Word: ballads
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Alice's Restaurant. Arther 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 incongrously 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...
...spirit, Outlaw Blues is like a lot of country music. It is a mock-heroic ballad, loose and unpretentious in form, good-natured, yet somehow not quite so memorable as it might have been...
...distance from the Stooges finds expression in "Dum Dum Boys," Iggy's tribute to his old band. The song begins with a short finger-popping catalogue of the whereabouts of the boys since the band split up. A raspy but bell-like guitar melody launches a well-structured ballad of alienation. "What happened to James?" "He's gone straight." states the prologue. But Iggy (a.k.a. James Osterberg) has lost his voice with the demise of the band...
...from a U.S. Army PX in the South. His escort explained, "That is merely a souvenir from Ho Chi Minh City [as Saigon has been renamed]." Our guides unabashedly confessed to listening to the Voice of America. They prefer country-and-western music and Hollywood show tunes to The Ballad of Norman Morrison, a Vietnamese song commemorating the war protester who burned himself to death on the steps of the Pentagon in November...
...diverts his energy into making rock music of a high order. A gifted songwriter, he has come up with an album of infectious melodies in a sophisticated rhythm-and-blues vein. In addition to the breakaway single You Make Me Feel Like Dancing, he has a winner in the ballad When I Need...