The Second Disc

Extra!  Extra!  Lost Folk Singer Found!

His name is Tom Northcott, and had things turned out a little differently, he might be remembered in the same breath as Joni Mitchell or Gordon Lightfoot, fellow Canadian troubadours.  After founding the Tom Northcott Trio, he headed for California during perhaps the most fertile period ever for creative, boundary-breaking musical exploration, the mid-1960s.  Northcott opened for The Who, The Doors and Jefferson Airplane, and was signed to Warner Bros. Records.  He gained solid regional airplay and a minor chart entry in the U.S., but his music never struck the same chord in America as in his native Canada.  In the early 1970s, Northcott retreated from the music business to practice law, returning only sporadically.  Thanks to the team at Rhino Handmade, however, the fresh and inventive music he created in his heyday is available once more.  Sunny Goodge Street: The Warner Bros. Recordings (Rhino Handmade RHM2 524879) brings together twenty long-lost tracks on one CD.  Is it sunshine folk?  Is it baroque coffeehouse?  This genre-defying and blissfully offbeat music speaks for itself.

Northcott was supported by a virtual “Who’s Who” of the L.A. scene, including Harry Nilsson, Leon Russell, Randy Newman and Jack Nitzsche, all under the watchful eye of Warner Bros.’ supreme A&R man, Lenny Waronker.  He stood apart from many of his contemporaries, though, by his reliance on material from outside songwriters.  Though an accomplished composer and lyricist with six self-penned tracks included here, Northcott was launched by Warner Bros. as an interpretive singer in an era when the rules were being rewritten on the spot.  Young men, armed with guitars, had little need for the songs coming from New York’s Aldon or Los Angeles’ Metric offices.

At the heart of Sunny Goodge Street is the 10-track Best of Tom Northcott, a Canada-only LP release.  It included a number of Northcott’s American single sides such as Harry Nilsson’s “1941” and a version of the Donovan song that gives the new Rhino anthology its title.  One month prior to the May 1967 release of Northcott’s “Sunny Goodge Street,” Leon Russell and Lenny Waronker had crafted the immaculate title track to Harpers Bizarre’s Feelin’ Groovy, and Russell is also responsible for the most vividly imaginative arrangements here.  The ornate, dreamy take on “Sunny Goodge Street” is even more far-out than “Feelin’ Groovy.”  The song is dramatically reinvented from Donovan’s slow, lysergic original, with Russell layering on a shimmering harp, calliope, accordion, strings, horns and background vocals in a beautiful cacophony.  Did Russell take his cue from the lyric’s “strange music boxes sadly tinkling?”  There are some similarities to Judy Collins’ earlier version of the song, but the vision of Northcott, Waronker and Russell is strikingly original.  The luscious orchestration contrasts with the impressionistic and vaguely disturbing words:  “On the firefly platform on sunny Goodge Street, violent hash-smoker shook a chocolate machine, involved in an eating scene/Smashing into neon streets in their stonedness, smearing their eyes on the crazy cult goddess, listenin’ to sounds of Mingus, mellow fantastic/My, my, they sigh!”  Northcott recalled in 1997 that Glen Campbell, James Burton, Larry Knechtel and Jim Gordon, all of the “Wrecking Crew,” all played on the song.

Perhaps proving the old adage that one must know the rules before breaking them, Russell ironically made his own solo career on stripped-down, raw and visceral rock and roll, the complete opposite of the style he supplied on songs like “Sunny Goodge Street,” John Hartford’s “Landscape Grown Cold” and Harry Nilsson’s “1941.”  Northcott, alas, didn’t find the same kind of success with “Landscape” that Glen Campbell did with Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind.”  James Burton fronts the Russell arrangement on dobro.  Nilsson’s “1941,” a sad and personal tale of one family’s history repeating itself, is adorned by Russell’s grandiose orchestra which embraces the song’s circus setting.  Northcott supplies an imploring vocal, and the resulting production is less delicate than Nilsson’s stately 1967 original.  “1941” cracked the U.S. pop charts at No. 88, and another Nilsson song, “The Rainmaker,” was issued the following year.  Jack Nitzsche was responsible for the quirky arrangement on Northcott’s version.

