Author Archives: Michael H. Little

In my mind’s eye I see Randy Newman supine on a sofa, taking an afternoon nap. Or a morning nap. Or an evening nap. It doesn’t matter. Or I see him in a comfortable armchair watching television, an old movie perhaps, or a documentary about acid rain, or an infomercial–anything at all really, he doesn’t care. He looks as blissful as a Buddha, but he’s talking it all in. Nothing escapes his amused notice. It’s all material for his fantastic songs.

Randy Newman is an unprepossessing fellow, and he likes it that way. He doesn’t worry too much about his image because in a sense he doesn’t have one–he’s spent his whole career hiding behind masks, amidst personae, inhabiting characters who aren’t Randy Newman.

I’m talking a rogue’s gallery of miscreants–whether they be wicked, deranged, pathetic, megalomaniacal, impotent, deluded, dumb but not nearly as dumb as you might think, sad, self-aware but only to a point, proud for no damn reason at all. I could go on, but suffice it to say they’re a terribly flawed bunch, and therein lies their pathos: all of them, no matter how awful, are human to a fault.

Newman gets tagged as a singer-songwriter, but singer-songwriters bare their souls; Randy’s far too reticent a soul for such confessional nonsense, and far too modest as well–Randy Newman would be the first person to tell you there’s nothing very interesting about Randy Newman. No, the label is accurate only to the extent that he writes and sings his own songs and performs a whole lot of them all by his lonesome on the piano.

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I have been guilty of saying mean things about George Harrison in the past, most of them having to do with the lugubrious and often wimpy tenor of the ex-Beatles solo work. But I am here today, dear members of the committee, to recant. I’ve been listening to 1970’s sprawling All Things Must Pass, and while it has its share of doleful bummers, what strikes me about it now is how hard it rocks. The most anonymous Beatle could cook when he felt like it, and on All Things Must Pass he frequently felt like it, as did co-guitarists Eric Clapton and Dave Mason, and when all is said and done I’m forced to agree with critic Mikal Gilmore, who called All Things Must Pass “the finest solo work any ex-Beatle ever produced.” And its flaws make that assessment all the more remarkable.

The studio sessions were a clusterfuck, with superstars being dragooned left and right. The line-up included the players who would soon form Derek and the Dominos as well as the members of Badfinger, to say nothing of folks like Ringo Starr, Billy Preston, Ginger Baker, and Gary Wright. Why, even Phil Collins played on one track. There was also extensive overdubbing, and while the production duties were formally in the hands of the mercurial Phil Spector, Harrison has said Spector required 18 cherry brandies just to BEGIN work, leaving poor George to handle much of the production himself. In addition, Harrison’s mother was dying, and he was nurturing a burgeoning heroin addiction.

Let me make it clear from the start; I’m not much for “My Sweet Lord,” the song the LP is probably best known for, nor am I wild about its companion piece, “Help Me Lord.” LP opener “I’d Have You Anytime,” which was co-written by Harrison and Bob Dylan, does nothing for me, nor do the run of the mill “Run of the Mill,” the milquetoast “I Live for You,” and the “I need love” sentimentality of “I Dig Love.” But I’ve changed my mind about the title track—it’s prettier than I remember—as well as about the Dylan cover “If Not For You,” a song whose laid back charms (great guitar riff, some nice harmonica by Harrison, catchy tambourine, etc.) had previously eluded me.

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News flash! Critic declares Ringo Starr greatest ex-Beatle! Rioting breaks out in hipster enclaves! Brooklyn in flames! Incensed Lennonites carry signs: “Michael Little = Dingbat!” Hairy Harrisonoids counsel karmic calm: “This too shall pass!” McCartney maniacs attempt to sooth selves with “Silly Love Songs”! NME headline reads: “Panned on the run!”

In my dreams. But it’s what I really believe. I really believe that Ringo Starr, who never got no respect and was the comic foil and clown of the legendary Fab Four has—over the almost four-and-a-half decades since the Beatles went the way of the Ono, er make that Dodo—produced far more genuinely likeable pop songs than any of his “genius” fellow Mop Toppers.

