BOBBY BLAND: SAD STREET (1995)
1) Double Trouble; 2) Sad
Street; 3) God Bless The Child; 4) Tonight's The Night; 5) My Heart's Been
Broken Again; 6) I've Got A Twenty Room House; 7) Mind Your Own Business; 8) I
Wanna Tell You About The Blues; 9) I Had A Dream Last Night; 10) Let's Have
Some Fun.
And here is the news. First, Bobby covers ʽGod
Bless The Childʼ. The song is capable of yielding to the man, yet I wonder just
how adequately he could get into it at the moment — Billie Holiday had written
it just as she was getting out (tentatively) of financial straits, whereas
Bobby's well-being had not generally been called into problem for about thirty
years or so. As good as the song is, this reading is completely perfunctory,
and I'd rather see Bobby do perfunctory readings of less personal numbers.
For that matter, his other cover choice — of Rod Stewart's bedroom anthem ʽTonight's The
Nightʼ — is far more appropriate, even if the old man does feel the need to
change the "let me come inside" line to something less provocative
("let your lovelight shine" or something like that, I already forgot),
and even if the song is just as gauche here and now as it used to be when Rod
The No Longer Mod used it to help solve the demographic problem. But that's
Bobby, all right.
Next, it is really all about Bobby Bland and
his odd team of late-period songwriters to take the name of an old blues
classic about poverty and rejection (ʽDouble Troubleʼ) and apply it to something
more morally ambiguous: "I've got double trouble between my woman and my
wife / My wife runs my pocketbook and my woman is running my life". It's a
decent enough, slow-running, nostalgically recorded piece of blues-de-luxe, but
somehow these new-fangled attempts at taking century-old lyrical clichés and
reinventing them seem a little corny these days, don't they?
Maybe not quite as corny as the title track,
though — the album's attempt at a Significant Social Statement: seven minutes
of somewhat uncertain complaining about how "the streets used to be filled
with love, but all you hear about now is blood". Considering that Bobby Bland,
the troubadour of broken hearts and carnal passions, had very rarely taken to
heart the problems of society at large, this particular stab at a «grass-was-greener»
sermon is a failure, despite some impressive ingredients (such as a grim
wah-wah lead line crawling along those sad streets, sometimes threatening to
erupt in a poisonous solo but never capitalizing on the promise). Somehow I
doubt that the streets of Bobby's childhood were filled with that much more
love than wherever he was spending his advanced years in 1995 — but then again,
who knows. Maybe it's just his way of expressing dissatisfaction on the illegal
immigration issue.
Finally, the really odd one out on this album is ʽI Had A Dream Last Nightʼ —
from the title, one would never guess that the song is a thoroughly nostalgic
disco number, replete with disco strings and disco back vocals à la 1977. The band seems so happy with
being able to establish such a perfect facsimile, they forget to switch off the
tape when the song is over and just keep on grooving for an extra two or three
minutes. Nowhere near a great number, of course, but enough to give the
reviewer an opportunity to add one more paragraph.
All of which, in the end, amounts to no less
than five songs that merit a special mention — making Sad Street a record-breaking album in Bobby Bland's post-1970s
career, but still not enough to guide it over the «great for fans, useless for
everybody else» threshold.
Check "Sad Street" (MP3) on Amazon
"when Rod The No Longer Mod used it to help solve the demographic problem"
ReplyDeleteDo you mean the song makes men impotent? The demographic problem obviously is that Earth is overcrowded ....