This is a very fine Randy Newman record, perhaps not among his all-time greatest (that’s a tall order) yet teeming with cleverly caustic commentaries that rank among his best.
My mom got the cassette soon after it arrived in January ‘83 and it remained a constant for months, until I had every line of it memorized by the time she took me to see Newman live for the first time that April at Universal, when I was 14.
There was a time, so soon after their ascendency to superstar status, when the most enduring incarnation of Fleetwood Mac was on such good terms with former frontman Bob Welch that it remains baffling why he was left out of their Hall of Fame induction and acrimony ensured for decades.
Ok, yes, the fact that he sued them in ’94 for unpaid royalties probably had lots to do with that snub. Rewind to November 1981, however, when this star-studded set was captured at West Hollywood’s world-famous Roxy Theatre, and you’ll find they were rarely chummier.
The keen eyes and ears of @all.the.records summed up this phase of my already-leagues-deep dive into Christine McVie’s discography in a comment on the previous installment in this series: ‘The takeaway I’m getting from these most recent … posts is the members [of Fleetwood Mac] worked on a lot of songs or records during some downtime in FM in the early ‘80s.’
I’d go a step further, actually: non-Mac downtime work became the band’s new standard operating procedure post-Tusk.
Time again to play the vinyl community’s fastest-growing game: Who Among Us Remembers This Guy?
Reintroducing Robbie Patton, another likable wannabe rock star who caught his big break opening for Fleetwood Mac’s troublesome tour behind Tusk — although Christine McVie, whose discography I’ve been revisiting, clearly took a shine to him more brightly than she did the focus of our previous post in this deep dive, Danny Douma.
We’ve reached the point in my year-old deep dive into Christine McVie’s vast discography where we must ask, for the first of several times: Who among us remembers this guy?
If you were lucky enough to catch Fleetwood Mac during the first North American leg of their Tusk tour in late ‘79 — and you bothered arriving on time — then you probably saw a warmup set from this likable fellow, Danny Douma.
If anyone was entitled to craft New Age-y yacht-rock with a dash of disco by the dawn of 1979, it was the Beach Boys. Except that’s giving them way too much credit, as if they’d planned to do exactly that — when in fact L.A. (Light Album), perhaps the group’s most forgettable collection, is nothing but a hodgepodge of solo material patched together to keep CBS Records from suing them for breach of contract, lest they turn in zero music two years after signing to that label.
