Word: albums
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...strongest music you can hear anywhere. Going solo, he anticipated and helped launch both the underground and glitter rock extravagances of the early '70s; his finely focused rage, his risk-it-all personal reflections, have given the punk rockers strong inspiration. Reed's recent Arista album, Street Hassle, is one of his very best, bitterest and most adventurous records, prime rock unconditionally guaranteed to give you the night sweats...
Other tunes in the album include a denunciation of a former associate called Dirt and, best of all, Street Hassle, the album's centerpiece, an eleven-minute kaleidoscope of destruction compressed into three separate dramatic vignettes and linked by a single musical phrase. Tough stuff, often outright scary, as when a character in one of the vignettes advises a fellow junkie how to dispose of his ODed girlfriend...
What's worse is Buffett's recycling in lieu of new ideas. Like "Cowboy in the Jungle" from the new album. It's a vagabond expatriate song with a couple of funny lines, but he did the same idea much better last year in his cover of Steve Good-man's "Banana Republics." And the title cut from Son of a Son of a Sailor is almost a bibliography of the half-dozen sailing paeans he's written before...
...into his roadband sound: drunken-sailor crabby-cowbell filled-in reggae rhythms, compounded with clean country whine-guitars, a baying folkie voice and Greg "Fingers" Taylor's wailing harmonica equals shrimpboat rock. Buffett bottled it quick before it fizzed, and the music hasn't changed much over the six albums in the last five years. Buffett's chartbusting last year was the result mainly of promotional considerations and the pull of a big-name producer, Norbert Putnam, who used to ride herd on Kris Kristofferson. Changes In Latitudes sured wasn't a new style--the best song on the album...
...DIDN'T LAST, this mainline no-cholesterol shoot-up in the hardening arteries of country music. Steve Goodman has paunched down into Chicago's home-grown favorite, writing witty little ditties without much punch. Jerry Jeff is falling prey to cirrhosis of the brain. John Prine's upcoming album offers the only hope in the bunch for a bucktooth overbite country record. And Jimmy Buffett, well, he said it four years ago in "A Brand New Country Star": "He's a hot roman candle from the Texas panhandle he can either go country...