.
Too bad it's wasted on what she's chosen to do here. Her songs are fairly awful, but she puts so much real-sounding feeling into trying to put them over that eventually one defrosts.
A little. Not enough, though, to overlook some of the "styling" gimmicks she attempts vocally-strictly "soul" by Bergdorf's and "blues" by Bendel. Ah, if only one could buy, or adopt, life experience . . . . P.R.
WOODY GUTHRIE: We Ain't Down Yet. Jess Pearson (narrator); Will Geer, James Seals, Dash Crofts (readers); Arlo Guthrie, Peter Yarrow, Hoyt Axton, Doug Dillard, John Hartford, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, others (vocals and instrumentals.) The Prophet Singer; Dear Mrs. Roosevelt; Build Me a World; Union Maid; Loneliness; Deportee; All of Us; So Long, It's Been Good to Know You; Wet Pair of Shoes; Win; The Grand Coulee Dam; We Ain't Down Yet; The Lady of the Harbor; Love Tonic; This Train Is Bound for Glory; Kids; My Daddy; Letter to Will Geer; Goin' Down the Road; The Singing Cricket. CREAM CR-1002 $6.98, 8316-1002H $7.95, 5316-1002H $7.95.
------- GEORGE HARRISON: reasonable cleverness and Beatlesque whimsey
Performance: Another tribute
Recording: Excellent
Now that there's a whole movie, Bound for Glory, devoted to the life of Woody Guthrie, it seems reasonable enough that somebody would want to issue still another album on the subject. Here Woody's "friends"-and the list is long and impressive-are on hand to quote him and to sing his songs of protest and exhortation. Such classics as So Long, It's Been Good to Know You, Goin' Down the Road, and This Train Is Bound for Glory are included along with a few songs that are not so familiar: the surprisingly patriotic piece he wrote on commission about The Grand Coulee Dam for the Tennessee Valley Authority, the war song My Daddy Flies a Ship in the Sky, and the wryly comic ballad The Great Historical Bum.
Not so effective as the songs are the quotations from the Wisdom of Woody, read all too reverentially between numbers by actor Jeff Pearson, who had the cooperation of Woody's widow Marjorie in assembling these excerpts from the letters and writings of what the news release from Cream Records de scribes as " America's depression hero." Woody could sometimes speak with homely eloquence in voicing his hatred of injustice ("I ache and I hate because the world needs so much fixin"), but a little of this sort of thing goes a long way, and one just keeps wishing the next song would start. An exception is a touching moment or two in which Will Geer reads a letter he once got from Guthrie; the prose here sounds less as if it had been inscribed in stone with a clumsy chisel and more like the man I remember.
By now there must be a shelf full of these song/narration tributes to Woody. All of them are well-intentioned and feature generous lists of talent, but if you really want to hear a Woody Guthrie song done as it should be done, the best place to turn is still to one of Woody's own albums, where that so harsh yet strangely gentle voice is accompanied by the guitar that always sounds like some marvelous extension of the singer's quirky personality. May those records never go out of print! P.K.
GEORGE HARRISON: Thirty Three and 1/3. George Harrison (vocals and guitar); Willie Weeks (bass); Billy Preston (keyboards); other musicians. Woman Don't You Cry for Me; Dear One; Beautiful Girl; This Song; See Yourself; and five others. DARK HORSE DH 3005 $6.98.
Performance: Mostly routine
Recording: Good
GEORGE HARRISON: The Best of George Harrison. George Harrison (vocals and guitar); other musicians. Something; While My Guitar Gently Weeps; My Sweet Lord; For You Blue; and nine others. CAPITOL ST-11578 $6.98, . 8XT-11578 $7.98, 4XT-11578 $7.98.
Performance: Sublime to ridiculous
Recording: Variable
Sorry, Beatles fans, but "Thirty Three and 1/3" is not the triumphant George Harrison comeback you've all been waiting for. True, it's better than anything he's done in ages, but ...
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Paul: Live and Flying
WHEN Paul McCartney and his band Wings flew to America for their long-awaited debut tour last May, everyone seemed to be eagerly waiting for the former Beatle's act to be grounded. Critics had given his solo al bums rather mixed reviews and, as is our habit with superstars who seem to think they are too super, we were ready to subject his every move to a cynical scrutiny. He had become, for many, rotten with success, more a music "personality" than a person who plays music.
But the tour changed all that. As STEREO REVIEW'S Steve Simels reported back then, "I came out [of the concert] almost ecstatic. I got chills. [McCartney's] so . . . endearing." Most critics agreed, and the twenty-one-city, thirty-four-performance cavalcade (airplanes have horsepower too) was a triumph. The keepsake of that tour, the memory book of that triumph, is a fancy-cover album containing three records, a poster printed on both sides, twenty-eight songs, and-oh, yes some very exciting performances. A pleasant switch from McCartney's seven other solo albums.
Those albums were often marred by painful pretentiousness and a sappy, sentimental self consciousness. The songs seemed to be over cooked and saccharine, like outtakes from a breath-mint jingle. But those some songs, oddly enough, removed from the studio candy box and set on the stage of the concert hall, work brilliantly, displaying some hard, rough edges that make us think more of sandpaper than of sandcastles. Moreover, McCartney sings them to communicate, not just to sound pretty. The result is a concert album of such realistic immediacy that you can almost smell ...
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. . . about as close as we're ever going to get to a reunion . . .
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... the sulfur of the audience's lighted matches (yes, they do that for McCartney too).
A good "live" concert album is, I think, al ways more exciting than a studio product. It's hard for a listener to imagine himself in the studio while the music is going on (granted that he would want to), but quite easy for him to imagine himself part of an audience that is already part of a recording. The performer has a lot to do with this. McCartney doesn't do a lot of talking on these six sides, but that doesn't matter. What he does do is concentrate on transfer of energy, picking it up from the audience, giving it back to them, and picking it up again in a warmly playful process of feedback that is almost palpable.