But first, a sordid confession. I’ve never cared much for Ringo’s old band. I can count on one hand the number of Beatles songs I really love (“Helter Skelter,” “She Said She Said,” “Hey Jude,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and “Let It Be”). As for most of the rest of their oeuvre, it could vanish into the void and I would never miss it. And there are plenty of songs (the dreadful “Long and Winding Road,” the hideous “Something,” and the unpalatable “Got to Get You Into My Life”) whose disappearance would make me very happy. As for the post-Beatles work of John, Paul, and George, I can think of maybe one or two (at most) songs I love by each of them. Shit, Ringo matched them with ONE single, 1971’s “It Don’t Come Easy” backed by “Early 1970,” a very funny series of good-natured jibes about his former band mates.

I always liked Ringo best because he wasn’t touted as a genius (although he’s a great drummer) by anyone. I’m an underdog guy, and Ringo was the ultimate underdog. Nobody expected much of him after the Beatles imploded, sucked into the black holes of John and Paul’s grossly oversized egos. And it isn’t as if Ringo has come through with a slew of artistic masterpieces. But since 1970 he’s put out a bunch of really cool pop songs, low brow it’s true, but I don’t give a shit where a song’s brow is (it can be a Neanderthal for all I care) if it has a good melody and I find myself singing along.

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The Scottish clods o’ peat in this hard-working, hard-rocking man’s man band never won any originality awards, and weren’t exactly well-versed in the songwriting arts either, and given their high scunge factor, I doubt they’d even be allowed into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as paying customers, much less as inductees.

They’re not going to be inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame anytime soon, either. Hell, they only hit two homers over the course of their long career, and their lifetime batting average is in the .233 range. Forget about Cooperstown; these guys would be lucky to earn a spot on the bench of the 1962 New York Mets.

But I’ll say this for ‘em–way back in 1975 every badass or wannabe badass in my home town was blaring Nazareth’s Hair of the Dog out of their car 8-track speakers, whether that car be a GTO or a rusted-out Ford Pinto. The title track–with its “Now you’re messin’ with a son of a bitch”–was a blast of pure unbridled belligerence and without a doubt the orneriest cut of the summer, hell the whole year probably. Alice Cooper may have put out “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” but that was play acting; Nazareth’s Dan McCafferty came on like the Real McCoy.

As for the album title, me and my buddies prided ourselves on knowing what it meant even though we’d never cracked a beer (much less suffered a hangover) in our lives–it made us feel adult, worldly even, just as that “Now you’re messin’ with a son of a bitch” made us feel tough, when in effect we were probably the wimpiest band of geeks to ever gingerly trod the halls of Littlestown High School, on the lookout for the real sons of bitches.

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So I died and went to Heaven (naturally) and who should I see as I step off that divine airline but The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn. Which took me back a bit, as McGuinn is still very much alive. So I said, “Roger, sir, what are you doing here?” and he replied, “God likes my music so much he’s given me a hall pass to come and go as I please.” So I asked him what the Lord’s favorite Byrds songs are and he said, “Well, you’d think it would be ‘The Christian Life’ but he actually doesn’t like that one very much. Says it’s a straightedge bummer. No, the song that always gets him is ‘Wasn’t Born to Follow’ or, if he’s been partaking of the magic mushrooms that are everywhere up here, ‘Eight Miles High.’ Says it can turn the most twisted trip into a Holiday Inn of the Mind.”

So here I am, typing this in between playing chess with Sam Cooke and drinking brandy with Richard Manuel, and basically all I want to say is that The Byrds were a great band, a very great band. Stylistically they traveled a weird but not unique road from their early days as the Jet Set, from folk rock to psychedelia to pure country to a combination of all of the above, while establishing themselves as the world’s best Dylan interpreters—so that with every new album you didn’t know what you were going to get, but you knew it would be interesting. Between the band’s extraordinary harmonies to McGuinn’s guitar tuned to the key of LSD it was hard to go wrong. And the talent! Between McGuinn (who was calling himself Jim then) and David Crosby and Gram Parsons and Gene Clark and Chris Hillman and Clarence White—all of whom passed through The Byrds at one point of another—they had enough great musicians to fill a whole wall in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

And the problem with The Byrds is figuring out which album to review, because between the innovative folk rock of their first LPs, the psychedelia of their later LPs, the cosmic country of Sweetheart of the Radio, and the powerful but not so easy to categorize later albums such as The Notorious Byrd Brothers (which inexplicably features three of The Byrds and Mr. Ed on its cover) I’ll be damned if I can choose a favorite, which is why I’m reviewing The Byrds’ Greatest Hits, which is great but limited because it came out in 1967—after only four albums—and hence before they recorded some of their best songs, such as “Wasn’t Born to Follow,” “Hickory Wind,” “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” “Bad Night at the Whiskey,” and “Chestnut Mare.” It’s also too heavy on the Dylan—four songs out of ten? Come on!—but it remains the best alternative to anyone looking for a single LP overview of the band’s many transmutations.

