Word: pickering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When asked after the concert if he thought his performances made people give up guitar in frustration, the big, friendly guitar-picker from Deep Gap shook his head and said, "Oh, no," but then he added, "They'll just have to work harder." It was a fitting prescription from so capable a "doctor...
Willard especially gains in integrity in comparison with Stewart's latest album, entitled The Lonesome Picker Rides Again. Stewart's tunes are good enough; the big differences are the lyrics and the production. Where Willard was knowledgeable, Picker uses exaggerated symbolism. Where Stewart used to rely on his gravelly honest voice, he now feels compelled to call in batallions of strings. The mushy production spoils two of the best songs on the album, "Touch of the Sun" and "Just an Old Love Song." But the strings are only a symptom of a deeper disease...
...Stewart's concern with the lost past turns, in Picker, into a vague, if not reactionary, romanticization of "kids everywhere, gettin' on in the back seat of the car." He sums up his disaffection with American life with the parable "Shoot all the brave horses and how will we ride," which is repeated for a tiring three minutes at the end of the album...
...rock on both Willard and Picker is already stripped of its popular form by the inherent limitations of its appeal, Willard at least deserves a wider audience on the basis of its musical content alone. In Picker, however, Stewart hasn't added much to the drifting times that will probably last until Carol King's next album comes...
Governor Ronald Reagan, a master picker of political targets, has long fired his hottest salvos at the University of California. He has rarely missed a board of regents meeting, where his conservative appointees have routinely attacked campus activists and university spending. Yet last week, pleading flu, Reagan missed his second monthly meeting in a row-perhaps, insiders suggested, because he has lately shifted his fire to a new target of opportunity, the welfare mess. The upshot was startling and wholly unexpected: by a comfortable margin, the regents chose a decided liberal to succeed retiring Roger W. Heyns...