The way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea
Continuing my trip back through the 1994 album charts.
14/08/94 : The Glory Of Gershwin - Larry Adler/Various
Yeah, it's against the rules but it's such a seriously odd and successful album that I feel I have to give it a spin. It's a celebration of Larry Adler's 80th birthday and features him on the harmonica along with various contemporary artists tackling Gershwin songs for no obvious reason other than that he knew them. I'm expecting some decent songs, some of which are done well and some of which are absolutely murdered.
Actually, there's very little Gershwinicide involved, but I would have to say it's a very peculiar album. Larry is good on the old harmonica, but there's only so much harmonica you can shoehorn in there (although he does a great job with "Rhapsody In Blue") so for the most part it's traditional songs done in a traditional way, sung by someone who's pretty famous but not known for tackling Gershwin numbers. And so the over-riding feelings are generally "why?" and "well, this is dull".
People who did the expected good job are Lisa Stansfield with "They Can't Take That Away From Me", Oleta Adams with "Embraceable You" and Willard White (of course he did a good job) with "Bidin' My Time". Of more interest are the people who I was expecting to bomb but didn't - Cher did a surprisingly good job with "It Ain't Necessarily So", Meat Loaf is unusually understated with "Somebody Loves Me" and I don't think anyone expected John Bon Jovi to do anything other than destroy "How Long Has This Been Going On", but he's surprisingly decent and the presence of Richie Sambora also works well.
Most of the rest of the tracks are bang average, but it's curious that Elton John doesn't really sound like Elton (and I've no idea why he got two songs which he just runs into each other), Kate Bush has a weird vibrato thing going on and they gave "Summertime" with its gorgeous vocals to Courtney Pine so they only had some backing singers warbling "oooh summertime", which is a waste. Robert Palmer at least gets bonus points for trying something different with "I Got Rhythm" (although I'd struggle to say it works) and it's only really Elvis Costello who doesn't exactly cover himself in glory (it's not good). But overall - WHY?!?
We're at #2 in the charts this week on their third week of an impressive 22 week run, with this being as high as it got but it spent its first three weeks there. The rest of the top five were a Wet Wet Wet best-of, The Prodigy, Orbital (a new entry, whch I'm sure I would have much preferred) and an Eagles best-of and the next highest new entry is Stereolab (#15) - what a curious bunch that lot were (and still are).
Wikipedia has very little to explain the mystery of the album's success, telling us it was produced by George Martin and the album cover is a pastiche of Pablo Picasso's Three Musicians painting - and that's your lot. It doesn't even tell us who played most of the music so those guys did some heavy lifting here for no publicity. Critically, there's only a 1.5 star rating from AllMusic but it's kinda critic-proof - who's gonna kick an 80 year old's birthday party? But commercially, people went somewhat over the top getting to #6 in Australia and #7 in New Zealand, which I can kinda understand - but I've got no idea what it was doing at #66 in Germany.
discogs.com doesn't have any copies for sale in the UK, but if you are prepared to order in from Europe then you can spend between 6 and 68 Euros with no obvious difference between the two - I suspect very few people are in the market for this though. I didn't hate it but it all felt completely pointless and a bit rushed - they could have made things a lot more interesting than they did, although I still wouldn't have understood its success . Well, that will teach me to break the rules, won't it? (spoiler alert - no, it won't)
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