(2 of 2)
Stung by his success with what the music biz still calls "middle-of-the-road" audiences, Billy Joel, an excellent balladeer and misplaced Broadway composer, set out to make an album that rocked harder and hung tougher. Although one of the tunes here is called It 's Still Rock and Roll to Me, the music sounds like Broadway without a book, and the lyrics are full of the backhand arrogance that Joel mistakes for true rock spirit. Midway through Side 2, Billy backs off a little and decides to flash his cosmopolitan credentials by trying a lyric in French. He isn't fluent in that language either.
Frank Sinatra: Trilogy (Reprise). Well, yes, he is weatherbeaten, and there is some rust in the pipes. Little relevance, less matter. Frank Sinatra gargling would still make most other pop singers sound like ventriloquists or, in some cases, their dummies. Trilogy is a rather unwieldy three-record set in which Ol' Blue Eyes explores the past, the present and the future. Each of the three sections carries a cumbersome subtitle (one is called Reflections on the Future in Three Tenses), but Sinatra checks this kind of weight at the door. There are some fine passes at old favorites (My Shining Hour, More Than You Know); some comfortable negotiating with contemporary material, including New York, New York, Billy Joel's Just the Way You Are (pay a little attention here, Billy); and, astonishingly, a beautiful rendition of Jimmy Webb's Mac Arthur Park, which Sinatra has built up simply by scaling down the psychedelic reveries (imagine him singing "Someone left the cake out in the rain") and letting a shimmering love song stand plain and perfect. The third record of the set is a Gordon Jenkins orchestral fantasia about things to come. It is entirely dispensable. For Frank Sinatra, the future is now.
Pete Townshend: Empty Glass (Atco). A diary of open-throttle intensity with no idling speed. Townshend, taking his second solo shot without the Who, cuts loose with ten songs that are like rounds of some unarmed psychic combat. I Am an Animal is a saw-toothed bit of self-mockery and self-appraisal, Let My Love Open the Door and A Little Is Enough love songs with a spiritual finish and a nice carnal edge, Rough Boys a terrific street anthem, and the title cut an elaborate meditation on musical survivors and musical pretenders. "I've been there and gone there/ I've lived there and bummed there/ I've spilled there, I gave there/" Townshend sings, and there are few rock musicians who can make that kind of claim and make it stick, fewer yet who can do it with such a feverish beauty. There can be no question: Townshend is one of the true life forces of rock music. Empty Glass is a promise fulfilled and renewed, most likely in perpetuity.
Jay Cocks