The album has fortunately avoided the pit falls that await live-in-concert albums. Worst of these is the Greatest Hits trap, usually bait ed with enough sweetened laughter and applause for a Lucy rerun. This album does contain McCartney's hits, but there are also enough never-before-recorded songs to make the whole thing a new dish rather than a platter of leftovers. One of them is Soily, the al bum's second band and last encore. It sounds like a rousing cross between an Elton John rocker and an Indian war dance, but it is pure McCartney, energy-filled proof that the man can-rock and roll.
Wdidn't really need that proof, I sup pose. Everybody knows McCartney is a rock and-roll star. But it's nice to learn from this album (and, of course, the tour that produced it) that he is such an accomplished performer, an entertainer who can keep an audience entranced for two and a half hours and a producer who can transfer all that excitement to disc. Nearly every concert on the tour was re corded, and McCartney himself listened to all the tapes, choosing five (!) versions of each song. Then he spent about six weeks (seven days a week, fourteen hours a day) making the final selections, mixing, and mastering.
The finished product is a complete concert without a noticeable splice, but McCartney wisely refrained from adding any cosmetics all the cracks, groans, and rough edges of his voice are intact.
The highlight for me is his performance of that unique Beatles classic Yesterday. Eerie, haunting, even a little chilling, it comes about as close as we're ever going to get to a reunion of the Beatles: a reunion of the old Paul and the new McCartney. If this album proves any thing, it is that this Beatle has grown up, that he has come of age as a solo artist. His tunes may still be a little too predictably sweet-and sour, but when he sings them right, when he reaches to the bottom of his performing gifts, then he does the impossible: he makes us for get about the Beatles.
-Rick Mitz
PAUL McCARTNEY AND WINGS: Wings over America. Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney, Denny Laine, Jimmy McCulloch, and Joe English (vocals and instrumentals).
Venus and Mars/Rock Show/Jet; Let Me Roll It; Spirits of Ancient Egypt; Medicine Jar; Maybe I'm Amazed; Call Me Back Again; Lady Madonna; The Long and Winding Road; Live and Let Die; Picasso's Last Words; Richard Cory; Bluebird; I've Just Seen a Face; Blackbird; Yesterday; You Gave Me the Answer; Magneto and Titanium Man; Go Now; My Love; Listen to What the Man Said; Let 'Em In; Time to Hide; Silly Love Songs; Beware My Love; Letting Go; Band on the Run; Hi, Hi, Hi; Soily. CAPITOL SWCO-11593 three discs $13.98, 8X3C-11593 $14.98, 4X3C-11593 $14.98.
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JOHN HARTFORD: lighthearted at last and much more fun
... for largely negative reasons--Tom Scott's horns are almost inaudible, mentions of George's love for Krishna are held to a mini mum (the Lord's in there a bit, but He's non-sectarian), a few of the songs have melodies things like that. I have to admit, though, that was sucker enough to have expected better Granted, "Dark Horse" and "Extra Texture," his two previous efforts, were perhaps the worst albums ever made by a musician with a major reputation, but George, as glimpsed recently on NBC's Saturday Night in performance with Paul Simon, and in two hilarious Eric Idle-directed promo films, both looked and sounded swell. Unfortunately, the two songs he premiered in the films provide the album's only worthwhile moments; This Song is reasonably clever and actually rocks a bit, and Crackerbox Palace is an addictive bit of Beatlesque whimsey that has some sensational guitar playing and an arrangement so alive that I find it hard to believe that the backing is provided by the usual hacks--Willie Weeks and company--who have made George and a slew of other famous artists sound exactly alike in the last year or two.
As for "The Best of George Harrison," the most telling comment that can be made about it is that while John and Ringo's greatest hits collections did not contain any material from their Beatles days, George's does-an entire side, in fact. That says more than enough about the declining state of George's creative powers. S.S.
JOHN HARTFORD: Nobody Knows What You Do. John Hartford (vocals, guitar, banjo, fiddle); Jim Colvard (guitar); Roy Husky Jr. (bass); Mac Wiseman (backing vocals); other musicians. You Don't Have to Do That; Didn't Want to Be Forgotten; In Tall Buildings; John McLaughlin; Granny Won't You Smoke Some Marijuana; Joseph's Dream; and six others. FLYING FISH 028 $6.98.
Performance: Very good
Recording: Good
I used to think, when John Hartford was straining metaphors in the shadow of Glen Campbell, that if he would take himself less seriously he'd really have something. I was right about this-he does take himself much less seriously here and most of this is great fun-but I didn't take into account something else I'd noticed about him: he tends to take a thing too far. Here he takes taking himself (and everything else) less seriously a little too far, which means part of the album is beyond fun and into a boring kind of absurdity. In The False Hearted Tenor Waltz and in the title song (which is constructed entirely of point less innuendo anyway), for example, he lapses into a squawking falsetto by way of poking fun at his own singing voice. The instrumental Sly Feel might be fun to play for four and a half minutes, but a listener feels left out of the joke. Golden Globe Award really needs to be only one verse long to make its point and actually runs over four minutes. And so on.
But the album is better than it is bad. Hart ford and Mac Wiseman use cornpone harmonizing to harpoon the mushy Somewhere My Love from Dr. Zhivago, and then graft a bit of Flatt and Scruggs' We'll Meet Again Sweet heart on the end to round it off. You Don't Have to Do That blends the kinds of gimmicks and messages found in such songs as Mama Don't Allow and Pretty as You Feel, and there's an excellent "straight" song about how awful the "normal" life looks to some of us: "Someday, my baby, when I am a man, and others have taught me the best that they can . . . They'll cut off my hair and sell me a suit, and send me to work in tall buildings." All the lightheartedness is played off against that; I guess he figured that called for a lot of lightheartedness, but he ought to post "Brevity is the soul of wit" or some such slogan above his desk. The instrumentation, charting some excellent country musicians through a hippie-folkie consciousness, is so good that it counters most of the excesses.
