Lot Better, and his rendering of Curtis May- What do you do if the Emperor has plenty field's It's All Right just proves how good of clothes but won't wear them? What hap- Mayfield was before he decided to get Signifi- pens when the artist simply can't do one more cant. The band, which is excellent throughout, cheap turn for those who applaud madly when defers to Rivers' vocals on sideone, but on the same two -note riff is hit harder but miss side two they become equal partners, andthe most everything else? Playing Fifties rock as musicians really cook on Willie and the Hand if Sixties rock had never existed doesn't make Jive, Got My Mojo Workin', Over the Line, much sense to me; I think it will eventually and Turn on Your Love Light. This isa very prove disastrous to assume that rock and satisfying album. J.V. nuance are mutually exclusive. Russell appar- ently agreed with me when he wrote such DIANA ROSS: Touch Me in the Morning (see songs as Delta Lady-which he sings here as Best of the Month, page 75) if it were a meaningless jumble of syllables wired into the conditioning of those whose LEON RUSSELL: Leon Live. Leon Russell need is not for music but for key words, (vocals, piano); Don Preston (guitar); Joey names, trappings, hardware, statistics, data, Cooper (guitar): John Gallie (organ): Carl something not to listen to tonight but to talk Radle(bass); Chuck Blackwell(drums); about tomorrow. Black Grass (backing vocals); various others. Few albums ever so candidly caughtso tal- Mighty Quinn Medley; Shootout on the Plan- ented a performer in the act of sandbagging. tation; Dixie Lullaby; Queen of the Roller N.C. Derby: Roll Away the Stone; It's Been a Long Time Baby; Great Day; Alcatraz; Crystal Closet Queen; Prince of Peace; and nine RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT others. SHELTER STCO 8917 three discs CARLOS SANTANA/JOHN McLAUGHLIN: $11.98, 0 8X2C 8917 $12.98, 0 4X2C 8917 Love Devotion Surrender. Carlos Santana $12.98. (guitar); John McLaughlin (piano, guitar); Performance A minor atrocity Larry Young (organ); percussion. A Love Recording: Good Supreme; Let Us Go into the House of the Lord; Naima; and two others. COLUMBIA KC Come a-runnin', kids; good old Fifties rock- 32034 $5.98, 0 CA 32034 $6.98, © CT and,roll is being revived once again, and you 32034 $6.98. wouldn't want to miss that. Actually, Leon Russell held this particular revival meeting Performance: Lasting last year in the Long Beach Arena, but thanks Recording: Excellent to the magic of greed, which makes it possible Some time ago, Carlos Santana teamedup for you to buy a copy of every grunt a rock with drummer Buddy Miles for an interesting star makes, you can share in this event. The Columbia album, but that effort mustnow timing is no problem, since Fifties music is take a distant back seat to the fruits of San- routinely "revived" every two weeks, and tana's collaboration with John McLaughlin,a apparently will continue to be until we're all guitarist who worked with (and influenced) safely ensconced at the Great Sock Hop in Miles Davis before forming hisown Maha- the Sky. vishnu Orchestra. This, to my mind, is the Timing was no problem for Leon during the ultimate fusion of jazz and rock in theirre- Long Beach concert, either-he simply found spective, current stages of development,a Designed the tempo that Jerry Lee Lewis alwaysuses merger that produces a highly rhythmic, so- and stayed with it all night long. Aside from phisticated music mirroring more the present the judgment involved in committing that sort than the past, a music that so takeson the ...So small that it of thing to a three -disc album, there aren't character of its players that it becomes theirs more than forty or fifty things wrong with this alone. package. shows full size in this McLaughlin and Santana are outstanding Before we get too deeply into that, though, guitarists, and their work hasnever been 1/3 page ad. let me acknowledge that I've noticed what heard to better advantage, from the delicate "Leon Live" spelled backwards is-but the Spanish moods of Meditation and John Col- ...To sound bigger question is, which of us is the yin and which trane's Naima to the electrifying, fierce beau- the yang? I think this album fairly faithfully ty of Let Us Go into the House of the Lord than a 2 page spread. records the unspoken conspiracy between and another Coltrane composition, A Love some artists and some audiences to pass off Supreme. Larry Young, who has been with ...To delight you choreography as spontaneity, chaos as excite- McLaughlin for some time and now calls him- ment, noise as music, and-if you want to get self Khalid Yasin, exhibits subtleties fewor- sociological about it-crudeness as populism. when you hear it. ganists are capable of, and the percussionsec- Here, as in Leon's stage and tube act, there tion includes such experts in the field as form- seems to be some sort of mass role playing, er George Shearing sideman Armando Per- people going through motions they associate aza, former Miles Davis associate Don Alias, with being "turned on" by entertainers who and McLaughlin regular Billy Cobham. BY really know how to boogie. You can hear in Let us hope that this album marks but the Leon's vocals, or even in the automatic beginning of a collaboration from which great pounding of his piano, that he is bored silly EZ[IrrifIREMM things can be expected. C.A. with this garbage-as what intelligentper- former wouldn't be? In Canada: Len Finkler Ltd. PATRICK SKY: Songs That Made America Distributor Leon is intelligent, you see, is talented, is Famous.Patrick Sky(vocals);orchestra. Export Agents: ELPA capable of nuance and idiomatic communica- Marketing International, Ltd Child Molesting Blues; The Pope; Yonkers New Hyde Park, N.Y. 11040 tion. He certainly knows enough about music Girl; Rock Star; Okie; and eight others. to know that he didn't use a hell of a lot of tal- ADELPHI AD R4101 $5.95. ent getting these sounds out and recorded. Surrounded by stage-fillers-hand-clappers, Performance: Fair Scintrex Inc. Recording: Good Amherst Industrial Park hangers-on, writhing girls who've memorized Tonowanda, N.Y. 14150 some Gladys -Knight -type harmonies-he has With all the new talk of payola in the record merely pounded and hollered until it was time business, this is an album 1wouldn't have to go home. (Continued on page 94) CIRCLE NO. 62 ON READER SERVICE CARD 92 STEREO REVIEW