The Clarke/Duke Project - "II" (1983)

Rating: 4

Verdict: Blue Bin

Although I have still been making my way through my album collection and merrily blue-binning records, it has come to my attention that I haven't actually been reviewing them. So I'm back to review the Clarke/Duke  Project!

I actually own three records by Stanley Clarke, who for those who don't know (I didn't), is best known for his bass playing on his own solo fusion records in the 70s as well as those of various jazz supergroups. The other two records I own, Journey to Love and School Days, I rather enjoyed and showcased a surprising level of diversity and inventiveness on Clarke's part in addition to the expected hyperactive bass playing (also worthwhile). And yet, prior to listening to this record, released just seven years after School Days, I looked up the allmusic.com rating and saw a 1.5 star rating. I doubted the veracity of such a low mark but really shouldn't have.

Indeed, Clarke was a victim of the same mass loss of taste in the 1980s that affected so many other musicians who released excellent music in the 60s and 70s. Having released several seminal jazz albums, he performed some inscrutable calculus that led him to the conclusion that the next way to proceed as an artist was to release albums of poorly sung dance-pop backed by drum machines and synthesizers. There are occasional glimpses on this record of Clarke's stupendous bass playing as well as a jazz-informed sense of melody. But I believe that these aspects may well make this particular album worse instead of better since they obscure whatever hooks there may well be. I will admit that the record isn't totally abysmal, but what it is is pointless and a disappointment compared to what came before. Blue bin!

Bob Dylan - "New Morning" (1970)

Rating: 8

Although it is my opinion that Dylan would never again reach the astounding heights of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde (and that includes Blood on the Tracks, which although it would probably make my purely hypothetical Hall of Fame Album Pyramid, wouldn't make the Pantheon), my recent listening to his immediate post-Blonde oeuvre certainly hasn't been unrewarding. Although I agree with the critical masses that his infamous Self-Portrait was a misfire, I also don't think it deserves infamy. Yet he released several good to great albums during this stretch, including John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, and New Morning, released just four months after Self-Portrait. My main criticism of him during this stretch is not that he lost his genius, but that his genius was unfocused, manifesting itself on a handful of songs per album only. This is somewhat the case on New Morning, but there is enough strong material to recommend it.

On this album, Bob largely ditches the guitar and focuses primarily on rambling piano ballads. Being Dylan, his piano-playing is unpolished, his vocals are abrasive at times, and especially due to the short length (35 minutes), it isn't hard to imagine it being knocked off in four months. Yet he is also more direct and heartfelt on this album than he had really ever been until this point, and he conveys a genuine warmth and sweetness. Although this is nowhere near as momentous a record as his earlier stuff and has too much filler for me to call it a masterpiece (witness the awful beatnik spoken-word "When Dogs Run Free"), the best songs here are also spiritually akin in that Dylan's humanity shines through like almost no other rock songwriter can manage.

For example, I was already familiar with the opening track "If Not For You," as covered by George Harrison on All Things Must Pass. After hearing Harrison's glorious Phil Spector-ized version with its wall of acoustic guitars, the much more low-key Dylan version with its significantly dinkier organ part and ramshackle feel passed me by on the first listen. And yet now, I am overwhelmed by the homely charm of the Dylan rendition and although the Harrison version is hard to beat, it's much closer than I ever would have thought.

The other major highlight for me is "Sign On the Window" which has the closing verse:

Built me a cabin in Utah

Marry me a wife, catch a rainbow trout

Have a bunch of kids who call me Pa

That must be what it's all about

Out of context, these lyrics seem almost embarrassingly naive. But in the context of the rest of the lyrics. ("Sign on a porch says, 'Three's a crowd'"), the tone is much more wistful. And in the context of the music, when you hear his rueful vocals in conjunction with his piano, it's deeply moving. Although Dylan is about the lyrics first and foremost (contrary to what the contrarians will have you believe), the way he sings the lyrics is just as important as how they are written down on paper, which is what nearly all the singer-songwriters who followed in his footsteps forgot. Keeper!

