Diana Ross: Touch Me in the Morning : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

In the light of the huge success of Lady Sings the Blues, the prospects of further contemporary recording from Diana Ross seemed heartening. The film revealed an astounding forte for instinctive acting. The soundtrack was a head-on confrontation between Ross and Holiday. Would the experience kindle an atypical interest in the blues? Reveal a new-found orientation as a jazz singer? Or would the film remain a fait accompli, secure in its own vacuum, without influence on Diana's riotous road to the sin-palaces of Vegas?

Touch Me in the Morning, unhappily, charts its course away from Harlem, sidestepping Detroit, finally arriving somewhere in Nevada. It's a near total rejection of her previous pop style, embryonic on "Stop! In the Name of Love," flowering on such Ashford-Simpson collaborations as "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" and "Remember Me." It is long on the "values" that nullify flights of imagination or individuality: spineless songs, full of nebulous over-familiar sounds that fade into aspic arrangements.

The title cut is the sole success on terms Ross has made her own. The perfect choice for a single, it nags with a vengeance. The verse begins with the familiar, molasses-like phrasing. The chorus builds as the singer's strength wanes; the song becomes a desperate plea. Finally, the two moods merge, double-tracked. The rest of the album wavers between this high point and the doldrums of flaccid cabaret posturing. There's a half-baked attempt to tone up "All of My Life" and "Leave a Little Room" with the help of a female chorus and a monologue straining for sincerity, but the songs, characteristically, are too antiseptic to contain them. Ashford and Simpson used these devices, along with a fretting piano and a rock-steady beat, to coax Diana beyond her natural tendencies to supper-club crooning. (They also wrote some excellent, energetic songs.)

Some of the more frustrating (because intriguing) attempts to vary the material concern the plight of the black family. "My Baby (My Baby My Own)" is the loveliest of these, sung with the intimacy of a Gershwin lullaby in a lower register that's almost a continual subdued wail. However, the "Brown Baby"/"Save The Children" medley refuses to work musically. "Save The Children," an integral part of Gaye's What's Goin' On, refuses to be pulled out of place.

Touch Me is drastically underperformed, short on engaging music and lacking in any direction except Ross's pursuit of the middle-of-the-road. It represents a disturbing misuse of an intelligent, unique talent.