Law and Order Revisited

[michelej1]

Lindsey Buckingham: Law And Order (Elektra)
Gene Sculatti
Creem, February 1982

ONE WAY TO assess the relative merits of any time frame is the measurable presence of oddballs. And, hey, it's no secret that oddball content in rock has dropped to its lowest postwar levels of late.

Plus, the problem is aggravated by the actual ravings of bogus oddballs – like that Fripp chump, drips like Peter Gabriel and the all-night jive of Britain's joyless division of gloom mongers. So, it's in short supply. This oddball deposit. This eccen-trics stockpile.

But it really doesn't matter. Because one of the best oddball LPs of the last nine or ten years is out now. And Law And Order, at least from this quarter, more than makes up for the paucity of similarly bent discs. This is pure mutant pop like you wouldn't imagine – warp-ed, subtle, provocative (is the character in ‘I'll Tell You Now’ contemplating staying home from school/job or planning on taking that big dive out the second story of Material World living itself?) I'm still reeling from the awesome beauty and cosmo-headed wigsnap of ‘It Was I’, which, in addition to being positively addictive, proves the absolute immortality and endless applicability of stupid, r&r lyrics (these courtesy of late 1950's two-hit wonders Skip & Flip). And there's an endlessly mysterious reading, tongue not entirely cheek-buried, loaded with Santo & Johnny dreamwalk, of ‘September Song’, the all-time death ballad (Kurt Weill writ it, Jimmy Durante hit with it). (Plus, it's on the same LP as ‘Satisfied Mind’...)

I don't suppose there's time or space to get specific about every inch of this weird platter – like how or where or why it features the most offbeat perc work in woodstick history, or how those billowy harmonies make ‘Mary Lee Jones’ the logical update of ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’, how ‘That's How We Do It In LA’, is the strung-out second cousin of ‘Long Tall Tex-an’, or the way ‘Bwana’ unites Brian Wilson with Africa as if it were perfectly natural. (The single, ‘Trouble’, is a precious distillate of the cool artesian water that ran through Sunflower itself, saved and salved to yet another impenetrable songsubject.) Have I made myself clear?

Later for o'ball fakery. This is the real thing.

Gene ‘Hipsomatic Version’