Blurbing For The Weekend: 3/15/24

Thanks partly to an unusually heavy social calendar (the annual Pop Conference being held in commuting distance at USC), I didn’t watch any movies last week. But I did listen to some used records that were purchased a couple months ago and have long awaited assessment. Some were obvious keepers, like Joe Tex’s Happy Soul and The Best Of Sam & Dave. Others I’m more on the fence about.

Evelyn “Champagne” King’s debut Smooth Talk will probably make the shelf off a strong B side, but - forgetting the album’s title - I spent much of the opening track wondering if she was repeatedly saying “pool hall.”

I’ll give George McCrae’s self-titled follow-up to Rock Your Baby a second listen before making my verdict, but it might be too transparently Keep Rockin’ Your Baby to keep (if only they’d spiced things up with an “I Still Get Lifted” or two). One nice surprise was a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Over My Head," which he practically mashes up with that number one hit.

I was very sad to hear about the death of World Party leader Kurt Wallinger last Sunday. I remembered reading about his aneurysm in the early ‘00s, but hadn’t kept up with his actions since. I’m glad to learn that he did recover, played a considerable number of shows in the years between his injury and his passing (opened for Steely Dan in Australia!), and that he recorded plenty of material even if nothing had been released. This lack of commercial presence might explain World Party’s underacknowledgment outside of their late ‘80s college-rock context today (what Alfred Soto calls the “Poppy Bush Interzone”). I’ve coincidentally mean to revisit albums like Goodbye Jumbo, Private Revolution and Bang! in full, but just from the hits I know that - as referential of the summer of love as the songs could be - there was a unique synthesis at work. “Ship Of Fools,” World Party's sole Top 40 hit in the United States, was a welcome vision of a respectable Mick Jagger solo career, that familiar enunciation (Wallinger unapologetically milking that “save me from tomoohhrrrow”), tied to a soul arrangement that was boisterous without being gaudy. Similarly, “Way Down Now,” their second biggest rock radio hit, dares to ask for “something true” in front of “woo-woo”s lifted from “Sympathy For The Devil.” Compared to similar moves from Tears for Fears and Lenny Kravitz, Wallinger’s throwback pastiche allowed for more humor without abandoning sincerity. If anything, the wink made it richer.

My favorite song from way back when has to be “Is It Like Today?” A modest hit from their third album Bang! That I heard a lot on the “progressive” station in Bloomington, Indiana as a middle schooler. It's a predictably gorgeous mix of echo, piano, jangle and harmony that imagines what God would make of man and vice versa. The answer? Confusion, basically. Whether his family decides to share the music he’d been working on for the last twenty years or so - and I’d respect whatever choice they make - I hope he kept both his heart and his humor throughout.