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It’s easy to say snide things about Frankie Avalon. I myself have called the teen idol who first made his name as a trumpet player, then as a singer, and finally as the star of such immortal motion pictures as 1963’s Beach Party (with Annette Funicello, natch) and 1965’s Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (with Vincent Price) the worst thing to happen to rock’n’roll this side of the extended drum solo.

I’m being unfair of course. Avalon was just a good Italian kid from Philly who specialized in froth, didn’t have a rebellious bone in his body, and never pretended otherwise. An earnest and wholesome boy as never got hooked on heroin or attempted to reinvent himself as a pinwheel-eyed avatar of the hallucinogenic sixties, was our Frankie. But say what you will about his escapist product, Avalon has always been and will always be true to himself.

As anybody who has ever listened to “Venus” or “Why,” Avalon was a crooner whose saccharine songs sound inconceivable as teen product to anyone reared in the rock’n’roll era. Lush orchestral arrangements, choirs, you name it—Frankie’s producers liked to lard it on, and on, and on. Ah, but once, just once—and it is as glorious a moment as any in the annals of rock—Avalon said to hell with it and got down with his bad self, garage rock style.

I have no idea why. Perhaps he ate an extra-large helping of some rich Italian dessert with a touch too much sweet liqueur, say amaretto, in it. Or drank one too many (as in two) glasses of red wine. Whatever the reason, on one lost day in 1963 a real, real gone Avalon swaggered into the studio, flicked a half-smoked cigarette at some studio hack, and snapped, “Fuck the strings, Johnny, and ditch the backing singers. This is Jungleland.” And proceeded to throw his everything behind as mean as guitar as he could get his goomba (no offense meant) mitts on.

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Back in the mid- to late seventies, when America was flying high thanks to the exalted stewardship of such Churchillian figures as Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, one all-around entertainer bestrode the Pop World like a colossus. Men wanted him. Women wanted to be him. He floated like a god in a bubble of fame so high above the rest of us it would have taken Ted Nugent with a surface-to-air missile to bring him down to earth, and he was known to one and all as: Barry!

Seriously, friends and neighbors, who better personified the soft-rock seventies–that epoch of saccharine supremacy–than Barry Alan Pincus, aka Barry Manilow? He was stardust, he was golden. To listen to his songs was to drink from life’s enchanted cup. To see him live was the musical equivalent of pissing on an electric fence. His voice was glorious treacle. It was said that the mere sight of his perfect feathered hair could cure cancer. His sleepy bedroom eyes were known to enchant your larger farm animals, giving them the ability to speak in the voices of men–a skill he liked to show off in his live performances.

Barry WROTE the songs that defined an epoch. Okay, so he wrote hardly none of them, including “I Write the Songs,” which was penned by the Beach Boys’ Bruce Johnston. But so what? Jesus’s best material was penned by other people, including Brewer & Shipley, ZZ Top, The Byrds and Ministry, and He never catches any shit for it. Fact is Barry MADE those songs his own by sheer force of his iron will; he was the divine conduit through which flowed such immortal tunes as “Mandy,” “Can’t Smile Without You,” and “Copacabana (At the Copa).”

Manilow began his career as a folk singer, entertaining beatniks in such flea-ridden New York City coffeehouses as Gerde’s Folk City, the Cafe Wha? and the Greenwich Village Starbucks at the corner of Waverly Street and 5th Avenue. Said fellow folk musician Arnie Van Gleb, “They didn’t actually allow music in Starbucks, so he would sneak into the bathroom and play there. At least until they broke down the door and threw him out.”

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Carole King is a paradoxical figure; having begun her career as an assembly-line songwriter with then husband Gerry Goffin at the famed Brill Building, where the couple collaborated on a number of highly successful songs for other artists, she went on become an archetype of the sensitive singer-songwriter–that avatar of authenticity who wouldn’t be caught dead singing songs written in the musical world’s equivalent of an automotive factory.