Even though Hartford, with his intelligence, shouldn't have put those there in the first place, this is an album well worth checking out. N.C.
HOT TUNA: Hoppkorv. Hot Tuna (vocals and instrumentals). Santa Claus Retreat; Watch the North Wind Rise; It's So Easy; Bowlegged Woman, Knock Kneed Man; Drivin' Around; and five others. GRUNT BFLI-1920 $6.98, BFS1-1920 $7.98, BFKI-1920 $7.98.
Performance: Good
Recording: Dense
Here's Hot Tuna doing what it does, which is to run some basic, blues-based tunes through Jorma Kaukonen's massive, intentionally distorted electric-guitar chording and over Jack Casady's agile bass, and to package it all in a jacket and sleeve that are as ugly as they can make them. These electric and mostly electric Hot Tuna albums run together in my mind, however conscientiously I try to listen to them individually. Kaukonen seems to be trying for some such effect, I sometimes think.
That would jibe with this other feeling I have that he's on an anti-stardom trip of some sort.
The covers may be unattractive on purpose, this line of thinking goes, and that and the similarity of sound and material from album to album and the evenly modulated way Kaukonen sings may all be related. Exactly where he wants all this to lead is something I haven't figured out yet, but I'll keep trying. Mean while, here's Hot Tuna doing what Hot Tuna does. N.C.
ENGELBERT HIMPERDINCK: After the Lovin'. Engelbert Humperdinck (vocals); instrumental accompaniment. After the Lovin'; Can't Smile Without You; Let's Remember the Good Times; I Love Making Love to You; This I Find Is Beautiful; and five others. EPIC PE-34381 $6.98, PEA-34381 $6.98, PET-34381 $6.98.
Performance: Nothing new
Recording: Very good
Engelbert Humperdinck changed his name from he won't say what and got himself off a breadline in. London about nine years ago to become an international singing star. Today, with his smooth, honeyed voice and flashy looks, he knows he doesn't have to try too hard to keep his following in love with him and try he doesn't. On this record, Humperdinck dispenses artificial ardor in indifferent ballads with lines in them like "I know that my song isn't sayin' anythin' new" (he can say that again-and he does). The album should certainly keep his wife Pat and their four lovely children living in comfort in their mansion outside London until the next one is issued, which probably will be soon. No breadlines now. P.K.
KID DYNAMITE. Kid Dynamite (vocals and instrumentals). Shotgun; Feel a Whole Lot Better; Uphill Peace of Mind; Lovin' Don't Last Forever; Music Man; Mysterious Ways; and four others. CREAM CR-1003 $6.98, 8316-1003H $7.95, © 5316-1003H $7.95.
Performance: Uninspired
Recording: Good
The jacket pictures and some of the sound (most of the vocals) suggest there's even more macho strutting going on here than nor mal for a rock group. It almost sounds like satire of that at times, but it doesn't go far enough and isn't clever enough to work that way. Val Garcia, who probably has a good voice if he would sing a song instead of act it, keeps turning the vocals toward a live-performance style, sounding as if what he really wants is not so much to be heard as to be seen. Yet much of the instrumentation seems canned. The band-two of its four members having trained under Steve Miller-is tight and technically competent enough, but that seems academic in this case, and I hear a lot more physics in it than chemistry. The songs, in any event, are hardly catalytic. Call it mu sic to strike a pose by. N.C.
AL KOOPER: Act Like Nothing's Wrong. Al Kooper (vocals, keyboards, guitar, arrange ments); instrumental and vocal accompaniment. (Please Not) One More Time; In My Own Sweet Way; Turn My Head Towards Home; Hollywood Vampire; This Diamond Ring; She Don't Ever Lose Her Groove; and six others. UNITED ARTISTS UA-LA702-G $6.98.
Performance: Intellectual
Recording: Very good
It's hard to tell whether Al Kooper is a musician or an entrepreneur; he seems to have been more involved in launching groups de signed to a certain format than in staking out a claim for himself as a player. He was one of the Blues Project, a New York group of the mid-Sixties who approached the blues as if they were writing a doctoral dissertation. He next formed Blood, Sweat & Tears as an experiment in jazz/rock, but left the group after the release of their first album. He recorded several albums as a soloist or in company with other stars of the day, then journeyed south to survey local bands, where he discovered, signed, and produced early albums by Lynyrd Skynyrd on his own Sounds of the South label.
Now Kooper appears again with a solo disc, in which he demonstrates his talents as an organizer and musical arranger. The album is obviously the work of a capable and experienced man, but the material-mostly weak love songs-and his limp vocals under cut the arrangements and the strong support he receives from his sidemen. The performances give the impression that Kooper wanted to show us that he himself could make a well crafted album, but there obviously was little feeling involved. A little oomph would have helped. J.V.
L.A. EXPRESS: Shadow Play. L.A. Express (instrumentals); occasional vocal accompaniment. Nordic Winds; Double Your Pleasure; Shadow Play; Chariot Race; and five others. CARIBOU PZ 34355 6.98, PZA 34355; $7.98.