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After more than three years of planning, preparing and waiting, audiences finally have a chance to enjoy an expanded edition of John Williams’ score to Steven Spielberg’s 1991 cult classic Hook (La-La Land Records LLLCD 1211). The world had been “getting by,” so to speak, with the Epic label’s original 75-minute CD presentation – a generous offering, to be sure, but one that only sort of did the score justice. While critics remain divided to indifferent on the celluloid continuation of James M. Barrie’s classic Peter Pan, the reputation of Spielberg and Williams’ first collaboration of the ’90s has grown exponentially in the Internet age. As collaborations between the director and composer go, its complexity and majesty have earned it a spot near the scores to JAWS, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in Williams’ canon – so an expanded reissue had all the anticipation and intensity of a Star Wars prequel.

Now that the dust is settled, is La-La Land’s two-disc Hook everything fans could expect? Is it a high watermark in soundtrack reissue craft? Will it open the floodgates for soundtrack enthusiasts everywhere as the version of Hook we’ve all been waiting for?

Yes and no. Yes and no.

As the film score community took to the Internet to share their love for the genre, it became clear that – musically, at least - Hook was far closer to a classic than mainstream audiences would admit. Williams’ gift for leitmotif (the practice of recurring themes to signify certain characters and ideas, exemplified through works by Wagner and Korngold as well as Williams’ own Star Wars scores) was in rare form on the film. He crafted hummable themes for all the major characters – particularly recognizable, we would later learn, as they were conceived as songs for a musical version of the film – and by the end of the film, there were marathon passages of music that presented many of these themes in perfect symmetry.

For example, the final battle sequence in which Peter Pan rescues his children from the clutches of Captain Hook called for nearly 20 minutes of unending music – more than the Williams-scored marathons in Star Wars (the final battle over the Death Star passed 10 minutes) and E.T. (the bike chase sustained 15 minutes). To survive that pace, and to do so with truly moving, fantastical music, solidifies Williams’ genius as not only a mere film composer, but the definitive classical composer of our age. And even knowing only a little about the score from official channels, fans were cognizant of the effort Williams undertook; Spielberg marveled in the liner notes to the original soundtrack that his composer began work on the film having only seen about 45 minutes of the unfinished film (which would stretch beyond two hours).

The density of the score could never have been attained on a soundtrack release at the time. Even at nearly the full length of a CD, the original Hook album missed huge action passages (including much of that final battle) and some tender and heroic cues from Peter’s adventure in Neverland. Other cues were replaced by less effective alternate takes or album versions, as has been the case with countless Williams soundtracks.

Now, La-La Land have become the darling of the film score community for completing what was thought impossible and expanding Hook for a captive audience. Some fans blanched at the announcement that the composer had personally supervised and approved the project; his modest insistences that not every last note of score needed to appear on disc prevented 2008′s Indiana Jones soundtrack box set from being perfect. And, indeed, some of the choices that were made – or rather, retained – at the behest of Williams have struck some as maddening. Nearly every one of the 17 cues from the original soundtrack appear in their original album edits. That means that “You Are the Pan,” the cue which underscores Rufio’s relinquishing leadership of the Lost Boys back to Peter, is combined with “The Face of Pan,” a track that appears in the first half of the film. The film’s prologue cue, used only in the film’s teaser trailer, was inexplicably mis-mastered on the original soundtrack and appears at a slower speed; that has not been fixed, even as it is acknowledged in Daniel Schweiger’s liner notes.