King’s move from West Orange, NJ to Laurel Canyon in 1967 was more than just a geographical one; insofar as it symbolized her transformation from song craftsman for hire to soul-barer, it made King–along with the likes of James Taylor and Joni Mitchell–the perfect embodiment of the soul-searching Me Generation.

King’s turn toward self-expression was well in tune with the zeitgeist, as was proved by the supernatural success of her second solo album, 1971’s Tapestry. Every sensitive soul in America owned a copy, including the two spinster ladies–they were probably only in their late twenties–who ran the Catholic Youth Organization meetings I attended as a teen, that is until it finally struck me that (a) I wasn’t even Catholic, but was only there to woo my first love, and (b) could be having a much better time doing drugs.

How many nights did I listen to Tapestry while looking at the cover and thinking “Why is her hair so frizzy? Why isn’t she wearing shoes? And what is that goddamn cat’s problem?” And for a long time afterwards, having abandoned King and the school of genteel singer-songwriters in general for the electric thrills of David Bowie and Frank Zappa, I chuckled at my silly and naive thralldom to the mild comforts and gentile thrills of this snug and familiar quilt of an LP.

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Once a decade or so a major label release comes along that is so utterly devoid of redeeming qualities you just know it’s going to go double platinum.

Take, as object lesson, Damn Yankees, the 1990 debut album by the supposed supergroup of the same name, who took their name from a 1955 baseball film about a Washington Senators fan who sells his soul to the devil for a chance to beat the hated Yankees, and is promptly transformed into the hitting sensation Shoeless Joe Hardy.

Combining the gonzo hard rock stylings of Styx’s Tommy Shaw, the tender romantic sensibilities of Ted “I Kill Mammals” Nugent, and the nebulous contributions of Night Ranger’s Jack Blades, Damn Yankees were hardly nobody’s idea of a rock and roll dream team. But on Damn Yankees they demonstrate a commitment to the cliché that is positively awe-inspiring, and over 10 cuts ingeniously manage to say (or play) not a single original thing.

The end result? Two million units sold and counting. Talk about your deals with the devil. Let this be an object lesson to you, young bands!

Damn Yankees is purely a cookie-cutter affair; it’s as if the boys in the band went down a list of bad rock tropes and dutifully checked off the boxes. Mega-successful suck-ass power ballad? Check. Song about a little girl lost in the big bad city entitled “Runaway”? Check. Song with the generic words “rock city” (i.e., “Rock City”) in the title? Check. Song with delicate acoustic guitars and soulful vocals kinda along the lines of “Dust in the Wind” only shittier? Check.

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Namaste, fellow seekers! And welcome back to the Vedic District and your host, Michael Paramahansa Yogananda Little! On this week’s turn of the cosmic wheel we’ll be discussing New Age seer and synthesizer-around-the-neck avatar Gary Wright, whose chakra-cleansing songs and mystical crystal revelations make him the most spiritually evolved being on our astral plane.

Wright was, arguably, pop’s first New Age musician. Forget George Harrison–who turned Wright on to Eastern religions while they were recording 1970’s All Things Must Pass–he refused to give up on rock and roll. And compared to Wright, Van Morrison and Stevie Nicks are mere earthbound materialists–the Bertrand Russell and Ayn Rands of rock, respectively.

It’s all there on the cover of The Dream Weaver, where a blissed-out Wright rests his head against what is either a telepod to other dimensions or the Findhorn Community’s very own jukebox–the man was staking his claim as the first New Age technocrat, enlisting the aid of machines to further the cause of the Harmonic Convergence.

And, boy, did Wright make a splash. Who, my fellow theosophists, can forget the Annus Mirabilis 1976, when a cosmic convergence brought us both David Spangler’s book Revelation: The Birth of a New Age and Wright’s June 11th appearance on The Midnight Special, where he cast a magickal sorcerer’s spell on an entire nation with his mesmerizing performance of “Dream Weaver”? Surely the stars were coming into alignment at last, and the Age of the Enlightened Unicorn was nigh.