Performance: Hooey
Recording: Good
I quote a statement made by this quintet on the back of the album cover: "Our music to day reflects a special, free feeling of expression. The synthesis of complex musical conceptions united with pure simplicity, has produced a broad stage on which to create. The five of us along with our brilliant contributors are playing that stage." Now, I ask you, does the playing of shoo bee-doo-wah jazz from the Sixties, of a type that would make a four-week music student giggle in contempt, mixed with boom-boom disco, qualify as "a synthesis of complex musical conceptions united with pure simplicity"? As a matter of fact, what is "pure simplicity"? Is "a broad stage" (a) an abstract conception, or (b) a literal conception, with curtains and lights and a stagehands' union and everything? And how important is the "broad"-ness of that stage to creativity? Couldn't L.A. Express "create" while standing on a dime? Furthermore, does "brilliant contributors" refer to friends, relations, spouses, lovers, hangers-on, the staff at chic Caribou Studios, and Ms. Joni Mitchell, who drew the album cover and sings back-up vocals on one cut? Let us assume that L.A. Express would not avail itself of the opportunity to be pompous, arrogant, and intimidating-for, as everyone knows, the denizens of pop music have for the last seven years conducted themselves in such an exemplary way that all the faithful cry hosannahs at all times. Still, I think it might have been more honest to have issued a statement something in the nature of the following: "Folks, we're ambitious hacks, pure and simple. Buy our album, please." J. V.
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Help Is on the Way. Melissa Manchester (vocals, guitar, piano); orchestra. Talkin' to Myself; Be Some body; A Fool in Love; Headlines; Dirty Work; and five others. ARISTA AL 4095 $6.98, 8301-4095H $7.95, 5301-4095H $7.95.
Performance: Raisin bran
Recording: Fine
Melissa Manchester is still nattering away like one of those dreaded acquaintances who is grimly determined to be your "best friend," no matter how you feel about it. Here she is again, still at your elbow with her endless raisin-bran philosophizing and shining-hour sensitivity. All of this is probably meant to set your reeling mind and emotions at rest-rather like a double issue of the Reader's Digest but, in truth, her fatuity brings out the murderer in me. This latest bowl of cereal has her wrestling with such eternals as hope (Help Is on the Way), faith (Be Somebody), and sex (Dirty Work). She has windy, novelettish answers to those problems and to just about everything else, all couched in her high-flown but carefully "street-wise" lyrics and per formed with the mysterious sincerity of some one's hippie old Aunt Myrt. Fine, slick-paper production by Vini Poncia. P.R.
MANFRED MANN'S EARTH BAND: The Roaring Silence. Manfred Mann (keyboards); Chris Hamlet Thompson (vocals, guitar); Colin Pattenden (bass); Chris Slade (drums); Dave Flett (guitar). Blinded by the Light; Singing the Dolphin Through; Waiter, There's a Yawn in My Ear; The Road to Babylon; and three others. WARNER BROS. BS 2965 $6.98, M8 2965 $7.97, M5 2965 $7.97.
Performance: One out of seven
Recording: Very good
Manfred Mann's groups have gone through various personnel and style changes since the mid-Sixties, when Mann first became known here in the days of the British Invasion. At that time the band's hit singles were usually re-workings of American teen tunes like Doo Wah-Diddy. Toward the end of the decade, though, they performed more complex and sophisticated material (Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James and Ha Ha Said the Clown, for example), which was colorfully arranged and delivered with muscle. In 1969 the group had its biggest (and, to date, last) commercial
----------- AL KOOPER: A well-crafted album from a rock entrepreneur
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Joni's "Hejira": A Little Travelin' Music
A LADY BUG mysteriously appeared on the arm of my old ratty-green music-listening chair in the cold, raw throes of November, just as I was getting to know Joni Mitchell's new album. The lady bug is a friend of man; back when I had a garden and other trappings of a fixed address, I used to order them through the mail and they would arrive and presumably eat up some of my enemies. This one was in such a wrong place at such a wrong time that I looked at it more closely than I once would have. What it looked like was a tiny pre-Rabbit Volkswagen, down to and including the orange paint job that has been available on those for several years. Where it came from is still a mystery, but what I hope is that it came in the mail, in the packaging with Joni Mitchell's album, for it is fitting that this tiny little live reminder of an automobile should accompany Mitchell's latest searching examination of wanderlust.
When Mitchell wrote Urge for Going years ago, she wasn't kidding. She has dealt with travel again and again in her music, travel and love, travel because of love, travel to sort out love, and even travel to escape love. Here, though, she has refined or distilled certain aspects of this into a seemingly irreducible poetry; she's articulated this connection between love and travel as she sees it, and she has gently fostered an acceptance of the white line fever in her soul, seeing the highway not as a place she is exiled to (as in "Hit the road, Jack, and don't you come back no more no more") but as a place of refuge.
“HEJIRA," the word Mitchell chose as the name of the album and of an important song in it, is a word rich enough in connotation to suggest she is talking about running away with her troubles and faith instead of from them.
Specifically, the word, usually spelled "hegira," means the start of the Mohammedan era, A.D. 622, when Mohammed, trying to escape persecution, migrated from Mecca to Medina.
The word is applied more generally to emigrations of the faithful; the Koran calls such emigrants Muhajirun and tells them they are honored persons. The idea of there being honor and dignity in being a refugee from one's home-one's love-nest in the case of this al bum, one's Mecca you might call it if the one you're dealing with loves love as much as Joni Mitchell has told us she does-adds a certain distinction to the album. Mitchell's way of writing about travel as a person rather than as a performer is subtler than most of her colleagues can manage. Her lyrics are more direct and frontal than they've been recently and the lines are ear-catching. You may won der what in blazes she's trying to do with sound, this time not because the melodies are difficult to track but because the arrangements seem so . . . well, unpremeditated. The instruments make sounds unlike themselves, al most random sometimes, except they do go together, and maybe this is what traveling mu sic should sound like when the travel is for its own sake, rather than toward or away from something. We've been conditioned to think of traveling music as having a bee-line qual rhythm guitars, train whistles in harmonicas, and so forth. Mitchell's travels in the album are meandering, and her goals lie not at the end but in the process: "I've gone coast to coast just to contemplate." A couple of times she seems to be writing to friends, putting down what she thinks to cap ture it for herself (as writers do) in Amelia and in Song for Sharon. And what she thinks about a lot is the old urge for going: "I slept on the strange pillows of my wanderlust . . I dreamed of 747's over geometric farms
. . . Dreams, Amelia, dreams and false alarms." . . . " Sharon, I left my man at a North Dakota junction, and I came to the Big . . doing what makes other people nervous is Joni Mitchell's job . . .