The set’s master stroke, of course, is presenting well over an hour of music that has either never been available (a series of terrible-quality bootlegs over the decades barely counts) or wasn’t used in the film. From the smallest moments – the film ending of the “Flight to Neverland” cue – to the lengthy two-thirds of the climactic battle music getting unearthed from the vaults, it’s a dream come true to have this music on disc. And yet, the presentation of these cuts are more bothersome than minor edits in the program: upon repeated listens, it becomes clear that La-La Land had something of lesser quality than master tapes – likely music-only stems from the film negative – to work with. The difference in sound quality between original album tracks and unearthed material is sometimes too noticeable, as evidenced by strange dips in volume throughout tracks.

It’s really unfortunate that things turned out this way, but it should be stressed that it’s not the label’s fault. They presented the material with the same high standards fans have expected from them for years – it’s just they didn’t have the highest quality to work with. And after a dozen or so listens, I find myself far less flustered as to how things could have gone with this set and far more grateful that a deserved classic score has made it onto CD in style, with an appealing package and great liner notes. (Schweiger finally sets the record straight on both Michael Jackson’s alleged involvement with a Spielberg-helmed Peter Pan project, and shines some light on some of the intended songs for the film, written by Williams with lyricist Leslie Bricusse.)

The execution of Hook may not be what everyone has been waiting decades for. Might a better source be located down the line and released as a more definitive set? Sure, it’s happened before. But why grouse about a less-than-desired but still above-average presentation of a reissue when there’s revelatory music to be heard? On content alone, Hook is arguably the catalogue soundtrack to beat in 2012 – and to listen will be an awfully big adventure.

By the time of 1964’s Muscle Beach Party, Philadelphia-born Frankie Avalon had already racked up some 31 hits on the U.S. Billboard charts, including two at Number One, “Why” and “Venus.”  On the urging of his Chancellor Records mentor Bob Marcucci, Avalon had welcomed the 1960s by diversifying his talents into film, appearing opposite John Wayne in The Alamo and Walter Pidgeon in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.  1963’s Beach Party, however, was something else altogether.  Directed by William Asher, later the creative force behind television’s Bewitched, the low-budget American-International picture spawned a virtual cottage industry.  Audiences flocked to see well-scrubbed Frankie and all-American Annette Funicello frolicking on the sun-kissed beaches of Southern California.  The teenage twosome would star in seven beach party movies together in less than three years, plus beach party movies of their own (in which the other half of the duo would cameo!)  Yes, Frankie Avalon had found a way to extend his teen idol years straight through the British Invasion, which brings us to Real Gone Music’s first-ever CD reissue of Avalon’s 1964 album for United Artists, Muscle Beach Party and Other Movie Songs, handily repackaged and expanded as Muscle Beach Party: The United Artists Sessions (RGM-0035, 2012).  This 20-track time capsule includes Avalon’s complete recordings for the UA label.

The musical history of the beach party films is far more complicated than any of the movies’ plots!  Due to Avalon and Funicello recording for different labels, both artists recorded their own renditions of the movie’s songs, and true soundtracks weren’t issued for most of the films.  (When La-La Land Records issued a soundtrack to Beach Blanket Bingo in 2010, it spotlighted Les Baxter’s score and the music-only tracks for the songs.  Frankie and Annette’s actual film vocals still couldn’t be released!)  “Competing” with Annette’s Buena Vista Records Muscle Beach Party was Avalon’s own United Artists LP.  The first side was dedicated to four of the Muscle Beach tunes and two reprises from the series’ first film Beach Party, while the second featured adult standards in supper-club arrangements.  Real Gone’s reissue proves that the first side, however, has aged better than the latter, and this is in no small part due to the contributions of one musical iconoclast by the name of Brian Wilson.

Roger Christian (“Don’t Worry Baby”) and Gary Usher (“In My Room”) co-wrote the score to 1963’s Beach Party and enlisted their pal, the erstwhile Beach Boys leader, to join them for the Muscle Beach Party song score.  Wilson, Usher and Christian wrote six songs for the film, three of which are heard here as performed by Avalon: the title song, “Surfer’s Holiday” and “Runnin’ Wild.”  (Dick Dale actually sang “Muscle Beach Party” in the movie, and Dale also performed “Surfin’ Woodie” and “My First Love.”  He joined Donna Loren for the onscreen “Muscle Bustle.”)