Of course that exalted age never arrived, nor did Wright’s success last. But if the former Spooky Tooth keyboardist’s fleshly fame was fleeting, he has accepted it with Buddhistic resignation–having parted the veil of Maya, he knows all too well that all we are is dust in the wind. Yet he continues to mould a new reality closer to the heart with his ecstatic ectoplasmic musical emanations, which make the ideal accompaniment to both Kundalini awakening and sweatless tantric sex.

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Ronnie Lane is a hardly a household name, but he is one of my all-time favorite rockers. Whether with the Small Faces, the large Faces, or his own band Slim Chance, Lane’s lovely and wistful voice was always a pleasure, whether he was singing sublime ballads like The Faces’ “Debris” or “Oh La La” or knocking off a hard rocker like the hilarious Faces tune “You’re So Rude.” The world didn’t know what it lost when Lane died at 51 after suffering for 21 years from multiple sclerosis. But I can tell you what it lost; a soulful and sweet soul whose bass work and vocals had an integral impact on not just one, but two great rock’n’roll bands.

Lane was a frequent collaborator with the likes of Pete Townshend, Steve Marriott, and Ronnie Wood (the two of them recorded the soundtrack to the 1972 Canadian film Mahoney’s Last Stand, and it’s a tremendous series of rave-ups despite its almost total lack of vocals). He recorded four LPs between 1970 and 1977 with Townshend, but three of them are hard-to-find tributes to their spiritual mentor Meher Baba, who lent his name to the great “Baba O’Riley.” Their fourth collaboration was Rough Mix, which was released in 1977 and featured an all-star cast that included Eric Clapton, John Entwistle, Ian Stewart, Charlie Watts, King Crimson’s Boz Burrell, the ubiquitous John “Rabbit Bundrick, and Medicine Head’s Peter Hope Evans. Why, even Townshend’s father-in-law, the noted British TV and movie soundtrack composer Edwin Astley, makes an appearance. Sly Stone is right; this one’s a family affair.

Lane and Townshend eschew rock for the most part, opting instead to mine the folk-rock vein, and it works. Lane wanted to collaborate on songs with Townshend but Townshend declined, and this collection of songs by two separate songwriters has a disparate feel, which is another way of saying it’s stylistically all over the map. But what holds it together is the passion both men pour into the songs, which stray from pure folk ballads to a pair of rave-ups to a handful of songs that defy easy definition, but show that both men showed up at the sessions—this despite the fact that Lane had just discovered he was ill—at the top of their game. No throwaways, in other words, or songs they didn’t think were good enough for their primary bands—they came to record great music, not just fuck around and jam.

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Well here you have it–the most feckless, no account, totally useless dog turd of an album it has ever been my displeasure to hear. On 1992’s Unplugged axe legend turned pop hack Eric Clapton plays the blues with far less passion and commitment than your average 94-year-old lady puts into a game of Mahjong, laying waste to “Layla” and adding his live version of “Tears in Heaven” to the short list of contenders for worst song ever in the process.

The joke’s on me, I suppose. Here I’d been begging somebody to unplug old Slowhand for years, and when they finally did I got… this monstrosity. Be careful what you wish for.

Robert Johnson–whose “Malted Milk” Clapton does a grave disservice to here–sold his soul to the devil; Clapton sold his soul–or what little was left of it–to MTV. As it turns out, one is much safer making deals with the Lord of the Underworld. But I’m not blaming MTV; its corporate heads didn’t force E.C. to go the adult contemporary, easy-listening route. The decision to sleepwalk his way through the LP’s assortment of hoary blues covers and lackluster originals was all his.

Champions of this bland excuse for an album–and there must be legion, given it’s the best-selling live album of all time–will no doubt argue that Clapton had every right to play like a guy who’s taken too many muscle relaxants, and they have a point; Clapton’s mid-1970s conversion to the easy-does-it Tulsa sound is a matter of historical record, and you can hardly fault a guy for digging the likes of Clyde Stacy and J.J. Cale.

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The most excellent Martin Scorsese Rolling Thunder Revue documentary on Netflix is most definitely a must see, but I won’t be buying the accompanying box set Bob Dylan—The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings; sitting down to listen to 14 discs and multiple versions of the same song (eight of “Isis” alone) is a fatiguing proposition.

