Gladys Knight: Imagination : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Recent Gladys Knight albums evoke some of the same frustrations one feels watching an inferior Greta Garbo vehicle. During the Motown years, one could blame the insensitive studio for squandering the lady's talents on warmed-over Temptations material and worse. But now that the group has switched labels and has complete artistic control over its records, the issue becomes more complex for the group seems unsure of what to do with their newly won freedom. And the people they have chosen to collaborate with on this album display unfortunately derivative ideas.

Jim Weatherly, composer of the group's biggest hit, "Neither One of Us," was contracted to write half the tunes. His "Midnight Train to Georgia" (whose lyrical idea comes from Dionne Warwicke's "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?") works out fine. Otherwise, he seems afflicted with "Bridge Over Troubled Water" on the brain. On one side he has Gladys proffering herself as "an umbrella ... in these storms of troubled times." On the other, she's taking her man down "Where Peaceful Waters Flow," to a Pips arrangement heavily influenced by Aretha Franklin's arrangement of "Bridge Over Troubled Water."

Yet Gladys Knight seems determined to transcend even the most intransigent material. There's one moment in "Peaceful Waters"—when she sings "And if the sunlight hurts your eye, boy"—that overwhelms with the mystical, almost religious feeling, which is the keynote of Gladys' style.

And so it goes throughout the album: nice touches, brilliant moments overcome by the anonymous production and banal lyrics. The non-Weatherly segments are freer and looser, but still badly flawed. Two of the Pips are given a chance to sing lead, and one gives a touching reading to "Window Raising Granny," a nostalgic tune they wrote, heavily influenced by Bill Withers' "Grandma's Hands." Their arranger can't sustain the momentum Gladys so artfully develops in the album's only R&B number, the Barry Goldberg-Gerry Goffin "I've Got to Use My Imagination."

Imagination is exactly what this album so desperately lacks. Gladys and her brood seem to be aware of their collaborators' shortcomings—their next album, Claudine, will be written and produced by Curtis Mayfield.