Word: balladeering
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Rough Edges. This odd, disjointed Down Under western tries to duplicate the rough edges of a folk ballad, placing Morgan's exploits in a context that is both romantic and social. Much time is expended depicting the primitive qualities of colonial justice, while government authorities are depicted, predictably, as brutal lunatics. Superintendent Cobham of the Victorian police (played with flush, fruity menace by Frank Thring) supervises Morgan's eventual capture and execution, then ships his head to an anatomy professor in Melbourne. The professor has a curious theory-he thinks Morgan could be half ape. The superintendent keeps...
...BILLY JOE, an extrapolation on Bobbie Gentry's 1967 back-country ballad about the young boy who jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge, is a nice surprise. Director Max Baer (Macon County Line) has a good, close feeling for the rural South, and the movie-shot on location in Mississippi-is careful about people, sharp in selecting and using details of landscape: hushed green fields, a sinuous, umbilical river, a house perched on the edge of woods as if waiting to be enfolded in the trees. Herman Raucher's screenplay concerns the real reason Billy Joe threw himself...
...swoops, glides and vocal glissandi. In concerts he adds his own million-dollar magic trick: he carries a band in his larynx - or so it seems when Jarreau fills in the melody with vocal imitations of instruments. He can even accompany himself, crooning the words of a sleepy ballad while making rhythmic clicks deep in his throat to provide a percussive counterpoint. Jarreau's vocal antics on this LP are confined to a guitar (Fire and Rain), flute (Glow) and bass (Hold On). But Jarreau is no mere sound effects man. His husky tenor is agile and warmly appealing...
...gritty voice and cannot sing very well. But neither can Bob Dylan or Randy Newman. Those who come to hear Zevon perform are not purists. They are beguiled by his lyrics, which typically are about Chicano hustlers, Sunset Strip women and hotel-bar bums. A quatrain from his ballad Desperados Under the Eaves: "And if California slides into the ocean/ Like the mystics and statistics say it will/ I predict this motel will be standing/ Until I pay my bill...
...lifetime offers-"Send $6.98 for records, $8.98 for eight-track tapes" -for Tchaikovsky's Greatest Hits and the Best of Connie Francis. Suddenly, a smoothly handsome, oddly familiar-looking young crooner appears on a softly back-lighted stage. While he pumps a microphone and purrs out a ballad, viewers begin to wonder: Como's kid brother maybe? An Italian Goulet? Then on comes the voiceover, hailing the "mood rock" sound of that nationwide heartthrob, Peter Lemongello...