CHER: FOXY LADY (1972)
1) Living In A House Divided;
2) It Might As Well Stay Monday; 3) Song For You; 4) Down, Down, Down; 5) Don't
Try To Close A Rose; 6) The First Time; 7) Let Me Down Easy; 8) If I Knew Then;
9) Don't Hide Your Love; 10) Never Been To Spain.
With a title like that, you might be expecting
a bunch of tight, hot, sweaty Hendrix covers, but no dice. Once again, the
album was produced by Snuff Garrett, with only marginal involvement from Sonny,
yet the results were much less satisfactory than on the previous record. Two
reasons come to mind immediately. First, the arrangements have become much more
schmaltzy, with excessive use of Vegasy orchestration overshadowing the basic
melodies — and second, Cher herself has become much more schmaltzy. The entire
record, for crying out loud, sounds like one big rehearsal for an upcoming
Vegas gig.
The best song of the lot is probably the first
one, ʽLiving In A House Dividedʼ; although written by corporate songwriter Tom
Bahler, it was a totally appropriate choice for Cher to sing, considering her
strained relationship with Sonny at the time. However, the arrangement is
dreadfully generic, and the vocal performance is completely unconvincing —
again, Cher finds it hard to express broken-hearted suffering, trying to
compensate for this with a powerhouse screamfest, but ultimately she just ends up
stuck somewhere between pain and
anger, and the emotional potential of the tune ends up wasted. (Compare
ʽGypsys, Tramps & Thievesʼ, where the anger mode worked to
near-perfection).
And yet, the tune is still better than almost
anything on this collection of mostly boring, hyper-orchestrated musical slush
where everything goes wrong — mediocre songs, by-the-book arrangements,
uninvolved singing. Leon Russell's ʽA Song For Youʼ is another possible
exception, but the song has been covered by just about everybody on Earth, so
why would you want to add a Cher version? At least somebody like Karen
Carpenter could capture all of its nuances and make it sound like a dialog
between her two inner selves — Cher knows nothing about nuances, and besides it's
almost impossible to picture her being "alone now and singing this song
for you", considering how natural it is for her to "act out my life
on stages with 10,000 people watching".
There is no need whatsoever to comment on all
the other schlock here; the main problem is not the songs, the main problem is
the performer — she cannot even show a decent sense of humor on Hoyt Axton's
ʽNever Been To Spainʼ, a cool demonstration of friendly ignorance and endearing
nonchalance on which she ends up badly overacting and ruining the joke.
(Granted, it's not as bad as the far more popular Three Dog Night cover, but
only because Cher as a concept by which we measure our pain is vastly
preferable to Three Dog Night in the same function in general). The only thing
left to do, really, is just wonder at how they could miss the point so badly
second time around — but then, the Sixties already showed us that the Cher
story would always be a random lottery of many losses and few wins, and Foxy Lady, alas, initiates yet another
losing streak, not to mention firmly cementing the dame's Seventies' image as
that of a glam Vegas queen. Which worked all right for her at the time, to be
sure, but now it's thumbs down all the way.
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