fi Apple here to face the dream's malfunction." She unburdens herself quite a lot to Sharon, in fact, even to the point of facing what a temptation it is to stop, to settle down with a husband and the kind of life Sharon appears to have. That song runs for eight and a half minutes and doesn't seem long at all, it deals so well with doubts and longings that go with this nomadic state. "There's a wide, wide world of noble causes," she says, "and lonely landscapes to discover . . . but all I really want to do right now is find another lover." Images of herself traveling haunt every song in the album, in any case. Mitchell senses that movement symbolizes freedom down deep in the genes of the culture, and threatening freedom is one of the things love does. The culture, however, in its development, has conditioned and browbeaten us to put security ahead of both freedom and love, and this-since we also need security to some degree-has confused our contemplation of the old conflicting yens to be autonomous and yet to attach ourselves to others. One can have a little of all three, but the question is, what are the proportions that will work? Let us go and seek the answer, Mitchell says, not go somewhere, just go-which means, first of all, we have to think positively about the going. A hejira is a flight from something, but not a panic-driven mad rush with one's mind, one's faith, in a shambles; it is an emigration, a dignified process with hope in it. Most people, their security needs culturally inflated, don't do it. ". . . It made most people nervous," Joni says. "They just didn't want to know what I was seeing in the refuge in the roads." WELL doing what makes other people nervous, being brave and seeing what she can learn from what ensues, is Joni Mitchell's job as she has defined it. She's stood up well to her own tough standards here, producing not answers or platitudes or advice but a way of grappling with the questions-and producing literature, poetry, and, in the bargain, pushing back the frontiers of the sound of travel music a little.
Which reminds me: I wonder what kind of car she drives (probably not a Volkswagen; "I'm rich and I'm fey," she tells the ghost of W. C. Handy, and if I were those I wouldn't drive a VW). And that reminds me that I haven't seen the out-of-season lady bug for a couple of days.
-Noel Coppage
JONI MITCHELL: Hejira. Joni Mitchell (vocals, guitar, piano); instrumental accompaniment. Coyote; Amelia; Furry Sings the Blues; A Strange Boy; Hejira; Song for Sharon; Black Crow; Blue Motel Room; Refuge of the Roads. ASYLUM 7E-1087 $6.98, ET8-1087 $7.98, TC5-1087 $7.98.
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DAVE MASON: some impressive singing and tasteful picking
.... success with a version of Dylan's nonsense drug song, The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo), which drew an endorsement from Zimmerman himself. The follow-up singles, Fox on the Run and-one of my favorite titles My Name Is Jack (and I Live in the Back of the Greta Garbo Home for Wayward Boys and Girls), made little noise.
The present group, the Earth Band, was formed in the early 1970's and almost had a hit with Living Without You. But by then Mann seemed to have given up on or lost interest in pop, turning to a free-form rock mixed about equally with jazz and British folk. He is a skilled keyboardist and a gifted arranger, but his meandering, amorphous, and ultimately pointless current style has never been as interesting or fruitful as his approach to pop material. Only one cut stands out on this album-a lithe, leaping performance of Bruce Springsteen's Blinded by the Light; Mann's arrangement and the band's pizzazz make it sound better, than it actually is. Mann is an interpreter rather than a creator. It's too bad he doesn't spend more time applying his specialized talents to pop. J. V.
PENNY MARSHALL & CINDY WILLIAMS: Laverne & Shirley Sing. Penny Marshall, Cindy Williams (vocals); orchestra. Sixteen Reasons; Graduation Day; I Know; Five Years On; and eight others. ATLANTIC SD 18203$6.98.
Performance: Poor
Recording: Expensive and elaborate
An enormous amount of expensive production work by Sidney Sharp and Jimmie Haskell went into the attempt to mask the indifferent singing talents of Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams, the stars of the top-rated TV series Laverne & Shirley. Lots of cutesie Fifties touches, songs that sound as if they were rejects from Grease, and elaborate arrangements can't hide the fact that Marshall and Williams can't sing their way out of a paper bag. This is a blatant commercial try at rip ping off diehard fans, one that I hope doesn't succeed. What next, the Fonz reciting This Is My Beloved? P.R.
DAVE MASON: Certified Live. Dave Mason (vocals, guitar); instrumental accompaniment. Feelin' Alright; Pearly Queen; Show Me Some Affection; All Along the Watchtower; Every Woman; World in Change; Coin' Down Slow; and seven others. COLUMBIA PG 34174 two discs $7.98, PGA-34174 $8.98, PGT-34174 $8.98.
Performance: Mostly very good
Recording: Good remote
Dave Mason does some impressive singing and his usual tasteful kind of picking here, but there's a live-album looseness about it. One tightly edited disc might have been more re warding, if indeed such a thing is possible to pull out of live rock performances. Mason does a glancing retrospective of his own material, some blues, and a few covers of contemporary songs. He doesn't try to overhaul the covers or fish about for "alternative" interpretations; his version of one of the Eagles' best songs, Take It to the Limit, is individualistic not in obvious ways but in subtle ones. I really like that, and I like about two-thirds of a disc's worth of other odd particles, including the way he does his own Sad and Deep as You and most of the way he does Sam Cooke's Bring It On Home to Me. But there are several of those drawn-out, live-album instrumental breaks that are so boring in the privacy of the home, and there's the usual stuff it would be better to see than to hear. I've thought of cramming twenty or thirty friends into the room to see if that makes the atmosphere fit the record-but where would a pop music critic get that many friends? N.C.