Crystal Gayle - "We Must Believe In Magic" (1977)

Rating: 5

I own two records by Crystal Gayle, who I had never heard of prior to that fateful day when I bought four boxes of records for $70. Apparently she was a somewhat popular country singer in the late 70s and early 80s but has faded into obscurity today, being most notable for being the younger singer of Loretta Lynn and having recorded a soundtrack album with Tom Waits. Both of these facts give her some credibility in my eyes, and although I am not exactly a country buff, I did find the pure country songs on We Must Believe in Magic to be tolerable. Gayle has a nice, though not exceptional voice and she's preferable to most modern country for sure.

The problem with this record is that the notion of trying to have a crossover hit had already seeped its way into Nashville, and several tracks here are misguided attempts to blend the horn section and rhythm of a disco song with the steel guitars of a country song (well, it was 1977). The main offenders are the disco-country cover of Cole Porter's "It's All Right with Me" (as awful as it sounds) and the closing title track, a synthesizer-led adult contemporary ballad that really isn't country at all and featuring lyrics about Alpha Centauri, ensuring that it would be dated by 1978.

So apart from the efforts to be modern, the country songs here are decent. But I'm not a country buff, so those songs aren't enough for me to rate this as a good album. They're decent, but they're not George Jones. Blue bin!

Mr. Mister - "Welcome to the Real World" (1985)

Rating: 3

Mr. Mister was a group of L.A. session musicians who formed in the early 80s to put their own spin on the pop-rock style of bands like Toto and Chicago (that sentence should tell you all you need to know about this band, but I shall proceed nonetheless). Indeed, lead singer Richard Page was offered the opportunity to lead both those groups, but declined and was rewarded with two #1 hits in "Kyrie" and "Broken Wings." Commercially, Mr. Mister was briefly very successful before fading into oblivion. Artistically, not so much.

I listened to the first three tracks on the first side and heard nothing but flat stadium rock with dopey keyboards and sludgy power chords in place of riffs. So I was prepared to turn the record off before even making it to the end of side one but then noticed that the three major hits on the album (the two aforementioned, plus top 10 single "Is It Love") were all aligned in a row on the second side. I'm not sure if Mr. Mister thought that would give them some credibility or perhaps force listeners to pay attention to their faceless music of the first side, but either way, definitely not a good move. Sometimes you just have to admit your limitations and front-load the album because that's all anyone wants to hear anyways.

Of course, it's not like those hits were particularly good, which I strongly suspect to be correlated with Mr. Mister's subsequent decline. "Kyrie" has the catchiest chorus on the record but said chorus is indistinguishable from Toto's "Africa." "Broken Wings" is the only song here that I recognized ("take... these broken wings") and I would call it the worst song on the album if I had actually listened to every song on the album. It's a prototypical power ballad, and like many 80s power ballads of ill repute, the group seemed to think that playing the entire song at a dragging tempo and having Page offer up somber platitudes is the same thing as writing a heart-wrenching love song. It isn't. 

So while allmusic.com may give this album four stars by default for being the Mr. Mister album with the most hits, that just makes me terrified to imagine what their other albums might be like. Blue bin!

Blue Bin Singles

As I tend to be an album-oriented person, I have found myself neglecting the small pile of singles that I acquired as part of my record collection. Though there are some worthy singles to be found in it (i.e, The Beatles' "Real Love"), there is also, of course, much to be jeered at and scorned. This post is about those unlucky singles that fall into the latter category.

The Young Moderns - "Body Won't Obey/(she's a) Disposable Girl"


The Young Moderns supplant whatever random jazz artist last held the title for Most Obscure Musical Act in my collection. My customary search on allmusic.com turned up no results for the group whatsoever. I then located this very single on rateyourmusic.com, with exactly one rating on its page and no other works by the Young Moderns listed. For this apparently hip, youthful group that featured both a male and female Jamie (as I inferred from the back of the single cover), this single was their one chance to make it big. And with the results sounding like the Sex Pistols if Yoko Ono were their lead singer, they failed.

