If there was a Venn diagram of Carole King and Frank Zappa, this album would fall in the overlap, small though it might be. Rundgren writes effortlessly easy pop-rock songs of the Goffin-King/Bacharach-David variety, but also with a dash of absurdity and tongue-in-cheek humour throughout. Take the song titles Some Folks Is Whiter Than Me, She Made Me Sore, and Slut, and you could easily see them as Zappa songs. That these are actually all pretty good rock and roll tracks adds to the Zappa feel.
But then take tracks like Rundgren’s big hit
off the album, I Saw The Light, which he even wrote with King in mind, and
you’ve got some radio-friendly easy listening with surprising depth to the
songwriting. I liked the quote given on the Wikipedia page from John Lydon,
that Rundgren writes songs that do enough and then gets out, not feeling the
need to endlessly repeat the chorus to fade or milking a tune for more than
it’s worth.
This is a double album, with each side given a title. Side One is a “Bouquet of Ear-Catching Melodies”, and is the most heavily weighted towards the King/Bacharach type of easy tune, notably I Saw The Light but also getting slightly bluesier in Wolfman Jack.
Side Two is “The
Cerebral Side”, where Rundgren gets a bit more playful. Although the
radio-ballad type songs continue with Saving Grace, the track Marlene takes a
similar romantic waltz-based tune and adds just enough of a dash of weird
synthesizer to take it into Zappa territory. After this we get the vaudevillian
Viking Song and the gloriously strange I Went To The Mirror wherein a sluggish
Rundgren narrates the strangeness of his facial features – kind of like a
trippy experience where the everyday becomes highlighted as unusual.
Side Three is “The Kid Gets Heavy”, which isn’t especially heavy apart from some electric guitar on Black Maria before the electric-guitar-mimicking-revving-engine
track Little Red Lights, a prime example of rock for driving your mid-life
crisis convertable to (your combover waving in the breeze). Couldn’t I Just
Tell You is a power ballad of mastery levels, just the right kind of
over-wrought that a power ballad should be.
Side Four is the magnificently titled “Baby
Needs a New Pair of Snakeskin Boots (A Pop Operetta)” and is the only side
where Rundgren doesn’t do absolutely everything himself (that includes all instruments *and* studio/production duties). It’s live recordings,
complete with studio chatter (and on Side Two Rundgren gives us an introduction
to “studio noises” such as you’d get from poor mike quality etc. which is amusing).
It’s this side that’s the most Zappa-esque, with the parade of unsavoury
schoolmates in Piss Aaron bringing to mind the strange kids next door from
Zappa’s Lets Make The Water Turn Black, but sounds a bit like a Randy Newman
ragtime jam. And despite a title and chorus that you probably couldn’t do these
days, Slut is an unashamed stomp-rock banger.
When the album started, I thought that it was going to be
“nice” but little more, but it really grew on me as it went on. But then given
I liked both circles of the King/Zappa Venn diagram, perhaps is no surprise.
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