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SOLO DEBUTS FOR ROCK STARS
By JOHN ROCKWELL
Published: September 20, 1981
A solo album by a member of a rock band is always fraught with a certain danger. The very act of deciding to make such a disk can put a strain on the band's sense of itself as a communal enterprise. If the record proves successful, the harmony may be further disrupted. If it fails, the individual loses credibility both within the group and with the public.
The reasons for making such records are many. An artist can feel constrained by the chosen style of her group (since the individuals to be discussed here are women, we might as well use the feminine possessive pronoun) and wish to explore some different idiom. Or she may be tired of the group, and have every intention of going out on her own if enough people buy her solo album. Or she may simply be restless.
Neither Stevie Nicks nor Debbie Harry has announced any intention of breaking up their respective groups, Fleetwood Mac and Blondie. Actually, it seems unlikely that there will ever not be some sort of ''Fleetwood Mac''; the band has gone through so many shifts of personnel and survived that Mick Fleetwood and John McVie could probably carry on by themselves if they had to. Blondie without Miss Harry, however, who is Blondie, would be unthinkable.
Both women have come forth with their first solo albums recently, and neither represents all that striking a departure from the styles of their parent bands. But both seem commercially successful, with Miss Nicks's ''Bella Donna'' (Modern Records MR 38-139) at or near the No. 1 spot on the charts and Miss Harry's ''KooKoo'' (Chrysalis CHR 1347) lower down but climbing sturdily.
Miss Nicks's album is essentially an extension of the slightly posey, little-girl-playing-dress-up-witch dramatic and musical image she has propagated in her songs on Fleetwood Mac's recent albums. But it is also the most appealing of the albums under consideration here. Miss Nicks's voice, which grows periodically frayed and unsteady under the pressure of touring, sounds solid enough, although it has hardened in timbre, too, and lost some of its reedy fragility. Her backup bands from track to track consist mostly of Los Angeles session men, with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on some cuts and the whole brew seasoned by miscellaneous Eagles and Roy Bittan of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band. They all provide good, tough, inventive rock arrangements that complement Miss Nicks's songs and singing. The songs themselves, composed between 1973 and 1980, range attractively in mood, but the themes are a li ttle hackneyed. Like toomany rock stars, Miss Nicks writes directly f rom her own experience. The trouble is that her current experience is that of being a rock star, which is a theme handled with greater p oetic insight by other writers. She also is fascinated by the occult and by love, but once again her treatment of these ideas is not str iking from a strictly verbal standpoint.
Still, rock songs, like all songs, work from a blend of music and words, not by words alone. Miss Nicks's songs, especially when sung by her, attain an individuality that is both seductive and undeniable. ''Bella Donna'' may not signify the liberation of a talent heretofore curtailed by membership in a band. But it is a nice record.
Miss Harry's ''KooKoo'' is more striking as a concept, for the alliance of potentially synergistic talent, than as actual sound. On its recent albums Blondie has used Mike Chapman as its producer, although Giorgio Moroder contributed a fascinating arrangement and production for the single ''Call Me.'' At one point Mr. Moroder was going to be used for the last Blondie album , but for various reasons the collabora tion collapsed. Miss Harry and her boyfriend, Blondie's guitarist Chr is Stein, then turned to Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards to pr oduce Miss Harry's solo debut.
Both Mr. Moroder and the Rodgers-Edwards team are known for their work in disco, the latter with Chic. But in the past few years Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Edwards have branched out to produce records in varied styles by other artists. Now that disco is ''dead,'' they have given Miss Harry what amounts to a dance-rock record with snippets of other idioms.
The trouble is that the songs are neither so wide-ranging as those on recent Blondie albums nor are they illuminated with Mr. Chapman's gift for the clever pop hook. Miss Harry has long epitomized the minimalist-robotic school of singing. If Miss Nicks is full of eccentric personality, Miss Harry is the dispassionate, witty but cool chronicler of sexual and societal mores. That puts all the more emphasis on the arrangements, and on ''KooKoo'' the arrangements just don't seem that special.
Miss Nicks and Miss Harry, on their own or with their bands, are two of the most popular female pop singers on today's market. Another is Pat Benatar, whose third album, ''Precious Time'' (Chrysalis CHR 1346) has already streaked to the top of the charts and fallen back a bit.
Miss Benatar has incurred considerable disparagement from the rock press. She is not this writer's favorite, either, but many of the complaints about her seem undisguisedly sexist. Miss Benatar's chosen idiom is male-strutting, macho-aggressive heavy-metal rock. People find her assumption of that stance to be calculating and false, but it is tempting to see their complaints as a simple unwillingness to accept any woman on what has conventionally been male turf.
Yet the Wilson sisters of Heart were not dismissed with such scorn when they imitated the sound of Led Zeppelin. There is something calculated about Miss Benatar's little growls and the gritty guitar chording of her otherwise neatly controlled band. On the other hand, many of the most popular male soloists and male bands today are similarly calculated. And Miss Benatar does have a fine, strong voice. If one's idea of rock-and-roll is still of burning, personal expression, then she will not seem very interesting or important. But on the level of the workaday entertainment that epitomizes mainstream popular music today, all honorable craft with few aspirations to anything higher, she fulfills a function that is not so despicable as some of her detractors seem to think.