Great piece, Marshall! I don't think I've ever listened to the album, and you've got me curious...although I might skip Leroy Brown. I'm also storing away Rockwell's "adding leaves to his laurels" line to steal later, LOL.
I was at "The Main Event" at the Garden. I had near front row aisle seats, too. (I was still in the music business). Steeped in rock as I was, I was still amazed at his charisma. I understood what people meant by "phrasing" to compensate for whatever loss of efficacy in his pipes. I saw him and reviewed him about 10 times over the next 20 years once I became a newspaper critic a year later: Saw some great nights, and some bad ones, until I wrote a column begging him to retire that went "viral" thanks to syndication. Frank was often unhappy: The word we use now was not diagnostic then: He suffered from depression.
For me this wasn't his last great album. That would have been "She Shot Me Down." The Voice is laboring mightily under decades of cigarettes and Jack Daniel's, but the old mastery of phrasing and interpretation are there in spades, even on the unlikely pop/pap of the title song. A miracle he pulls off one last time.
Great piece, Marshall! I don't think I've ever listened to the album, and you've got me curious...although I might skip Leroy Brown. I'm also storing away Rockwell's "adding leaves to his laurels" line to steal later, LOL.
I was at "The Main Event" at the Garden. I had near front row aisle seats, too. (I was still in the music business). Steeped in rock as I was, I was still amazed at his charisma. I understood what people meant by "phrasing" to compensate for whatever loss of efficacy in his pipes. I saw him and reviewed him about 10 times over the next 20 years once I became a newspaper critic a year later: Saw some great nights, and some bad ones, until I wrote a column begging him to retire that went "viral" thanks to syndication. Frank was often unhappy: The word we use now was not diagnostic then: He suffered from depression.
For me this wasn't his last great album. That would have been "She Shot Me Down." The Voice is laboring mightily under decades of cigarettes and Jack Daniel's, but the old mastery of phrasing and interpretation are there in spades, even on the unlikely pop/pap of the title song. A miracle he pulls off one last time.