Wilson’s compositional stamp is evident.  “Surfer’s Holiday” is a bit reminiscent of “Sidewalk Surfin’” (coincidentally recorded by Funicello) which shares its melody with The Beach Boys’ “Catch a Wave.”  The rapid-fire “Running Wild” also recalls Wilson’s infectious, early Beach Boys work with the de facto guitar break.  “A Boy Needs a Girl” wasn’t written by the Wilson/Christian/Usher triumvirate but rather by Guy Hemric and Jerry Styner, but it fits in well and even recalls Wilson in his dreamy romantic mode (think “The Surfer Moon”).  After this enjoyable compendium of Beach Party tunes, Avalon turns to a brace of film-related songs aimed at adult listeners.

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Bespectacled singer/songwriter Randy Vanwarmer became one of the unlikeliest radio heroes of the late 1970s when his gentle ballad “Just When I Needed You Most” began its ascent up the Billboard chart amidst an onslaught of disco (“I Will Survive,” “Hot Stuff”) and New Wave (“Heart of Glass”).  Vanwarmer’s bittersweet memory of a long-gone lover hit a nerve with listeners looking for an escape from the dance floor.  Although the song would qualify him as a one-hit wonder, Vanwarmer continued to record and write songs for other artists until his death from leukemia complications in 2004 at the age of 48.  The U.K.’s Edsel label continues its Bearsville Records series with four Vanwarmer albums on two single-CD releases, the first bringing together 1979’s Warmer and 1980’s Terraform, while the second combines Beat of Love (1981) with The Things That You Dream (1983).  Previous CD editions of the first two albums have been commanding high prices in the secondhand market, making Edsel’s reissues very welcome, indeed.

Based on Vanwarmer’s debut Warmer, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the song title was a pun on the artist’s name.  Paul Myers’ detailed liner notes reveal otherwise, that the title owed to the album’s warm MOR sound, and hence, Randy Van Wormer became Randy Vanwarmer.  The artist’s style on this album isn’t unlike that of prime Dan Fogelberg or Christopher Cross, although the surging popularity of the latter artist actually led Bearsville parent Warner Brothers to concentrate less on Vanwarmer.  Producer Del Newman (Cat Stevens, Elton John) added subtle textures to Vanwarmer’s delicate and confessional songs, while Ian Kimmet and Bearsville’s John Holbrook remixed the album at Warner Brothers’ and Bearsville owner Albert Grossman’s behest.

But the familiar “Just When I Needed You Most,” enlivened by John (“Welcome Back”) Sebastian’s autoharp, isn’t the only great song waiting for you here as Vanwarmer traverses a number of styles all within the adult contemporary context.  Despite the number of mid-tempo, radio-ready ballads on the album, the record label initially opted for the glossy, lightly funky “Gotta Get Out of Here” as the album’s first single.  With its big choral sound on the hook, it was perhaps an attempt to court the new wave audience.  The falsetto chorus of “I Could Sing” has a light disco flavor very much of the time, and Vanwarmer even comes close to rocking out on “Convincing Lies,” with its up-front electric guitars.  Though its title is hardly original, “Call Me” is one of the most appealing tracks here, with another strong melodic hook and vocals again recalling Christopher Cross.  The subtle, twangy guitars of “Forever Loving You” presage Vanwarmer’s later work supplying artists like Alabama and The Oak Ridge Boys with hits out of Nashville.

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Catalysis (ca-tal-y-sis): The action of a catalyst, especially an increase in the rate of a chemical reaction.

