Month: July 2019

This album has somehow taken on the status of a legendary disaster in Sammy Davis, Jr.’s career, which may not be entirely a fair assessment based on its actual contents. It is admittedly the only one of his MGM album releases that is even still remembered today, but it nonetheless gets consistently treated like the red-headed stepchild of his discography.

Despite producing at least one song that has become an inescapable staple of Davis’ ‘best-of’ compilations, the album has never gotten a re-release of any kind in its original form, and consequently is only available for those willing to hunt down (and able to conveniently play) the original vinyl. As a result, most of our information about the album’s quality comes from then-contemporary reviews, which invariably paint it as a horrifically garish and tacky disaster. But I wondered if there was actually any truth to that assessment, so I did some research, listened to the actual contents of the album, and I present my findings here.

Of course, part of the problem is that the big hit from this album was “The Candy Man”. This song was widely despised when it came out, but for reasons that aren’t really relevant today. Remember, this was the era when Rock’n’Roll’s hatred and scorn for the genres that proceeded it was reaching its zenith, and the fact that such an obviously non-Rock song from a musical children’s movie was a Number One hit in that era filled most of the popular critics of the day with completely irrational rage. But now that multiple generations have grown up since that acknowledge the movie this song comes from as an immortal classic, I think we’ve outgrown the antipathy this song used to receive, and that most of us can acknowledge it for what it is—a gloriously sunny and delightful classic. (It’s also worth noting that the same songwriters who contributed this song, Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, were responsible for plenty of Davis’ earlier signature hits from the Sixties, including “What Kind of Fool am I?” and “Who Can I Turn To (When Nobody Needs Me)?”).

There was one other Leslie Bricusse song included on the album…the triumphant, inspirational “I’ll Begin Again”. Written as part of Bricusse’s score for the movie Scrooge, which was a rather poor film but did feature fine songs, it sounds much like the songs Bricusse wrote with Newley in the Sixties, and provides a fine opportunity for Sammy to provide the same kind of warm, dramatic performance he had favored on his earlier hits by the songwriter.

Many of the complaints about this album have to do with the producer, Mike Curb. Davis himself didn’t care for Curb’s production, but, at least on this album, the results sound quite good, alternating between unashamedly lush Seventies Easy Listening and reasonably convincing attempts at Funk that still don’t go too far to sound credible when sung by Sammy.

I don’t really see the problem with Curb’s production, and the two songs he and Mack David wrote for this album are excellent. Particularly good is “I’m Over 25 (But You Can Trust Me)”, a wise and compassionate song about the idealism of youth seen from the perspective of an older person. “Take a Ride” may have originally been intended to be part of Donny Osmond’s risible attempt to reinvent himself as a Pop-Soul singer, but it sounds perfectly respectable in Sammy’s rendition,and is actually a lot of fun as a composition.

Particularly lovely is “Willoughby Grove”, a touching narrative from the perspective of a man who spent his childhood in the titular poor country neighborhood. He reminisces about the beauty and innocence of that time, then tells of how,because he wanted to “see the world”, he “hitched a ride” and “never found a reason to return”. The song turns heartbreaking as he finally comes home for his mother’s funeral and sees the neighborhood has been modernized and gentrified and the innocence he prized destroyed (“and in our yard, there’s a factory”). Davis gives this sad narrative especial weight with his solemn, deeply felt reading, and the track is one of the album’s utmost highlights.

“This Is My Life” bears a certain resemblance to a less grandiose, more vulnerable version of “My Way”. Like that song, it is a translation of a foreign hit with the lyrics translated into English, but here those lyrics are significantly superior to those in “My Way”, and it serves as an effective counterpart to that song, expressing the essence of Sammy’s persona just as eloquently as the former song did Sinatra’s.

“Take My Hand” may be a pretty standard, predictable Gospel pastiche, but Davis sells the Hell out of it, and the result is actually quite stirring. And a funk-blues arrangement of the Great American Songbook standard “I Want To Be Happy” serves as a perfect emblem of this album’s attempt to modernize Davis’ sound without contradicting his rich musical legacy.

Even the famously cheesy Easy Listening standard “MacArthur Park” comes off surprisingly well here. There’s only so much you can do about the embarrassing lyrics on the song’s chorus, but Davis’ performance is beyond reproach, taking the song seriously throughout and offering a particularly eloquent delivery of the song’s haunting middle section (which is easily the best part of the song in any case).

