Word: elton
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...HEAR AS MUCH in Elton John's music from the small, overamplified speakers of the radio in a rusted-out '69 Dodge as you can from an expensive living-room stereo. That is a major source of his success and his importance. His songs made it big from the dashboards of beat-up, second-hand cars, old bomds parents let their kids take out on Saturday nights, souped-up monsters that squealed out of high school parking lots, cars with steamed-up windows parked in dark woods outside town...
...themselves. Still, the Sex Pistols' pile-driving Anarchy in the U.K. is an anthem of despair. The British punk bands are a community linked by anger and frustration. They are, within the music world, a rebuke to the bourgeois excesses -and smooth musical stylings-of such stars as Elton John and Peter Frampton...
Buzzing Basses. Her new style is really not all that radical, considering the cross-fertilization of modes that country rock has brought in recent years. If Elton John or the Rolling Stones can dabble in country, why can't Dolly flirt with rock? She does it expertly, as her New Harvest album makes clear. Those pounding drums and buzzing electric basses on her own How Does It Feel do not disguise Dolly's country touch, just give it greater aural depth...
...Sayer: Endless Flight (Warner Bros.). For years, Sayer's own sweet soaring tenor (reminiscent of Elton John's) was obscured as he comported himself onstage in thick white makeup and a clown suit. Now Sayer has shucked his Petrushka image. Instead he 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...
...something hippies do when they get bored. That's the name of a song by the Grateful Dead. That's modern, right? Actually, Cora La Redd first introduced a song called "Truckin"' at the Cotton Club in New York in 1935. Likewise, Fats Waller's "Alligator Crawl" preceeded Elton John's "Crocodile Rock" by more than 40 years. Popular music, like the song titles, derives from an old American tradition. Rock 'n roll was born 20 years ago, like me. The national hit charts were born over 40 years ago, like...