With his induction into Ace Records’ Producers series, John Cale joins an esteemed group including Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Sly Stone, Phil Spector and Burt Bacharach.  If Cale isn’t always thought of in the same breath as those giants, it’s simply because his career has been so diverse, encompassing writing, performing and arranging for artists ranging from The Stooges to Siouxsie and the Banshees.  Well, there’s simply no better place to appreciate the man’s art than on Conflict and Catalysis (Big Beat CDWIKD 299), the illuminating new anthology devoted to John Cale, producer and arranger.  Taking in the 20 songs on display here, it’s clear that Cale’s catalysis as a producer has led to some of the most distinct work in these artists’ career, making the conflicts along the way well worth the while.

These tracks could be the work of multiple producers, so impossible is it to pin Cale to one stylistic approach.  The musically rebellious Welshman trained at Goldsmith College at the University of London, nurturing his talent on the viola.  He was in the vanguard of the avant-garde Fluxus movement and was an associate of John Cage but perhaps ironically, also a devotee of Aaron Copland.  Cale’s participation in the 18-hour performance of Erik Satie’s “Variations” even landed him a spot on Garry Moore’s popular game show I’ve Got a Secret.  All of this experimentation and fearlessness towards dissonance and musical repetition made him the perfect foil for Lou Reed when they founded The Velvet Underground.  Cale and Reed frequently clashed, but when they found themselves in synch, the results were astonishing.  Reed’s dark, earthy lyrical poetry formed a distinct union with the multi-instrumentalist Cale’s electrically-amplified viola, piano and bass guitar, creating a sound that was only rock music in the sense that it challenged convention.

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Journey back with me to 1968, will you?  Your time machine is courtesy Owsley “Bear” Stanley, visionary sound engineer and renowned LSD chemist.  But you don’t need any lysergic acid to enjoy the music contained on the little silver disc known as Live at the Carousel Ballroom 1968 (Columbia/Legacy 88697 96409 2, 2012), billed as the first release from Bear’s Sonic Journals.  That said, a little Southern Comfort probably wouldn’t hurt.  (Or a toke or two, as per the suggestion of Stanley’s son Starfinder in the sleeve notes.)  But the music as heard at San Francisco’s Carousel Ballroom nearly 44 years ago just might be mind-altering enough.  It captures Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company holding court two months before their breakup.  Like all good things, neither Joplin’s Big Brother line-up nor the Carousel lasted, but the band’s fiery blend of blues and rock – a combination of the two, if you will – sounds no less exciting today than it must have that Sunday night in June ’68.

This is music too big to be contained by an iPod.  As per Bear’s specific instructions, the best way to enjoy the perfect storm that is Live at the Carousel Ballroom is to push your right and left speakers close together.  This will enable you to hear the music via a “single point sound system” (as it would have been heard from the audience at the Carousel) rather than hearing Janis’ vocals and Dave Getz’s drums on the left and everything else – Sam Andrew and James Gurley’s guitars, Peter Albin’s bass – on the right.  Trust me; for full tilt musical pyrotechnics, you’ll want to crank up the stereo rather than listening through earbuds or your laptop speakers!  And play it loud.  The sound here is warm, natural and immediate.

Every track from Side One of 1968’s Columbia studio debut Cheap Thrills is given a live airing: the originals “Combination of the Two” and “I Need a Man to Love,” the theatrical classic “Summertime” and of course, the hit “Piece of My Heart.” (“Ball and Chain” from Cheap Thrills also appears.) The band reached back to its debut album for “Light is Faster than Sound,” “Call on Me,” “Down on Me” and “Coo Coo,” the latter of which was originally a single release before being added to the Columbia reissue of the original Mainstream pressing of the LP.  “Call on Me” is actually heard twice here, once as a bonus track from the June 22 show, and its inclusion serves as a reminder that Big Brother could, and did, attack a song from multiple perspectives.  The performance offers musical and vocal variations from the version in the main set.