The only track on this album where it seems to remotely merit its bad reputation is the final one, where Davis offers an incredibly ill-advised and awkward rendition of the “Theme from Shaft”. Isaac Hayes himself helped with the arrangement and even contributed some new lyrics to this version, but the result is still every bit as embarrassing as it sounds. Indeed, this song seems to embody the reputation that the whole album has acquired, which seems a bit unfair given that it’s really only based on one track at the tail end of the album.

Overall, this album comes across today as one of Davis’ classics, and if they would actually give it a CD and/or digital release so modern audiences could hear it, I would bet good money that its reputation would be vindicated in no time.

With the musical bio-film Bohemian Rhapsody having become a box office smash (despite the generally lukewarm response it has garnered with critics), I felt I had to cover something relevant to this recent hit musical film. But the truth is that there’s surprisingly little of interest to say about the film itself, apart from pointing out its myriad historical inaccuracies (which literally everyone else has already done). So instead, I thought I’d discuss a far richer and more interesting subject…the album that is given the most attention in the film, and indeed is generally regarded as Queen’s Magnum Opus (a few would opt for their heartwrenching swan song Innuendo, but this still remains by far the more common choice for that title). So I give you the album that made Queen the legends they are now…A Night at the Opera.

To start with, don’t let anyone tell you that Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, or the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, or Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is the most surreal and incomprehensible Classic Rock album of all time. This album holds that title, hands down. People often joke that the aforementioned albums must have been made on drugs, but I refuse to believe any drugs exist that are powerful enough to produce an album like this. You simply can’t come up with something this insane by accident; you have to be trying.

There is a widespread claim that this record is, in fact, a full-fledged Concept Album. It’s certainly structured like one, with several songs flowing directly into one another, but because no-one has the slightest idea what any of the lyrics mean, this claim has proven to be impossible to definitely confirm or deny. The music, with its heavy influences from Opera and Musical Theater, is richer and more ambitious than any Rock’n’Roll ever heard up to that point (yes, even that of the Beatles), while the lyrics are a mix of maddeningly opaque cryptograms and outright gibberish, the dividing line between which has never been clear. Some of the lyrics do appear to have a concrete meaning (for example, people have more or less figured out that the melancholy “39” tells a story about an astronaut returning from a hundred-year space flight under its layers of confusion), but it’s impossible to know if some of the more indecipherable songs actually mean anything or not.

For example, I have listened to the opening track, “Death on Two Legs”, over a dozen times for this review alone, and I still don’t have the slightest clue what it’s supposed to be about. Then there’s lyrics like “You call me sweet like I’m some kind of cheese” (from the bizarre Rocker “Sweet Lady”), or the utterly insane “I’m In Love With My Car”, which, from the lyrics and presentation, does not seem to be a metaphor…it appears to literally describe a man with an erotic attachment to an automobile.

On top of this, in between the intense Rock music that forms the bulk of the album are inserted three surreal, twee pastiche interludes apparently based on British Music Hall influences…”Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon”, “Seaside Rendezvous”, and “Good Company”. Then, apparently just to confuse the audience, we get two fairly straightforward romantic ballads, “You’re My Best Friend” and “Love of My Life”. These songs feature the same intense quasi-Operatic sound as the rest of the album, but in every other respect, they are perfectly normal love songs, and their presence just makes the album seem all the more insane.

Of course, the climax and centerpiece of the album is the immortal “Bohemian Rhapsody”. I’m sure every person reading this already knows the song, but I still want to point out how it goes from sorrow to silliness in an instant during the middle section. It starts as a keening aria that seems to be telling the story of an impoverished young man who kills another man and is condemned to die for it, and then out of nowhere there’s “Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the fandango?” In other words, it goes quite abruptly from parodying tragic Opera to parodying Comic Opera, a transformation that, interestingly enough, does not generally happen in Opera, at least not with this degree of sudden contrast.

However, contrary to popular belief, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is not actually the longest track on the album. That would be “The Prophet’s Song”. at eight minutes (to “Bohemian Rhapsody”‘s six). The song, a throwback to the fantasy themes found on the band’s first two albums, contains a gloriously self-indulgent three-minute section where the singers repeat two short phrases ad infinitum in ridiculously elaborate and showy vocal harmonies.

