"Okay, next case.
"I see this is a custody battle."
"Yes, your honor. The case of Debbie Gibson vs. the Public. She is suing for custody of her image. I'm her conscience and I'll be representing her."
"It doesn't appear the Public has shown up for this hearing, so you may proceed."
"The Public still views Ms. Gibson as a giddy teen. But with her third album, Anything Is Possible, Ms. Gibson, who is now 20, should be taken seriously. Exhibit A is Lamont Dozier, noted Motown songwriter, who co-wrote four songs with Ms. Gibson. This is a well-respected writer, and his presence connotes that she is respected."
"I need better evidence than that."
"Exhibit B is how all the tracks, except the catchy 'Another Brick Falls,' blend in with most other overproduced Top 40 hits. Ms. Gibson is mature; she knows playing it safe sells records. As Exhibit C, I offer this sleeve photo of Ms. Gibson showing cleavage and sitting on a motorcycle."
"Is there anything else?"
"Well, Exhibit D is the clever way in which Ms. Gibson puts all the dance songs together and calls it the NRG side of the record—for the record, that's 'energy' in cute form—and all the ballads on the 'Mood Swings' side. That makes this a concept record. You know, like Abbey Road.
"Finally, Exhibit E: Every song title is spelled right. Could a teenager do that?"
"I'm sorry, but I must rule in favor of the Public. They can keep their image of Debbie Gibson a while longer.
"Next case: Tiffany vs. the Public." (Atlantic)
Bobby McFerrin
Based on his track record, McFerrin, the magical one-man vocal orchestra, seems capable of anything. Make that almost anything. While this album extends his artistry, it is less festive and less consistent than its popular predecessor, Simple Pleasures.
But don't go away until you've sampled some of this record's estimable concoctions. There's the doo-woppy "Yes, You," reclining seductively on the feather bed of McFerrin's airy falsetto. "Sweet in the Mornin'," on which the singer is backed by his Voicestra, a 10-member chorus, is a sweeping gospel flood that could have even Take 6 catching their breath.
The simplest song here, the ballad "Common Threads," may be the prettiest, so lovely it makes you forget all the layering McFerrin is using to put it across.
On Simple Pleasures, McFerrin illuminated pop music with syncopated rhythms and askew harmonic elements. His stated intention this time was to experiment with taking his style in a more African direction. In this he succeeds only moderately well.
Maybe it's the lack of percussion, but such songs as "Medicine Man" sound more like American Indian music than they do African. He does get a good tribal feeling going on "The Garden," a musical meditation on the dawn of mankind.
"Discipline," on the other hand, is a tedious work chant, despite the fact that it features the Paul Robeson-like baritone of Bobby's father, Robert McFerrin Sr.
So, if ambition at times casts McFerrin into deeper waters than he can plumb, it's true that he has already done unimaginable things with the human voice. And even the weak tracks here are marked by McFerrin's inventive arrangements. It would be idiocy not to applaud his attempts to expand his horizons. (EMI)
The Beautiful South
This sextet from the questionably beautiful town of Hull in northeast England appeared last spring with the excellent debut disc Welcome to the Beautiful South. With light pop melodies and satiric, biting lyrics, that album's songs worked on two levels.
Now, less than a year later, it's sophomore slump season in Hull. Choke contains some good music, but neither the lyrics nor the tunes are strong this time. The accompaniment can get so square it sounds like Burt Bacharach, while the songs address tough issues—wife beating, political revolution—but only rarely with insight.
The band still holds the potential to create great pop music, as a few new songs show. "Tonight I Fancy Myself" makes a funny argument that it's easier to stay home alone and amuse yourself than to bother with the hassles of a romance. As always, vocalists Paul Heaton, Dave Hemmingway and Briana Corrigan deliver their songs with lots of personality and variety. There's still plenty of talent here.
Maybe it's a blessing that the Beautiful South rushed out a second album quickly. Now the band can turn its talents to a post-slump comeback. (Electra)
Maceo Parker
Maceo Parker is best known as a horn-toting henchman for the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. For most of the last quarter century, Parker has greased the gears of Brown's bump-and-grind sex machine with his hot-buttered saxophone solos.
Taking a sabbatical from the JB Horns in the mid-'70s, Parker added earthy grit to the electro-funk of Bootsy's Rubber Band and George Clinton's Parliament/Funkadelic groups. More recently, while the Godfather has been serving his six-year term in an Aiken, S.C., prison, Parker put together an old-fashioned jump band for a delightful excursion in search of his prefunk roots.