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There’ll be joy and there’ll be laughter/Something big is what I’m after now…

As frontman, songwriter and saxophonist of Paul Revere and the Raiders, Mark Lindsay had experienced his fair share of joy and laughter, but as 1969 rolled around, the band behind such garage-pop anthems as “Kicks,” “Just like Me” and “Hungry” was beginning to fracture.  Jack Gold, head of A&R at Columbia Records, however, saw something big in Mark Lindsay’s future.  According to the singer, Gold had stumbled on him in the studio goofing around with Johnny Mathis’ “Chances Are” and felt the time was right to launch Lindsay on a solo career as an adult vocalist.  But Lindsay balked at Gold’s suggestions of material, covers of then-contemporary songs that Columbia proffered to a stable of singers including Mathis, Andy Williams and Robert Goulet.  Lindsay envisioned ballad-oriented original songs as his calling card, and Gold agreed.  The fruits of their labors at 45 RPM have been compiled by Real Gone Music as Mark Lindsay’s The Complete Columbia Singles (RGM-0027, 2012), a companion to 2010’s same-titled collection for Paul Revere and the Raiders on the now-defunct Collectors’ Choice label.

Although Real Gone is still a new kid on the block, this collection ranks hands-down as one of its finest and most consistently enjoyable releases to date.  There’s a palpable joy in rediscovering these long-unheard sides from a talented singer who took on a very different vocal character for his solo recordings.  Gone is the snarling punk of many Raiders records, but Lindsay even reinvents himself track by track here,  adapting to the unique sound demanded by composers like Jerry Fuller, Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb.  The Complete Columbia Singles makes for pure pop gold.

Tim Hardin’s “Reason to Believe” was initially planned to feature on Lindsay’s first solo single, but the April 9, 1969 recording was shelved, and two Jimmy Webb songs recorded the same day were instead selected to launch Lindsay’s solo career.  In retrospect, “Reason to Believe” was probably a bit over-arranged, but you can hear it for yourself; the recording makes its debut here.  As for the Webb songs, “First Hymn from Grand Terrace” b/w “The Old Man at the Fair” couldn’t get past No. 81 on the pop charts, but that’s no reflection on their quality.  Al Capps arranged Jerry Fuller’s production in a suitably baroque style, and Webb was at his most impressionistic.  On “First Hymn,” Lindsay sings, “There was a hill we climbed and a nursery rhyme went flying across the waving grass/Like silver bells against the curtain that the sky had made/And so, we played.”  But the songs’ lack of a traditional verse/chorus structure might have impeded their chances at chart success.  Neither song has been much heralded over the years, either.  Richard Harris recorded “First Hymn” as a segment of the 9+-minute “Hymns from the Grand Terrace” suite on his The Yard Goes On Forever LP, while folk singer Judy Mayhan recorded the only cover of “Old Man” to this writer’s knowledge.

Mark Lindsay’s second single was just the ticket, however.  Kenny Young’s song “Arizona” still sounds like a hit today, with its big hook, spot-on vocal and forceful production by Fuller of an arrangement by Brill Building stalwart Artie Butler.  Lindsay was rewarded with a Top 10 hit, although following it up wasn’t easy.  J. Kelly’s song “Miss America” was the first attempt to replicate the success of “Arizona,” though Butler and Fuller took a page from the Webb playbook with the song’s prominent horns and string orchestration.  Lindsay considered the song “preachy,” however, so his next single hewed much closer to “Arizona.”  And “Silver Bird,” also by Kenny Young, may have been too close for comfort, with a similar-sounding brass arrangement and anthemic chorus.  Still, it reached a respectable No. 25 and was even adapted for a Yamaha motorcycle commercial!

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By the way, which one’s Pink?

A record executive poses that wry musical question of Pink Floyd in “Have a Cigar,” a brief, humorous respite on the band’s elegiac 1975 album Wish You Were Here.  The ever-ambitious group would actually answer that wry question with The Wall, 1979’s sprawling double album.  The psychedelic Dark Side of the Moon and reflective Wish You Were Here both invited listeners to create their own stories in service of the albums’ impressionistic concepts, largely dealing with isolation and absence.  The Wall found primary songwriter Roger Waters making his concepts more explicit than ever before in telling the tale of Pink, who endures a traumatic childhood (including a deceased father, an overpowering mother and torment at the hands of his classmates) and builds bricks in his own personal wall with each painful event. Pink overcomes this to become a rock star, but finds life no easier as an adult, and continues building his wall as each relationship crumbles. Only after an unsettling, violent onstage performance does Pink look inward.  He places himself at the center of a hellish trial and finds the inner strength to tear down his wall.