This album is outrageously self-indulgent, brain-breakingly incomprehensible, generally insane, and one of the greatest albums in Rock history. It honestly feels like a Lewis Carroll poem set to monumental music and stretched out to album length. This is what it would have sounded like if late-career Train really had been absurdist geniuses gleefully trolling the entire world (and had made infinitely better music, obviously). Queen would go on to make a number of great albums in the future, including a supposed ‘sequel’ to this album in A Day at the Races, but never would they feel quite as utterly in their element as they do here, and they never topped this one as a pure showcase for them doing what they do best.

I usually avoid this practice, but just this once, let me start this review by sharing a personal anecdote. I made a seemingly innocuous comment about this artist on Twitter during the American Music Awards, calling him a “decent enough second-tier Hook Rapper”. This led to one of my former acquaintances on that platform verbally abusing me behind my back because the artist in question had been accused of domestic abuse (let’s note, just for context, that this artist was also dead by this time). Ironically enough, it was this personal attack that led me to explore the artist’s work beyond the few singles I had then been exposed to, and I have actually come to the conclusion that I was entirely too dismissive of this late Rap/R&B star’s work. My prior description of him actually did him a disservice, and my claim at the time that he would never have beaten SZA and Khalid for the Favorite R&B Album award if he had not died now seems to me to be questionable, at best.

It is certainly clear just from this album alone that XXXTentacion was a deeply disturbed individual (which might go some way towards explaining the things he was accused of during his life), but as someone who has experience with battling this kind of severe of mental illness, I’m not inclined to judge him (there but for the grace of successful medication go I, and all that). Besides, he’s hardly the first musician to be accused of this particular crime. Both John Lennon and Bing Crosby were guilty of exactly the same crimes, and I don’t see many people trying to deny their legacies because of it.

And while he might not be a giant on the level of the Beatles or Crosby, this album makes it clear that we lost an enormous and important talent when this man was killed. Unlike his long, sprawling follow-up release ?, this album is an intensely focused gut-punch of psychological truth (hence its surprisingly short length of only 22 minutes). It begins with a spoken introduction warning off those that would judge him, which raises the question of how (or why) those who condemn him have even heard his music when he tells them exactly why they shouldn’t listen before the album even begins. As someone more inclined to sympathize with his experiences, I of course forged ahead, and was absolutely stunned by what followed.

I normally single out individual songs in these reviews, but I’m not sure this album really has any. Granted, they did release a few fragments of this album as “singles”, but this goes beyond even the unified album statements we’ve been getting more and more of in the past few years. This is more like a Classical-style suite or Tone Poem…a freeform composition broken up into movements, but still intended to be heard in one continuous take. The result is an incredibly haunting dreamscape that really does feel like a journey into a deeply disturbed and tragic psyche. There are brief fragments of elegaic, almost Classical beauty, moans of anguish that feel like a postmodern version of the Blues, and occasional bursts of rapid-fire rapping that feel like stabs of dissonant anger among the overall ambiance. All this over an endlessly shifting instrumental background that sounds like it can never find any rest. The lyrics are mostly broken, repeated phrases full of desperately depressing imagery that perfectly fit with the dream-logic mentality behind the album, and the singer generally delivers them in a barely-intelligible murmur that is nonetheless far more full of raw emotion that the attempts at the same sound by the likes of Future or Post Malone.

Only one featured guest Rapper appears anywhere on the album. It might have been better to feature none at all, given how insanely personal the material here is, but Trippie Redd, a dear friend of the artist who had started out as an enemy, seems attuned enough to his friend’s mentality that you can hardly tell there are two rappers on that track at all. This is one of the finest albums of 2017, no small statement given what a bumper year for great Pop album that was, and it explains why this tragic, tortured young visionary made such a deeply-felt impact during his brief time in the spotlight. In retrospect, the only thing I regret about that Twitter comment is not giving this shining talent more credit than I did, and I certainly won’t make that mistake again.

