There's a song here which works perfectly well. Called "Catfish," it jogs along on a beat from David Bromberg's guitars while Danny O'Keefe happily offers himself to a girl in the country. Cheeky, provocative, he won't be too dismayed if she says no thanks. The track lasts barely two minutes, and Danny probably put it in to fill up the space. But it stands starkly as the only song which sounds as if the words and music evolved together.

There are plenty of precedents for a singer-songwriter album crammed with too many words, but there was justification for hoping for better things from Danny O'Keefe. His "Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues" is simply an American classic, and the LP it came from, O'Keefe, integrated Danny's wordy songs into strong rhythmic and melodic contexts. It looks as if Danny made that LP as a commercial concession to get himself an audience, and we now have what he feels is the real O'Keefe.

He would like us to remember that he never does the obvious. Like the characters in Dylan's John Wesley Harding, his people have allusive names—Harlequin, Magdalena, Angel. And like Dylan's, Danny's voice rarely takes the melodic direction that the listener anticipates. To get anything out of him, the listener has to concentrate, and is frustrated too often by the feeling that a strong story idea hasn't been properly translated.

Apart from "Catfish," "Magdalena" works. A tribute to a red-headed Catholic girl who vacillates between yes, no and maybe, it has some beautiful slide guitar from Hugh McCracken and steady help from the rest of the name New York musicians. "Angel Spread Your Wings" is lyrically simpler and probably destined to be the single, but I'm not convinced that Danny's voice possesses sufficient magic to carry the song to the Top Ten.

Two other songs could be loosely described as love songs, according to Danny's perverse definitions. "Mad Ruth/The Babe" is cleverly constructed so that Danny alternately describes the baseball player and a girl he knew called Ruth; clever, but so what? "The Edge" reads well on the printed lyrics sheet, a prostitute and a romantic debating about whether they should get together and if so on what terms. But Danny breaks the song up so much, the sense is lost.

The noble intentions of a couple of uptempo good-time numbers should probably be applauded, but they sound so clumsy, the album would be better off without them. The same is true of two Reality songs, "Junkman" and "She Said, 'Drive On, Driver.'" The second of these is a startling story of a woman who was beaten up by an impotent policeman which might have been chilling; but Danny's indifferent delivery precludes our emotional involvement.

If there's a moral to this record, it must be that producer Arif Mardin should go back to the Memphis/Nashville session musicians who made much better musical sense of Danny's songs than these New York musicians were able to. Or maybe Danny should worry more about the listeners, less about his determination to avoid the obvious. (RS 142)

CHARLIE GILLETT