We may never know to what degree Waters was working out his own demons in song, but The Wall has remained potent onstage, on film and on record in the ensuing years.  It now receives its most grandiose treatment yet via the latest of Pink Floyd’s Immersion box sets.  The 6-CD/1-DVD The Wall: Immersion (EMI/Capitol 5099902943923) follows the format of the DSOTM and WYWH sets, meaning that it’s equal parts revelatory and head-scratching.

At the box set’s centerpiece (and also available as a stand-alone 2-CD set and part of a 3-CD Experience Edition) is James Guthrie’s remastering of the original album on two compact discs.  Guthrie’s remastering is again exceptional, bringing out the details in the band’s intricate playing as well as the production of Bob Ezrin, Roger Waters and David Gilmour.  What the Immersion box lacks as compared to the two previous sets is any kind of high-resolution mix on DVD or Blu-Ray, and that is the box’s most significant loss.  The surround mixes included on DSOTM and WYWH offered the chance to hear these albums in a completely new light, indeed more “immersive” than ever before.  Although a surround mix is reportedly in the works for The Wall (and any audio DVD or Blu-Ray release would likely include a high-resolution PCM Stereo track, as well), the lack of one here makes the Immersion Box Set less than definitive.

Of course, the music of The Wall is as haunting, narcissistic, exploratory and bold as you remember.  Although the libretto by Waters is more concrete (no pun intended) than in the past, the album’s style is a clear continuation of the sound explored on previous albums.  There’s the familiar Floyd brew of sound effects (chirping birds, crying babies, crowd noises, etc.), brief dialogue snippets, fragmentary songs and big stadium-ready rock anthems.  It’s always been among The Wall’s most striking attributes that the concept of building the wall onstage is inherent to the album itself.  The very first notes of “In the Flesh” serve as a theatrical Overture and the foundation of the concert framework itself, with Pink inviting (or taunting?) the audience to hear his tale.  From the outset, The Wall invites comparison, too, with another famous rock opera, Pete Townshend and The Who’s Tommy.  Both Pink and Tommy are confronted with the difficult reality of life in post-WWII London, and both have to confront the consequences of their parents’ own failings.  Waters has said that he wrote The Wall about the loss of his own father, but over time, the album has resonated as a meditation on war and loss in general.  A dark worldview permeates The Wall as Waters uses each tool in his songwriter’s artillery to bring these characters to life.  “The Happiest Days of Our Lives” is ironically titled, as Pink recalls “there were certain teachers who would hurt the children in any way they could…even as it was well known [that] when they got home at night, their fat and psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives.” Yet Waters’ vocal doesn’t betray a hint of sentimentality or even sympathy for those he describes.

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Carole King was ready for a fresh start in 1977.  She had recently split from manager/producer Lou Adler’s Ode Records, the label with which she had signed back in 1968 as the lead singer of The City.  It was, of course, at Ode where King triumphed with Tapestry, and over the years introduced a parade of memorable songs like “It’s Too Late,” “So Far Away,” You’ve Got a Friend,” “Sweet Seasons,” “Been to Canaan” and “Jazzman.”  Yet the four albums recorded by King at Capitol between 1977 and 1980 have been overlooked since their original releases; all but one had never been domestically released on compact disc.  Through her own Rockingale Records label and Concord Music Group, King has now reissued Simple Things (RKG 33601-02), Welcome Home (RKG-33597-02), Touch the Sky (RKG-33599-02) and Pearls: Songs of Goffin and King (RKG-33603-02) as The Carole King Collection.  This quartet fills in a major gap in King’s catalogue, and there’s plenty to rediscover!