1989 (the year, not the Taylor Swift album) was not, on the whole, a particularly good year for Pop music (indeed, it is generally considered one of the worst years on record), but even a year like that is bound to have a couple of bright spots, and the release of this album was one of the brightest of all. This album is Cher’s second-best-selling of all time (right after her Nineties “comeback” album, Believe), and is generally regarded as her Magnum Opus by her fans. Moreover, it set the sonic template for all of Nineties Adult Contemporary–without this album, for example, Celine Dion’s entire body of work would probably not have existed, at least in the form it wound up taking.

The ‘new sound’ this album pioneers was not really unheard-of at the time: this album simply placed it in a new context. The style was familiar from the Rock ballads sung by the ‘Hair Metal’ bands of the Eighties, but generally these songs were limited to a couple of tracks on albums otherwise composed of standard Hard Rock. What this album did was place an entire album’s worth of Hair Metal ballads on a single, exclusively ballad-focused disc. And it’s worth noting that the kind of albums that had previously focused entirely on Soft Rock ballads had featured a very different, much softer sound that, to be brutally frank, has not aged especially well (think Air Supply or Eighties-era Chicago, for example).

Apart from Cher herself, there were two other artists who were crucial to this album’s innovations. Diane Warren was the premiere author of Easy Listening songs from the late Eighties through the Nineties, and while her assembly-line approach to songwriting meant that she had more than her share of off days, she was always known for doing particularly good work in her collaborations with Cher, from this album to “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me” from the movie Burlesque as late as 2010.

Also a prominent contributor to this album’s sound was Desmond Child, the Pop-Rock songwriter and producer best known for being one of the major forces behind Bon Jovi’s output and for being an equally major impetus in Aerosmith’s late-Eighties comeback. Child wrote and produced a significant portion of this album’s material, and his fingerprints are all over it, doing much to explain its prominent Hair Metal influences.

This album produced two of Cher’s all-time classic singles…the anguished “If I Could Turn Back Time” is probably the best-known, but “Just Like Jesse James”, a vaguely Country-influenced ballad presenting romance as a power struggle, is just as compelling. The stoically sorrowful title track was also a minor hit. The album also features two covers of other artists’ songs, though both were still the work of Warren and/or Child. “Love on a Rooftop”, was a single for former Sixties girl-group star Ronnie Spector, while “You Wouldn’t Know Love” was originally one of the better tracks on Michael Bolton’s Soul Provider album earlier in the same year. Of the pure album cuts, perhaps the most memorable is the devastating “Does Anybody Really Fall in Love Anymore?”, which featured a co-writing assist by Jon Bon Jovi himself.

Pretty much the only track that doesn’t feel like it belongs is “After All”, a duet with former Chicago lead singer Peter Cetera. This isn’t too terribly surprising, as it was not actually written for the album…it was an interpolation of the theme song Cher and Cetera recorded for the movie Chances Are. The lyrics, by Fame lyricist Dean Pitchford, are a cut above the usual level of Eighties Soft Rock, but, apart from the obvious fact that Peter Cetera is a lousy singer, the song just doesn’t fit in with the album’s sound. It sounds like something that Cetera would have recorded with Chicago, and represents the old Soft Rock sound of the Eighties that Cher was overtaking rather than the new sound this album was introducing.

Overall, even in a career as long and illustrious as Cher’s, I can definitely see why this is generally regarded as her best album, and it ranks alongside Genesis’ Invisible Touch, Sting’s …Nothing Like the Sun, Bryan Adams’ Reckless, and Billy Joel’s An Innocent Man as one of the finest Soft Rock albums of its decade…not a field with a great deal of competition, true, given the quality of most of that genre in the Eighties, but still a reminder that even in their darkest hours, Easy Listening and Soft Rock can still be legitimate sources of truly great music.

The most famous of Frank Sinatra’s pioneering Concept Albums all come from his Capitol and Reprise years, but he did make a few during his early tenure at Columbia records. The two that get the most attention are The Voice of Frank Sinatra (arguably the first Pop album ever to have a truly unified sound) and Swing and Dance with Frank Sinatra (his first Swing album and the one that first showed the world he was capable of more than just ballads), but I think this one deserves some attention as well. It has never been released on CD in its original form (for this review, I had to recreate it from tracks on the Complete Columbia Recordings box set), but I’d argue that in its own way, it was just as influential at the time as the aforementioned other two releases.