There are, of course, two other ways of aurally reliving Dylan’s traveling folk-rock circus of a roadshow, which made the rounds of smaller halls in two legs in 1975 and 1976. Like the box set, 2002’s The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue captures the roving band on merry minstrels on the first, Northeastern leg of the tour; 1976’s Hard Rain documents the second leg.

Hard Rain received poor reviews upon its release and never shows up on lists of great Dylan albums–as many have noted, the second, Southern leg of the Rolling Thunder tour did not go as well as the first. Call it road fatigue or a simple case of pushing a good thing too far, but the consensus is that Dylan and his band mates were tired; enervated is a word often used to describe these performances.

But–and you can call me a contrarian if you want–I enjoy Hard Rain, and would argue that, at least in parts, it’s better than the other two live recordings. Why? A simple case of song selection. No, Hard Rain does not include versions of the revved-up and extraordinary “Isis,” the impassioned and angry “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” or the divinely lovely “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” on which Dylan and Joan Baez’s vocals mesh so beautifully.

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Little Feat’s eponymous 1971 debut may not have changed the world, but to those who were listening it must have come as a revelation–here were four guys, two of ‘em Mothers of Invention alums, boldly staking their claim (and a decent claim it was) as America’s very own Rolling Stones. Not bad for a first outing.

Fronted by guitarist/vocalist and native Angeleno Lowell George–who with his gutbucket growl was the youngest white old black bluesman ever to graduate from Hollywood High School–Little Feat laid it on the line on their first LP. You get lysergic blues, trucker toons, some Sticky Fingers-school country honk–these guys took Gram Parsons’ concept of Cosmic American Music and ran with it. This is edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold music, the sound of the Mississippi Delta on hallucinogens–a mythical collaboration between Don Van Vliet, Dave Dudley, Mick & Keith, ZZ Top, Slim Harpo, and Harpo Marx.

Robert Christgau opined that these guys could “pass for” the Band, but he’s fulla shit. The Band always held things in check; they were as tightly wound as a clock, and clocks aren’t in the business of howling. They never hit as berserk a note as the Feat do on “Hamburger Midnight,” and there’s simply no mistaking the very agitated freak looking for safe harbor in “Strawberry Flats” to Levon Helm’s resigned drifter looking for a place to lay his head in “The Weight.” And the Americana-loving Robbie Robertson never could have come up with as song as bizarrely lovely as “Brides of Jesus,” which is set where exactly? In Lowell George’s LSD-scrambled mind?

No, the early Little Feat was a freak’s dream’s come true. Just check out the sorta Captain Beefheart-esque “Hamburger Midnight,” on which George plays some truly frenzied slide guitar and delivers the most unhinged performance of his career. Or “Strawberry Flats,” wherein poor Lowell (who’s been “ripped off and run out of town”) knocks on a friend’s door in search of succor only to discover: “His hair was cut off and he was wearing a suit/And he said not in my house, not in my house/”You look like you’re part of a conspiracy.”

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Talk about your unholy alliances. Michael McDonald and The Doobie Brothers? If you’re a fan of neither, it can only be compared to a disastrous corporate merger (remember AOL and Time Warner?) or, if you’re really a hater, the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

Ah, but if you’re a proud Yacht Rock captain, their coupling was a dream come true–the McDoobies’ first album, 1976’s Takin’ It to the Streets, produced not one but two smooth rock classics in the form of the title cut and “It Keeps You Runnin’.”

It was ace guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter who recommended fellow Steely Dan alum McDonald to the Doobs when Tom Johnston took sick with stomach ulcers (the result, no doubt, of massive guilt), so blame the stink on the Skunk if you want. But no matter where you stand on the band, there’s no denying that Mc’D’s addition gave the Doobie Brothers a new lease on life–their previous LP, 1975’s Stampede, included only one hit, and it was a cover. Despite continuing album sales, the Doobie Formula was growing stale, and the band’s quantum leap into easy listening kept them on FM radio.

Takin’ It to the Streets didn’t win the Brothers any critical love; The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, for one, famously dismissed it with the words, “You can lead a Doobie to the studio but you can’t make him think.” Oddly, Christgau seems not to have noticed the addition of McDonald and the band’s radical turn towards blue-eyed soul. No fan of either artist, he might have noted that their union was a laudatory thing, insofar as having them in the same place made it easier to keep an eye on both of them.

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