Kicking things off with the Ray Charles classic "Them That Got." Parker eases into a swinging groove. His broad tone and springy rhythmic lines on alto are set off nicely by the tight ensemble playing of tenor saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis, trombonist Fred Wesley, guitarist Rodney Jones and drummer Bill Stewart. Meanwhile Don Pullen weighs in with gospel-inflected harmonies on organ, giving the proceedings a sanctified feel. The band turns Charles Mingus's "Better Get Hit in You' Soul" and the Jay McShann-Charlie Parker dance hall song "Jumpin' the Blues" into rump-roller romps. And Parker reveals a deep understanding of the blues on both an original, "Children's World," and a mournful interpretation of "Over the Rainbow."
Sly Stone's "In Time," the session closer, serves as a reminder that Parker is still capable of getting downright funky, in the event Brown is ready to pick things up where he left off. (Verve)
Judy Collins
Good news for Collins fans. After years when she seemed to be lost, she's moving in the right direction again.
Her 23rd album is her first in at least a decade that revives the assured technique of such albums as In My Life and Wildflowers.
Fires of Eden isn't perfect: Collins still lets some schmaltzy arrangements and ornate harmonies trample over her natural talents (Smash those synthesizers, Judy!). Yet the overall tone of the project rings true. Collins's voice is resonant and powerful again. The first tune, "The Blizzard." is a highlight of Collins's 29-year career. Her music and lyrics indeed invoke the beauty of falling snow. Singing to her own cascading piano accompaniment, she tells of meeting a stranger in a storm, a small event that builds to a rewarding moment of vision.
Collins does her best work on her own, but she also co-wrote several pleasing songs with the duo David Buskin and Robin Batteau. Some of these, particularly "Home Before Dark," have the kind of wistful lyrics Collins once specialized in.
Still, she sounds most appealing when she injects a song with strength and even toughness. It's hard to understand why she sometimes picks fluffy material and croons it in a dizzy romantic way. (She does, however, make a success out of one of her weird choices, turning "The Air That I Breathe," one of the lesser gifts of the Hollies to pop music, into a loving lullaby.)
Thoreau once warned, "Simplify! Simplify!" Collins falters when she ignores that advice. When she heeds it, she sounds ready to follow Bonnie Raitt's footsteps on the comeback trail. (Columbia)
Robert Johnson
A longtime hero to such superstars of the rock world as Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, who emulated his haunting, raw-boned singing and deep-blues-style guitar playing, Robert Johnson (1911-38) has finally come into his own with the release of this 29-song compilation that is part of Columbia's Roots 'n' Blues series.
In these highly personal and darkly primitive songs, Johnson tells the story of his dissonant, peripatetic, secretive and short life better than any biographer. These are tales of drink, the devil and a compulsive kind of dogging around, sung in a voice that is plaintive and solemn, that taps at once into the sordid and the sublime, to the accompaniment of his chilling guitar and slide-guitar spills and riffs.
Like much of Johnson's life, and death, how he came to play the guitar the way he did is the subject of mystery. After learning the Jew's harp and harmonica in his teens, he began picking up the guitar from local musicians working juke joints and country suppers in the Mississippi Delta. Bluesman Son House, it is said, told Johnson early on. "You can't play nothin'," only to stand amazed, a few years later, listening to his former student's prodigious playing.
The collected Johnson is the fruit of five recording sessions in 1936 and 1937 in San Antonio and Dallas. They represent the entire known body of Johnson's legacy in wax.
Here you'll find "Terraplane Blues," the only song that afforded Johnson a small measure of fame during his lifetime; two takes of the slow and sulky "Love in Vain." covered by the Rolling Stones in the '60s; and such familiar, if seldom heard, tunes as "Stop Breakin' Down Blues," "Cross Road Blues" and "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom."
The accompanying booklet contains an essay on Johnson, loving tributes by Clapton and Keith Richards, a discography, and pictures of Johnson, his family and other Delta bluesmen Johnson traveled and played with until the night in 1938 when he was apparently poisoned by the husband of a woman he had become friendly with while playing at a backcountry roadhouse. Johnson died three days later, at age 27.
Equal parts hellhound and dreamer, Johnson had a talent for living the blues and the genius to make us feel his life in song. (Columbia)
- Contributors:
- Craig Tomashoff,
- David Hiltbrand,
- Michael Small,
- David Grogan,
- Lisa Shea.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