MURRAY MCLAUCHLAN: Boulevard. Mur ray McLauchlan (vocals, guitar, piano, harmonica); Silver Tractors (instrumentals). Harder to Get. Along; Train Song; Met You at the Bottom; La Guerre C'Est Fini pour Moi; and five others. ISLAND ILTN 9423 $6.98.
Performance: Fair
Recording: Okay
Murray McLauchlan is a Canadian folk-rocker whose voice, material, and delivery depend too much on the occupational delusions of the average folk singer: that everything he says is important, that every character portrait or situation he provides is bathed in an aura of pure aesthetics, and that everybody out there in the audience is just dying to hear what he has to say. Average folk singers like McLauchlan (or annoyingly ambitious ones like Harry Chapin) insist that the listener recognize them as being important and worthy before they have demonstrated any claim to being so.
McLauchlan's material is about what you'd expect: a train song, broken-romance songs, anti-war songs. The band behind him, which is adequate, is billed as the Silver Tractors. If things don't work out in the folk-rock area for McLauchlan, perhaps he can try again as a hard-rock act and call himself Stutz Bearcat and the Platinum Studebakers. J.V.
SUSIE MONICK: Melting Pots. Susie Monick (banjo); David Amram, Steve Burgh, Timmy Cappello, "Charlie" Chin, Richard Crooks, Peter Ecklund, Erik Frandsen, Eddie Gomez, John Hartford, Bob Hipkens, Mark Hoff mann, Alto Madness, Tony Markellis, Bob Montalto, Tony Ramos, Jeremy Steig, Brian Torff, Tony Trischka, Jay Ungar, Kristin Wilkinson, Ted Wonder (instrumentals).
Clinch Mountain Backstep; Daybroke Myban yo; Whiskey Before Breakfast; Colts Creek; One Day on South Street; and five others. ADELPHI AD 4107 $6.95.
Performance: A lot of a good thing
Recording: Very good
Susie Monick has a talent for playing a mean banjo and another for surrounding herself with some of the liveliest musicians in the business. The roster of her accompanists in "Melting Pots" is almost more impressive than the lusty instrumentals of which the al bum consists. With thoroughgoing mastery, Monick can make all three types of five-string banjos she plays-the f railing banjo, the blue grass banjo, and the solid-body electric ban jo-do just about anything. Anything, that is, except not sound like a banjo, and that, even with all the master fiddlers, trumpeters, French-horn tooters, and dobro players on hand for the occasion, is a built-in handicap.
Pieces like Marmalaid are rife with wit and ingenuity, and there is nothing wrong, I sup pose, with naming a banjo composition after a cat named Orange Julius. But in the long run it all begins to blur together. Still, no record I've heard recently has come up with a better finale than Wicked Witch Breakdown, said to have been composed "after teaching seventy six banjo students to play Cripple Creek" and making use of everything from a musical saw to the cackling of the witch herself. It's a honey of a Halloween piece, although even more ...
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The Streisand Version
STREISAND dux, Garland redux: dux be cause Barbra Streisand seems to have had the last imperious word on practically every aspect of the soundtrack album for her new film A Star Is Born (with the possible exception of the grade of vinyl it is pressed on), and redux because Judy Garland has been re turned to us in a rerelease of her version of A Star Is Born, which is, apart from her "Live at Carnegie Hall" album, the best thing she ever did on records.
A Star Is Born, half dreary soap opera, half bitter truth about the entertainment industry and its corridors of power and fear, is a durable little tale. It made its first appearance in the Thirties, starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. In the Fifties came the Judy Gar land and James Mason version with a score by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin-its first musical treatment. Now, in the Seventies, comes the Streisand version, with anew score drawn from a number of sources.
Briefly, it is the story of a great male star who meets a young girl struggling to make the Big Time. It traces their romance, her rise to superstardom, his gradual professional eclipse owing to alcoholism, and finally the "way out" of suicide. (The original by William Wellman and Robert Carson had echoes of the real-life story of Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. After a too-hot-not-to-cool-down affair with the Great Lover, Garbo went on to become the brightest star the movies have yet produced. Gilbert, the reigning matinee idol of the silents, became technologically unemployed with the arrival of the talkies-he had a high-pitched, untrained, and apparently un trainable voice. He turned to the bottle and ended an apparent suicide, walking into the sea just as the hero of the two earlier film versions of A Star Is Born did.) The soundtrack of the Streisand version of this popular Hollywood myth is, frankly, a big disappointment. The hero (Kris Kristofferson) is now a rock idol and the girl (Streisand) is a struggling singer, which ought to have made the problems of story/song integration a whole lot easier. Maybe too easy, for the songs (by several hands, and not a rocker among them-Barbra doesn't do that kind of thing) seem just to plop on by, one by one, pieces of special material tailored to the scale (larger than life) and the dynamism (consider able) of heroine Streisand.
There are, I must confess, three happy exceptions, all by Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher. Kristofferson gets one, Hellacious Acres (hell as an amusement park), and he performs it with a manic fury I didn't know he had in him. Streisand gets the other two. The Woman in the Moon is a really good song that . .. lyrics . . . that are as contrived as a Middleton double-crostic may have just a superficial touch of women's lib about it ("I was warned as a child of thirteen/Not to act too strong . . ."), but it moves beyond contemporary sexual politics to become a song about personal freedom for everyone. It is unquestionably a Streisand Song, and she bites into the highly charged lyrics ("Keep on pushin'/Don't believe a word about/Things you heard about/Askin' too much too soon . . .") with the kind of dramatic conviction only she seems able to muster these days. Fan or not, one has to applaud that kind of steely magnificence.
