Fort Lauderdale News from Fort Lauderdale, Florida • Page 110

Friday, Noy. 21, 1980 Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel 22S mmi' I 7 I 7- Jim Morrison Unwrap a few 6 greatest hits By Cameron Cohick Rock pop writer hv reviews Greatest Hits, Volume Two Linda Ronstadt. I've said horrible things about Linda before, but I have nothing bad to say about this album. For my dollar, this record is the single greatest Ronstadt disc on the market. Not that it was assembled with any particular sensitivity; it's just Linda's latest crop of Top Tenners, 1976-80.

But there is a continuity and a unity here, nonetheless. A sort of vision, almost: seven rockers, all of them crisp and full and hot, plus four ballads, all cool and luscious and smooth. It all makes for a good balance, and there's no chaff, as on her studio LPs or even Greatest Hits, Volume One. The rockers, like It's So Easy, Back In The US.A., How Do I Make You, and Tumbling Dice provide the meat of the record, while creamy delights such as Ooh, Baby Baby and Hurt So Bad are the dessert. Only one qualm: eight of the 11 songs here were big famous hits for other artists before Ronstadt latched onto them, making this a real retread album.

Isn't that kind of bad, somehow, Pa? Let's not confront that deep moral question, son, this is fine listening, anyway. Oh, OK. Aerosmith's Greatest Hits. After all the ups and downs and ins and outs and building up and recanting and revisionism and changes mind and heart on the part of the rock-listening populace, Aerosmith turns out from the late 1980 vantage-point to be just about what everybody originally nailed them as: a B-team Rolling Stones who were trying to ape Led Zep sometimes too, just to be safe. But again, that's not bad.

That's good. Because they do, or did, pull it off. They are, or were, excellent as junior varsity Stones. This album shows off their limited but very real talents. Side one fares best, featuring three airplay hits.

Dream On, Sweet Emotion and Walk This Way, all of which are good (though Sweet Emotion has if burbling bass marimba opening hacked off.) Side two is short on what truth-seekers would actually call "hits," but it shows off the 'thick, dense style the band hall favored in later days. Big complaint; "Where's Big Ten-Inch Record, the only Aerosmith song hopry historians and earnest teen-agers will be playing 100 years, from now? It's omission was a big mistake, boys. And that reminds me where's One Way Street? And Uncle Salty? And Toys In The Attic? You can read this sentence, or a close variant, in rock columns every year: "It's getting near Christmas and record companies are gearing up for the big holiday sales push with the usual glut of 'greatest hits' Maybe you're getting tired of that sentence. I know I am. But so what? This glut isn't up to us; it's up to the big boys at Warners and Columbia, etc.

So that well worn sentence is just as true this year as it ever was. Why fight it? Instead, let's just have ourselves a look at some of the more interesting compilations: Greatest Hits The Doors. The Doors are cresting on a wave of unexpected but fully deserved new popularity, with several of their studio albums from more than a decade ago back on the Billboard charts and a Jim Morrison biography by Jerry "My Stuff Is Long But It's Dull" Hopkins and Danny "I Was A Teen-age Doors Groupie" Sugerman doing good business, as well. This LP, designed no doubt as the coup de grace to this wonderful resurgence, is a hit-and-miss affair. It could hardly be an all-around winner; capturing the Doors' essence on a single record is almost as, ridiculous a concept as doing the same for the Beatles OrBob Dylan.

Hard-core fans are likely to dismiss it as only a superficial collection; but then, this album isn't aimed at them. This is for the nouveau-Doors fan, and as an Intro sampler, it's not bad. Light My Fire is here, along with radio faves like Hello, I Love You; Touch Me and Riders On The Storm, (I can't understand why Frank Sinatra still hasn't covered those last two; they're right up bis alley.) There are also some good, rather odd choices: People Are Strange, Deve Me Two Times. What's missing is the twisted, slimy side of the group the long, serpentine numbers like The End or When The Music's Over and the murky, bluesy side, things like Back Door Man or Maggie McGill. And even a tingles fan could legitimately wonder why a non-hit like Not To Touch The Earth is included and Love Her Madly, a bona fide AM song, fcnt The answer to these problems tojjb skip Greatest Hits and pick up Weird Scenes Inside The tkd Mine.

Sure, it'll cost three or four bucks more, but you get more than twice as much music, a better title (the titles accurately reflect the imagination involved in programming each album, in fact), and all you'll really lose in the transition is Light My Fire. Go on, do it. Hits! Box Scaggs. It's a great country where even a guy named Boz can go from an unsavory, dog-pound rock 'n' roller to a slick, tux-wearing big-hit crooner. Of course, it helps if you can hop a bandwagon or two on your way up.

Boz went totus porcus (that's "whole hog" to you Americans) on the disco soul train a few years ago, and even now he's reluctant to get all the way off. His albums were never straight disco. But ever since he's been having hits, since about 1976 or so, the aesthetics of disco have been Boz's own: a high, slick gloss on the music, an undeniable smugness, a sense of ease rather than a sense of effort, a tireless cool in the face of good times or bad, and all of it happening In the city, not out on some cattle ranch or sugar beet farm or lonely highway. This isn't necessarily bad. Boz's smooth stylings, seemingly part of a conspiracy with the Doobie Brothers and Toto to bland-out the radio-listening population probably to soften us for further atrocities are actually kind seductive.

Lowdown, which is on this album, is a real good song to hear at daybreak after being up all night for one reason or another. Jojo, which is on this album, is one of the finest songs about a pimp ever recorded. Georgia, which is not, tragically, on this album, is blindingly lush, the aural equivalent of a camera zooming on Farrah Fawcett's oversized choppers. Breakdown Dead Ahead and Lido Shuffle, two rockers which are on this album, are welcome relief on the AM and a pleasant sight on jukeboxes everywhere. far, so good.

If you're going to pay money for a Boz Scj)ggs record from his "silky" phase, this might as well be the one. 4 One sleaze touch: Miss Sun first saw the light of day on this album, so it's not remotely a "hit!" yet. A typical move, but very un-cool, Boz. No class..