#238
by Lori Alley
June 15 1980
Robert Gordon
Bad Boy
Genre: Rockabilly
Allen’s Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Lori’s Rating 2 out of 5
Lori’s Highlights:
The Worrying Kind
Sweet Love on My Mind
Digression #1 - My mother claims she was the Jitterbug champion of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia in 1950...something. So we grew up dancing to music like this in our living room. It's fun! This album is a characterization of all of those sweaty sideburns/saddle shoes/standup bass /hep cats/smokes rolled up in your tshirt/sock hops at the Grange. Robert Gordon is the Don Ho of Rockabilly, really this is all about his voice. Because he CAN sing this way, actually he SHOULD. He truly DOES have dulcet tones, and sounds like Elvis. But despite that his delivery seems phoned in, and actually is sometimes pitchy and off key. That's why I only gave this a 2.0 (I started at 3.5 but the more I listened to this the lower the score went down, especially on the "slow dances."). Gordon used to be in a punk band called the Tuff Darts, which had some acclaim because of their sense of humor, and probably their timing in the development of the whole thing. But they were punk in the same way Culture Club was "new wave." Anyway, some of the songs like "Torture" and "Nervous, " and "Born To Lose" well, don't throw me a softball like that, I don't even need to bother weaving those titles into my opinion. Truly terrible.
Digression #2 - I got married in Las Vegas in 1997 at The Little Chapel of the Flowers and on one of the days leading up to the wedding a bunch of us went to the Barbary Coast downtown (prob no longer there) to drink the margaritas out of the freezie machines and watch karaoke. There were at least four "Elvises" performing (one of them there with his mother apparently) and they were all vying for the stage. The problem is, they were all REALLY good. Which tempered our hilarity and taught us a lesson, goddammit. Elvises are not to be ridiculed! Even if their mother DID drive them to the bar! (Also, don't eat at The Stinking Rose the night before the ceremony. Everyone will smell like garlic and it will piss off your husband, then you'll leave him 5 years later). This is all to say, if you're sort of famous because you sound like Elvis, you better make it good, because he's a hard act to follow. Anyway, the only thing surprisingly NOT on this album is that old chestnut "There Ain't No Cure for the Summertime Blues." But that's okay because I can imagine him singing it anyway. Just listen to the first song, and you'll get the picture without the rest of the suffering.
No comments:
Post a Comment