Before we proceed to discussing the merits or lack thereof of Orleans’ 1976 LP Waking and Dreaming, we must first address the naked guys in the room. I’m talking, of course, about the album’s cover. What we have here are five men, four nipples, and two awful chest pelts. No wonder Waking and Dreaming has been proclaimed by various sources to be one of the “19 Most Hilariously Failed Attempts at Sexy Album Covers,” one of the “10 Gayest (the site’s homophobia, not mine) Album Covers of All Time,” and one of the “50 Worst Album Covers.”
Orleans was one of the many more or less interchangeable soft rock bands that made the mid to late 1970’s so positively Lovecraftian. I suspect someone made a mistake, because Waking and Dreaming should have been entitled Waking and Screaming. A kind of American version of Australia’s Little River Band, Orleans made John Denver sound like a punk. They were smooth, smooth, smooth, which is just another way of saying soporific. “Waking” my ass; Waking and Dreaming is an aural sleeping pill, and I had to drink about 10 cups of coffee just to make it through the damn thing. Asked for a quick summation of the LP’s songs, several words come to mind–namely bland, blander, and blandest.
That said, Orleans has its moments. “Stoned” and “Two-Faced World” off their eponymous 1973 debut aren’t half bad, and the title track off 1975’s Let There Be Music almost rocks, albeit in an anonymous, slightly lame, Doobie Brothers kind of way. Unfortunately none of these mildly diverting moments occur on Waking and Dreaming, whose sole merit is that it at least doesn’t have the MOR hit “Dance With Me” on it. Instead it includes their slightly more palatable MOR hit “Still the One.” I say slightly more palatable because at least it has a pulse, which “Dance With Me” does not. And I actually enjoy the final 8 seconds or so of “Still the One,” which is something I suppose.
But wait! I’m wrong! There is, amongst the terminally inoffensive songs on Waking and Dreaming, one bona fide good song! No, I’m not talking about “If I Don’t Have You,” “Sails,” and “Golden State,” all of which are soft-in-the brain rock. Or the insufferably tame funk of “What I Need,” “Reach,” and “The Path,” or even the more up-tempo rock-lite sounds of “Spring Fever,” “Still the One,” and the title track, which opens like yet another stultifyingly lame ballad only to segue into an almost bearable jam featuring an almost listenable guitar-organ duel.
Open enough oysters and sooner or later you’ll discover a pearl, and the pearl on Waking and Dreaming is “The Bum,” a hilarious studio lark in which the shirtless lads in Orleans get down with their inner Fug. I can’t imagine what Orleans’ Seals and Crofts, Pablo Cruise, Firefall, and Little River Band-loving fans made of it. No doubt the band thought of it as a throwaway, but that just shows you how much they know.
One of two songs not written by John and Johanna Hall, “The Bum” is the stomping heavy tale of an utter down-and-outer, and opens with two guys simultaneously talking snide shit about the poor guy, to the effect of, “You must be the dirtiest cat in this whole city” (Guy One), “A can of Rheingold in one hand and a dirty rag for washing windshields in the other one” (Guy Two), and, “Hey listen, we could get you a bath in the East River, hah hah hah” (Guy One again). At this point the song kicks into a gutbucket blooz number with a fiery guitar solo and lots of whooping and hollering, to say nothing of several stanzas that all close with the line, “B-you-M, bum bum sha do be Bowery.” Why, this could be a Frank Zappa and/or Flo and Eddie number, and how it got beyond management is beyond me.
Orleans did not hail from New Orleans, and would most likely have been laughed right out of New Orleans, but for one glorious moment John Hall and Company demonstrated that they had, buried beneath their commitment to the mass production of easy listening treacle, another side, one they chose to never again reveal to the world. Why? Because they weren’t dumb. “Still the One” and “Dance With Me” were the soft rock sound of a slot machine paying off, and whatever else you may say about Orleans, they knew what side their bread was buttered on. And it wasn’t “The Bum.” If anything, “The Bum” was a cautionary tale about where they’d end up if they recorded more songs like “The Bum.” And that was the “Bum bum sha do be Bowery.” As if that was the worst thing in the world. Pass this bum a Rheingold!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D+
