Word: ballads
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Crosby will of course sing on and on. And not just in records of White Christmas, the tinselly ballad that Crosby, with the help of World War II's general homesickness, transformed into a national holiday anthem. Echoes of Crosby's voice have passed into the styles of every important prerock balladeer in the U.S. Long before his personal style was submerged by Elvis Presley and all his musical progeny, Crosby had become not only one of the world's richest entertainers, worth tens of millions, but perhaps the most influential pop singer of his time. Last...
Newman gets some help from the Eagles in "Rider in the Rain," in which Don Henly, Glen Frey, and J.D. Souther sing background vocals. As a result this ballad sounds very much like an Eagles tune, except that raspy-voiced Newman sings the lead and the lyrics sound like they were written from a rhyming dictionary, with little regard for meaning...
Alice's Restaurant. Arthur Penn does a nice job of turning Arlo Guthrie's half-hour long ballad about hanging out in western Massachusetts and ingeniously resisting the draft, into a loose, rambling, amiable film. The first half works particularly well. The second half drags on a bit too long and is broken by some inconguously depressing sequences, but the movie still remains one of the best film portraits of what life was like for the draft-board-baiting bohemian back-packers...
...equally bitter ballad, "Bring Back the Chair," Paxton evinces his skill with irony. He mockingly suggests that America should revive executions to escape from complete boredom, chanting, "Bring back the chair, strap someone there, strap down a pair." Swept away by the morbid message, Paxton lapses into moments of poor enunciation and phrasing, but the song is funny enough to short out delivery problems. Again, the music provides a steady circuit for the electricity of Paxton's work...
...more oldies also receive excellent treatment on the album--a country ballad from Roy Orbison (one of Elvis's teenage idols) called "Blue Bayou," and the old Jagger-Richard standby, Tumbling Dice. The Stones version is, of course, the best, but it its interesting to hear it sung by a woman. In fact, this cut may be the best on the album. The remaining seven songs on the album (which total up to a mere 32 minutes of music - those record companies really bleed you dry) further demonstrate Ronstadt's recently-found maturity. They range from mediocre, like "Maybe...