A valentine to a West Coast drug dealer whose number was on every scion’s wall, “Kid Charlemagne” was too ebullient to be cynical, as any listener with ears can tell after Larry Carlton’s guitar solo fades, and too peppy about its subject to get farther than #82; but Walter Becker and Donald Fagen earned, I hope, a decent payout when Kanye West, after his handwritten plea to the authors and an offer Becker-Fagen couldn’t refuse, sampled it for Graduation‘s “Champion” (I will not link to it).
Tanya Tucker’s gift was to project the kind of ebullience impervious to cynicism. “Here’s Some Love” flirts with the aqueous electric piano clichés of late ’70s soft rock and is all the better for it, as Tucker’s rasp invests skipping-a-stone lines like “Keep it close to you and save it for a rainy day-ay-ay-ay…”
I imagine Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers jukin’ up Walter Egan’s “Only the Lucky,” and my imagination has perhaps overrated it because the author of “Magnet and Steel” wrote it.
The Hague
Wayne Newton – The Hungry Years
Barry DeVorzon & Perry Botkin Jr. – Bless The Beasts And Children
Billie Joe Royal – Under the Boardwalk
Meh
Olivia Newton-John – Dancin’ Round And Round
Maynard Ferguson – Rocky II Disco
Kiki Dee – Once a Fool
Goody Goody #1 Dee Jay
Sound, Solid
Aretha Franklin – Look Into Your Heart
Robin Trower – Caledonia
B.W. Stevenson Down To The Station
Atlanta Rhythm Section – Jukin’.
Kevin Lamb – On The Wrong Track
Good to Great
Tanya Tucker – Here’s Some Love
Steely Dan – Kid Charlemagne
B.T. Express – Close To You
Walter Egan – Only The Lucky
Prism – Spaceship Superstar
Humanizing The Vacuum 