Like any other great performer, Streisand has to have one big set piece per show, one rip-up-the-seats, get-'em-in-the-gut scene; in this case it is the third Williams/Ascher song, the finale, called With One More Look at You.
That one more look lasts a good deal longer than you would believe in the movie, but on disc it sums up all the tender, protective, yet urgently erotic yearnings she feels for her lost lover in a bravura performance.
One of Streisand's least recognized (or per haps least publicized) talents is her executive instinct. She has always had an unerring sense of the right person for the right job-that job being, of course, the provision of the material, direction, whatever, that sets Barbra off to precisely the best advantage. Part of that instinct was knowing when to give others their head as creative artists, when to step out of the kitchen. Here, for some mysterious, Jerry Lewis-ish reason, she stayed at the stove to cook up the music for The Love Theme from a Star Is Born, a wet-dream theme out of Brahms adapted for a TV deodorant commercial, and lyrics for Lost Inside of You (music by Leon Russell-he, at least, is a rocker) that are as contrived as a Middleton double-crostic. The result is a general lowering of standards; the songs contributed by Rupert Holmes, Donna Weiss, and Alan and Marilyn Bergman are all sadly, mechanically routine.
Streisand will most likely have to take the rap for the packaging too, from the tacky Scavullo photo of her and Kristofferson locked in a nude embrace to the series of stills from the film, mostly bare flesh and heavy breathing except for the "performance" shots, which manage to give the really spooky impression that A Star Is Born might actually be (pardon my irreverence) The Story of Sonny & Cher.
THE Garland version? Simply a joy to hear again. She is in wonderful voice, she has an immortal pop classic (The Man Who Got Away) to introduce, and she sings it every bit as well as Harold Arlen could possibly hope for. The Born in a Trunk number (her bravura scene) remains a wonderful montage of yesterday's pop hits assembled and unified by the style of the last great vaudevillian. Garland was the classic tragic gamine, primarily a singer, but she also had a specially com municative dramatic power with which she could convince you of almost anything.
Of comparisons there can be none. It would be as pointless as comparing Laurence Olivi er's Hamlet to Albert Finney's. Both are crea tive artists, both offer their quite individual conceptions of the material at hand. Streisand remains Streisand, Garland Garland. There are precious few like them in any theatrical century.-PeterReilly A STAR IS BORN. Original-soundtrack re cording. Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson (vocals); orchestra, musical supervision Paul. Williams. COLUMBIA JS 34403 $8.98, JSA 34403 $8.98, JST 34403 $8.98.
A STAR IS BORN (Harold Arlen-Ira Gershwin). Original-soundtrack recording. Judy Garland (vocals); orchestra, musical direction Ray Heindorf. COLUMBIA SP ACS 8740 $7.98.
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... scary is the "flea of those seventy-six players being let loose on a defenseless world to launch banjo albums of their own. P.K.
MELBA MOORE: Melba. Melba, Moore (vocals); instrumental accompaniment. The Way You Make Me Feel; Good Love Makes Every thing Alright; The Long and Winding Road; Ain't No Love Lost; and four others. BUD DAH BDS 5677 $6.98, 8320-5677 $7.95, © 5320-5677 $7.95.
Performance: Show-off
Recording: Excellent
Melba Moore? Why, it seems only yesterday when that girl with the glorious gospel voice was knocking us dead on Broadway in Purlie.
Now the still immensely talented Melba seems to be going the way of so many fine performers in her line-putting out a series of fancily wrapped gift packages with so much glitter surrounding the stuff that it's hard to find the gift. No mistake about it, Melba can still sing her heart out when she wants to, especially in a real gospel tune like Mighty Clouds of Joy, or when she's given a chance to be herself in a touching ballad like Lennon and McCartney's The Long and Winding Road. Most of the space here, however, is wasted in showy over-arrangements of shabby tunes in which Melba is driven, like a vocal trapeze artist egged on by some fiend of a trainer, to show off how high she can scream, how loud she can belt, how hard she can sock out her soul credentials. Swamped in the overproduction of it all, she made this listener wish she could buy back her own personality somehow and be the girl we all loved at the start, when the song was the thing, not the musical tricks and the showing off: P.K.
DONNY MOST. Donny Most (vocals); orchestra. Hey Baby; Terminal; Bony Moronie; Rock is Dead; Early Morning; and five others. UNITED ARTISTS UA-LA696-G $6.98.
Performance: For collectors
Recording: Okay
Here's yet another refugee from a hit TV series to be immortalized on, vinyl. This album, flintily produced and arranged as a disco record, showcases Donny Most (front Happy Days) in an awesome variety of musical moods and alternating rhythms. The problem is that Mr. Most cannot sing, and he is about as rhythmic as an attack of St. Vitus' dance.
In addition, there is evidence here that his voice is in the process of changing-into precisely what I'm not sure. A real collector's item. P.R.
THE O'JAYS: Message in the Music. The O'Jays (vocals); orchestra. A Prayer; Let Life Flow; Desire Me; Paradise; Make a Joyful Noise; and three others. PHILADELPHIA IN TERNATIONAL PZ 34245 $6.98, PZA 34245 $6.98, PZT 34245 $6.98.
Performance: Routine
Recording: Good
Here, from the Philadelphia kitchens of Gamble-Huff, is another ragout de zilch. Aimed at the guts of the disco market, it ought to put the average place out of business in one night.