Billy Ocean - "When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going"


Robotic R&B dance-pop lacking the charm of Ocean's most famous single "Get Out of my Dreams (And Into My Car)." The most entertaining thing about this single for me is that the B-side is an instrumental version of the A-side, as if anyone would ever want to hear five minutes of a three-note electronic bass line played over a drum machine.

Dion - "Abraham, Martin & John/From Both Sides Now"


From the crooner most famous for "The Wanderer," this single found Dion attempting to recast himself as a sensitive folk-rock performer. On the A-side, Dion contemplates the assassinations of Lincoln, King and Kennedy but has nothing interesting or meaningful to say ("But it seems the good they die young/I just looked around and he's gone") nor despite laying on strings and organ, is the song anything but boring.

R.J.'s Latest Arrival - "Shackles"


Dating back to 1983, this was, for all I know, this was a pioneering rap single. Unfortunately, this R.J. or perhaps his latest arrival had yet to pioneer quality in rap. Once again, the B-side is an instrumental so you get to hear a lot of scratched turntables if you're into that kind of thing.

Art & Dotty Todd - "Chanson D'Amour"/Johnny Crawford - "Cindy's Birthday"


Pre-Beatles pap. To make a Bayesian inference, the odds of me enjoying a song by the performers Art and Dotty Todd are close to zero.

J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers - "Last Kiss/Hey Little Girl"


Hey, it's that song Pearl Jam covered in the 1990s! But there can only be one great early 60s song about the death of a teenager and that song is "Leader of the Pack." Okay, I like this song too, but it's not the original version, and this obscure cover isn't particularly noteworthy.

Mike Cross - "Rock 'n' Rye" (1980)

Rating: 4

This album is definitely one of the most obscure records in my collection, having obtained exactly one rating on rateyourmusic.com (and zero reviews). Even allmusic.com didn't review this album, though Mike Cross does at least have his own biography. Because of this, I know that he went to UNC-Chapel Hill, thus joining James Taylor in the annals of mediocre musicians hailing from the town where I currently live. Oops, did I spoil the surprise?

Although I had the impression from the album cover of the other Mike Cross album I own (yes, I have two) that this would be some sort of Irish folk album, it is in fact mostly straight-up country, with some occasional electric guitar and fiddle thrown in. It is at least 'old-school' country, i.e., not just an insular ode to the redneck lifestyle like modern country, but with lyrical subject matter mostly about broken hearts and getting drunk. I am not particularly inclined towards even this kind of music, but much like with blues, the songs are all pretty much the same, so it is safe to say that a country record succeeds largely on the passion and sincerity of the singer. And although Cross seems to be a genial fellow, his slow songs aren't wracked and anguished enough for my liking, and his fast songs not funny enough. I'm not going to pop a boner for just any country record made before 1990, so there's only one judgment I can give Rock 'n' Rye: blue bin!

James Taylor - "Gorilla" (1975)

Rating: 4

Frankly, I can't stand James Taylor, Chapel Hill lineage or no. To quote allmusic.com, "when people use the term 'singer/songwriter' in praise or in criticism, they're thinking of James Taylor." Indeed Taylor is who I associate with the term "singer-singwriter" and I absolutely mean it in criticism the majority of the time. Gorilla is a fairly lightweight album, exploring more poppy acoustic arrangements, so isn't exactly like the man's most famous (or infamous) work, but does share the same critical flaw that there isn't a single memorable melody to be found on the record. Perhaps I exaggerate, but this record does nothing to correct my impression that behind Taylor's warm, smooth vocals and pleasant guitar playing, there isn't much interesting musically here. Lyrically, there are some interesting moments, but this isn't exactly supposed to be a 'deep' album anyways, not that it would impress me much more if it were. Someday I'll listen to Sweet Baby James and decide once and for all if there is anything in James Taylor's discography I would enjoy, but if there is, it certainly isn't here. Blue bin!