King’s band Navarro took the place of her Ode-era stalwarts like Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar, Russ Kunkel, Leland Sklar and second husband Charles Larkey.  But despite the fine musicianship of Navarro (guitarists Rob McEntee and Mark Hallman, bassist Rob Galloway, drummer Michael Wooten, percussionist Miguel Rivera and flutist/saxophonist Richard Hardy), the sound of Simple Things doesn’t stray too far from King’s stylistic signature.  The title track “Simple Things,” co-written with King’s third husband, Rick Evers, features that same warm acoustic sound, augmented with a subtle string arrangement.  King embraced a “back to nature” outlook both in life and in song, relocating with Evers to his home state of Idaho: “Simple things mean a lot to me/Some things only children can see/Simple things, like horses running free/And easy acceptance of life.”  In making this life change, King had discovered an answer to friend and collaborator James Taylor’s “Secret o’ Life.”  She even concludes in song, “The secret of living is life.”  The album begins with “Simple Things” and ends with a reprise of the same sentiments in “One”: “He is one, she is one/A tree is one, the earth is one, the universe is one/I am one, we are one.”

Evers was King’s only co-writer for the LP, with three songs to his credit; the remaining seven compositions were all from King’s pen alone.  He also contributed guitar to a couple of songs, with King herself stepping from behind the piano to play guitar on “Hold On.”  She’s in fantastic voice throughout the album, contributing strong vocals and harmonies to ballads like the beautiful, piano-driven “In the Name of Love” and “Time Alone.”  Richard Hardy fills in for Tom Scott for the jazzy saxophone on “Labyrinth,” and the beguiling Latin rhythms of Ode hit “Corazon” get a new spin on one of the most memorable tracks off Simple Things, “Hard Rock Café” – no relation to the chain of restaurants founded in 1971!  Elsewhere, King and Navarro credibly rock on “You’re the One Who Knows” and “God Only Knows,” although the latter pales in comparison to another, rather better-known song of the same name.  It’s hard not to read into the lyrics of “To Know That I Love You,” on which King sounds blissful in love: “Over and over again, we light the flame/Rediscovering that we are the same/And I love you.”  Evers joins her for a duet on this touching paean to a deeply felt romance.  Simple Things may be the great lost album of King’s long career, with the title song, “Hard Rock Café” and “In the Name of Love” all able to stand alongside her most sterling accomplishments.

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Isn’t it romantic?

The titular phrase from a song by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart could apply to much of Tony Bennett’s musical career, now in roughly its 65^th year.  It’s also the title of a new compilation aimed at the casual Bennett fan from Concord Music Group.  Isn’t It Romantic? (CRE-33463-02) repackages 15 prime cuts from the singer’s work at his own short-lived Improv label, with a smattering of tracks from a Fantasy Records LP thrown in for good measure.  Though Bennett’s artistic accomplishments at Improv were numerous, its output was small; the label only released ten or so albums.  Indeed, every track on this new set was released in a less-than-two-year period between 1975 and 1977.  Following the demise of Improv, Bennett took a break from recording, recharged his batteries, and emerged in 1986 back at his old home Columbia Records.  Revitalized with the aptly-named album The Art of Excellence, Bennett hasn’t stopped striving for excellence since.

The small body of work made by Bennett at Improv has been mined numerous times by Concord in the past, most notably on 2004’s The Complete Improv Recordings, a box set (Concord CCD4-2255) chockablock with alternate takes and unreleased material, all of which proved manna for collectors.  More casual fans could content themselves with releases like last year’s The Best of the Improv Recordings (CRE-32955).  As for Isn’t It Romantic? , it follows Tony Bennett Sings for Lovers (Concord CCD-6023, 2009) as another set of amorous tunes from this short if fertile period.  Hit the jump to explore this latest collection! Read the rest of this entry »