The nominal stars of the album, the O'Jays, are saddled with a batch of typically mediocre Gamble-Huff creations and almost obliterated by super-loud, super-busy arrangements. As they valiantly tried to boogie their way through it as if wearing lead shoes, they won my sympathy but no cigar. P.R.
MAX War Ina Babylon
(see Best of the Month)
------- DONNY MOST: As rhythmic as an attack of St. Vitus' dance
---------THE STAPLES: One of the suavest vocal acts in the business
LEO SAYER: Endless Flight. Leo Sayer (vocals); orchestra. Hold On My Love; Reflections; Endless Flight; Magdalena; How Much Love; and five others. WARNER BROS. BS 2962 $6.98, M 82962 $7.97, M 52962 $7.97.
Performance: Disappointing
Recording: Fancy
Leo Sayer used to be one of the spritelier, more caustic spirits among us, but "Endless Flight" is a disappointingly bland and commercial album. There's probably not enough unfiltered Sayer here: he wrote only five of the songs; the arrangements, by various hands, have a shopworn sound; the production, by Richard Perry, is as fancy as it is un sure and scattered-as if afraid not to touch all bases; and Sayer himself sounds untypically forced and strident. No Business Like Love Business is undoubtedly the low point (it's a monstrosity), and the not very high point is Sayer's own I Hear the Laughter, a song about loneliness that at least has some echoes of his earlier, more sardonic work. You'd think that a man as naturally talented as Sayer is would be able to run through this kind of commercial bleep on sheer technique, but somehow it doesn't work out that way. Probably just as well for Sayer's own future. P.R.
BOB SEGER & THE SILVER BULLET BAND: Night Moves. Bob Seger (vocals); Silver Bullet Band (instrumental accompaniment). Rock and Roll Never Forgets; Night Moves; The Fire Down Below; Sunburst; Sun spot Baby; and four others. CAPITOL ST-11557 $6.98, 8XT-11557 $7.98, 4XT-11557 $7.98.
Performance: Excellent
Recording: Very good
Despite the rock media's strenuous assurances that Bob Seger, a Detroit hero, is exactly what national audiences should have been looking for all their lives, and that rock can't get along without him (just as the media can't survive without telling us such things), Seger is probably no more than a hard-working, better-than-average singer who occasionally surpasses himself.
His cougar-scream vocals and phrasing owe quite a lot to the black Motown influence. No Detroit white singer has ever escaped the harping, aggressive peculiarities of the style, especially as portrayed by Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops and by Edwin Starr. But there are other influences. In the title tune, which owes its narrative plot and musical construction to Van Morrison's Brown-Eyed Girl, Seger phrases like the glorious Otis Redding, the Georgia genius. The Fire Down Below is in the manner of Who's Makin' Love and Take Care of Your Homework, both hits for Johnny Taylor of the Memphis-based Stax label in the late Sixties (Taylor was a subtler screamer than Stubbs, but harder than Redding), and the Silver Bullet Band plays in the two-fisted, slinky, air-tight Brown Sugar style of the Rolling Stones.
The other cuts on the album prove that Seger is a highly professional and experienced entertainer who enjoys his work and has thoroughly absorbed his influences so that he can deliver his performances with punch and bravado. He is not an original by any means, but he is solid and dependable. His previous al bum, a live recording of a Detroit concert where he was preaching to the already converted, was a noisy and flabby thing, but he seems to do better in the disciplined confines of the recording studio. It's not a world beater, but for what it is, and for who he is, this-is a very good album. J. V.
SPARKS: Big Beat. Russell Mael (vocals); Ron Mael (keyboards); instrumental accompaniment. Big Boy; I Bought the Mississippi River; Everybody's Stupid; Nothing to Do; Confusion; Fill-Er-Up; and five others. CoLUMBIA PC 34359 $6.98, PCA-34359 $6.98, PCT-34359 $6.98.
Performance: Misapplication
Recording:Good
Sparks are the brothers Ron and Russell Mael, two Americans who were, until about a year ago, happily expatriate in England, where their dizzy songs, daffy stage theatrics, and LP's made them quite popular. They are now living again in the United States, and they are quoted in the press material that accompanied this album to the effect that they consider it "very guitar oriented, very hard rock. . . . It’s OBVIOUS, like rock should be, and more accessible than anything we've ever done before." Unfortunately, the most obvious thing about this album is that Ron Mael's talent for writing and Russell's for comedic singing are simply too good for hard rock, and their at tempts to pair it with that style's pounding monotony smashes their humor into a pulp.
The Maels' sophisticated, dadaistic music be longs in a cabaret or a revue; for recordings the accompanying instruments and players should be tailored to the material, not the other way around. Sparks have made a wrong choice here. J. V.
RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT
THE STAPLES: Pass It On. The Staples (vocals); orchestra. Take This Love of Mine; Making Love; Precious, Precious; Pass It On; Party; and four others. WARNER BROS. BS 2945 $6.98, M8 2945 $7.97, M5 2945; $7.97.
Performance Excellent
Recording: Excellent
The Staples are one of the suavest vocal acts in the business, and they do their thing exceedingly well in this silver platter of an al bum. Curtis Mayfield wrote all of the material here (most of it's very good) and furnished a production that glistens and glows with first rate professionalism. The three-girl, one-man group gallivants through such things as Party and the hokey Love Me, Love Me, Love Me with the kind of stylish, self-confident swagger that only the complete pro can handle without turning the audience off. Their clean, defined attack is a wonder to listen to, and the arrangements by Rich Tufo spotlight the sleekness of it all. "Pass It On" is a model of musical craftsmanship. P.R.
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Also see:
CLASSICAL DISCS and TAPES--Pianist David Bean: Awfully Impressive JAMES GOODFRIEND Frederick Delius' Fennimore and Gerda PAUL KRESH Wagner's "Ring" Complete on Cassettes