This is the farthest back in time I have yet gone for one of these looks back. While I don't recall anything from this issue, it's likely it was still in the house when I began perusing Dad's SR magazines a year or so later. Several of the albums under consideration here would certainly land in the collections of friends sooner or later.
Article
Penelope Ross Profiles The Captain and Tennille
We get a brief history of how Darryl and Toni rose to success, including their years with the Beach Boys and their initial trouble getting a recording contract (the 1973 vinyl shortage is cited as one reason for it); self-financing a recording of "The Way That I Want to Touch You," which became a regional hit in LA, led A&M to sign them. The contrast in personalities (she's the gregarious one, he's the quiet one, as we well know now) receives more than one mention.
This month's reviewers are Chris Albertson, Noel Coppage, Paul Kresh, Peter Reilly, and Joel Vance, though you'll soon see there's a guest review from a future regular.
Best of the Month
--Steve Goodman, Words We Can Dance To (NC) "…you feel as if you've been set down in a department store of musical styles, and again you just know this is not one of your run-of-the-strip low-overhead marts…Goodman takes a style—country swing, Caribbean, whatever—and does it right, with jaunty clarity."
--Sylvia Syms, Sylvia Syms, Lovingly (PK) "Most of the time Sylvia, who comes on slow and easy and is most at home with an old-fashioned torch song, seems out to break the listener's heart, and she is expert at it…
--Warren Zevon, S/T (Steve Simels) "…I have to confess I am totally bonkers about it. Why? Because despite his style (deadpan humor) and his subject matter (pithy dissections of the seamy underbelly of California-America), he has made a rock-and-roll album that is as musically rich as anything I've heard in geological epochs."
Recordings of Special Merit
--Toshiko Akiyoshi/Lew Tabackin Big Band, Long Yellow Road (CA) "Toshiko's arrangements are not always easy to play, but the band has caught her considerable spirit, and the music flows effortlessly…Tabackin has a steady job, buried in the Doc Severinsen orchestra on the Tonight Show, but his talent is considerably greater than that of his boss."
--Captain & Tennille, Song of Joy (PR) "This is a good act getting slicker and better all the time…but (Tennille's) perhaps a little too earthy this time out; she seems to have been listening to too many Bessie Smith records, with the result that she sounds a bit forced and melodramatic." This is first album my sister and I ever purchased, secured I assume by pooling our allowances—I must have given up baseball cards for a few weeks?
--Seals & Crofts, Get Closer (NC) "Seals and Crofts—well, I think we keep them around like pets…This latest album, while it is a little looser and considerably less puffed up about spirituality than most, does come right on over and lick your hand."
Featured Reviews
--Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines, 1928 (JV) "Armstrong's grandeur and bravura are everywhere evident in the collection, though on certain tunes he doesn't seem quite comfortable…Hines, by contrast seems entirely at ease…Overall, the set is a treasure, and the civilized person will simply have to own a copy."
--Neil Sedaka, Steppin' Out (PR) "Along with his contemporary and peer Paul Anka, he has the seemingly natural ability to seize upon whatever is the popular mood of the moment and then expand or define it in a very slick but often surprisingly graceful and apt way…The threat to me, of course, is that in twenty years I'll be writing this kind of piece about (ugh!) Tony Orlando and Dawn or (say it isn't so!!) the Osmonds."
--Steely Dan, The Royal Scam (Stephen Holden) "From the beginning, the musical turf they staked out has been rather narrow—almost all of Becker and Fagen's tunes revolve around a single modal idea—and they have worked it over so intensively during the course of five albums that the strain is beginning to show."
Other Disks Reviewed
--America, Hideaway (NC) "Partly it's the problem of what to say after you've said 'Why both?' I don't think the group has improved all that much; it's just been accepted in some kind of default situation."
--David Cassidy, Home Is Where the Heart Is (PR) "Still, this album should convince almost anyone that Cassidy does have talent and that with a lot more work and a lot less production gimmickry he's sure to make a very fine album one of these days."
--The Eagles, Their Greatest Hits, 1971-1975 (NC) "A few other bands would have breathed more excitement into the better songs (say 'Take It Easy'), but then a lot of other bands would have sunk miserably with such mundane ones as 'Best of My Love.'"
--Genesis, A Trick of the Tail (NC) "Trying to appear deep without actually being deep seems to make Genesis appear silly more often not…Still, the extremes have been lopped off, and this does have tuneful moments."
--Golden Earring, To the Hilt (JV) "If you hear a group playing blues-rock patterns and moaning overblown lyrics, you can safely assume they are trying to be Significant; you can further assume, with the utmost safety, that they are not."
--Kiss, Destroyer (NC) "This seems worth talking about only to the extent that it shows that not only can a 'successful' act be illiterate and silly, but it doesn't even have to keep its affectations up to date."
--Nils Lofgren, Cry Tough (JV) "Maybe he's been hanging out with rock for too long and ought to look for other musical forms; his Prisoner-of-Rock-and-Roll stance is good on paper, but in many ways it's a trap…"
--Bob Marley & the Wailers, Rastaman Vibration (NC) "I feel a definite pressure to fake liking reggae, of which Bob Marley and the Wailers are just about the epitome, more than I really do…There may have been a time when I could have faked it pretty well, but times change and they apparently change us…"
--Olivia Newton-John, Come on Over (PR) "Olivia Newton-John looks improbably lovely and chaste in the cover photo on her newest album. On the record itself she still sounds as semure as she looks…all this album really does is bring out the Dirty Old Man in me."
--Richard and Linda Thompson, Pour Down Like Silver (NC) "All the songs are good enough to be in albums—it's just that I question the judgment involved in putting them all in the same album."
--Wing and a Prayer Fife and Drum Corps, Babyface (PR) "It is such disasters as this that make record reviewing a hazardous occupation for those of us with nervous conditions…it felt like being trapped in some demonic elevator…"
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