This album has a particularly clear concept even by Sinatra standards…all but one of the tracks consist of love songs addressed directly to the listener. This had been done before in songs, of course, including some that Sinatra had already recorded, but never in such a focused and deliberate manner. In this fundamental innovation, the album may well have set the stage for virtually all subsequent Teen Pop (take a look at how many boy-band ballads in later years would be addressed to a non-specific “you”). The production now sounds dated as all Hell, with its florid backing choirs, but Sinatra’s actual singing, which is obviously the main attraction, is still as electrifying now as it was when this album was released. Imagine all the erotic vocal tone of a David Bowie, combined with the passion and sensitivity of the greatest romantic actors, and you may have some idea of what an effect this album has.

The first two cuts on the album are slightly more obscure than the rest of the material. The opening track, “The Music Stopped”, is in particular a lovely and lyrical gem that deserves to be better known. The flowing melody and exquisitely poetic lyrics, combined with Sinatra’s hushed and tender performance on the song, get this album off to a quietly stunning start.

The second track, “The Moon Was Yellow (And the Night Was Young)”, would be rerecorded over a decade later for the Moonlight Sinatra album on the Reprise label. But the version of the song on that album is more delicate and atmospheric, whereas this version is hungrier and more intense, emphasizing the romantic and erotic elements of the song far more than the later version…as you’d expect on an album with this concept.

Two of the songs are drawn from Wright and Forrest’s pasticcio Operetta based on the music of Edvard Grieg, Song of Norway. “I Love You” is the one song in the score with music taken absolutely verbatim from Grieg’s original; it is essentially a translation of the extremely famous love song Grieg wrote for his wife to sing. Sinatra throws himself particularly passionately into this one, offering one of the most convincing declarations of love ever heard in Pop music…and aimed, like the rest of this album, directly at the listener. The other Song of Norway tune, “Strange Music”, was supposedly drawn from Grieg, but in such a contrived way that it is essentially an original Wright and Forrest composition. It is one of the most rhapsodic Operetta ballads out there, and Sinatra’s ringing, ecstatic performance enhances that effect into a nigh-overwhelming romantic sweep.

“Where or When”, from Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms, is delivered in a more low-key manner here, with a quiet, melting tenderness that makes a nice contrast to the intensity of the previous tracks. Sinatra sounds relaxed and at ease here, like he’s actually having a sweetly sensitive conversation with you, and the effect is perhaps the most irresistibly charming of any song on this record.

The album’s one flaw is the inclusion of “None But the Lonely Heart”. It’s a lovely song, with a melody taken from an art song by Tchaikovsky, but it doesn’t really fit into the album’s concept…the word “you” never even appears in the lyrics. On top of that, at the point in his career at which this album was recorded, Sinatra hadn’t really figured out the art of the torch song yet. Of course, he would later become the undisputed king of that song model…indeed, he would make an infinitely more moving recording of this very song for the darkest and most despairing of his torch albums, No One Cares. But during his RCA and Columbia years, while he was phenomenal when it came to caressing love songs, he couldn’t yet capture the real depth of sorrow found in his later work. The consensus among those who knew him seems to be that his split with Ava Gardner in 1954 was his first experience with real heartbreak, and that it taught him how to project real romantic despair because he could now draw on personal experience (it is worth noting that his first truly great album of torch songs, In the Wee Small Hours, came out in 1955). Unfortunately, his performance here, while certainly beautifully sung, is uncomfortably insincere, even phony, and stands as the album’s only real sour note.

On “Always”, Sinatra doesn’t really make much attempt to ‘act’ the song, letting his lush vocals and the song’s legendary Irving Berlin melody carry the track. It isn’t the most compelling cut on the album, but it’s so gorgeous as pure music that it still holds its own. The album closer, “Why Was I Born?”, is traditionally delivered as a torch song, but Sinatra’s honeyed vocals turn it into more of a piece of shameless flattery. The attempt at manipulation is far less subtle than on the rest of the album, but it’s still exceptionally sweet, and given Sinatra’s aforementioned trouble with torch songs at this point in his career, this was probably the wisest strategy to take for this song.

I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to be a hormonal teenage girl in 1950 and be exposed to this album, but I’m genuinely surprised there are no reports of any of them literally bursting into flames. In any case, if any of you have ever wondered how the stereotype of the bobbysoxer swooning at the very sound of Frankie Sinatra’s voice came into existence…this is how.