Neither Ian Hunter's You're Never Alone with a Schizophrenic nor Steve Forbert's Alive on Arrival boasts any special thematic pretensions, but both records set off reverberations that reach deeper than any particular track on either. Each offers an affecting wholeness, a rare unity of mood, that makes its own statement as much between the lines as in the grooves. Forbert calls one of his songs "Steve Forbert's Midsummer Night's Toast," while Hunter, despite a preference for fast ones rather than ballads here, somehow always manages to sound like a venerable rock & roll King Lear, raging passionately against the elements. Or like Hamlet, sitting in the graveyard, holding his own freshly unearthed skull (instead of Yorick's) in his hands, gazing into its eyeless sockets and prophesying autumnal doom.

None of the lyrics of either LP is as important as the way Forbert and Hunter sing them. Steve Forbert shines like Charlie Chaplin's smile on a sweet summer night, his youthful high spirits disarming all criticism as easily and innocently as a pretty girl's figure breaks hearts. Some of his tunes aren't even that terrific, it's just that once he's got you hooked on his free-flowing enthusiasm, every little vocal wink is irresistible. With great strength, Ian Hunter works the darkness on the edge of town. He's out there, an aging, James Dean desperado under the eaves, bending rock & roll phrases in ways that define both meaning and genre. Like Sam Spade turning Brigid O'Shaughnessy over to the cops, he sings: "It's just another niiiiight!"—which tells you right away that it isn't. And in his three near-bardic soliloquies, Hunter elevates certain everyday events from the familiar to the fabled through the sheer force of his I've-seen-it-all conviction. Alive on Arrival is about being twenty. You're Never Alone with a Schizophrenic is about not being twenty.

Steve Forbert's a Mississippicum-New York City singer/songwriter with so much honesty and energy that he overwhelms his songs with the punch of a punk rocker without ever sounding like one. Though his feverish folk-rock bears no resemblance to either the Sex Pistols or the Clash, he trashes (without trying to) such exploitative New Wave spinoffs as Joe Jackson, the Police and the Boomtown Rats while absolutely annihilating the stilted pseudorockabilly posturings of Dwight Twilley and Robert Gordon. There's little calculation here, simply raw talent (the best kind, really) blasting through the roadblocks and over the finish line. People will tell you that Forbert sounds like the early Bob Dylan, but even if they're right, they should be ignored. In 1979, such an approach is misleading and won't get you to the heart of this or any other matter. Anyway, people will tell you anything.

"I'm glad to be so young/Talking with my tongue .../Glad to be so crazy in my day," Steve Forbert beams just a few seconds into his debut album, and those lines are a perfect summation of what's great about Alive on Arrival. Side one practically explodes off the turntable, the tour-de-force singing coming straight at you like a field-of-fire missile with have a nice day painted on its warhead. In "Goin' Down to Laurel," Forbert's so hyperkinetic and positive that he doesn't even hear someone who's trying to tell him a hard-luck story. "Yeah, best of luck and all/And try to have some fun," he mouths matter-of-factly before soaring into what he's really interested in: "They tell me this great life can always"—a pause while he dives for cover from a volley of drumbeats—"END!," though the vitality of the vocal belies anything but further adventures.

Laurel may be "a dirty, stinking town," but the singer "know[s] exactly what [he's] going to find" there. He's got more than enough confidence, in "Steve Forbert's Midsummer Night's Toast," to hoist a triumphant shot glass to the bad things in his life: "Here's to all the shitty jobs that I despise," he grins, and it's catchy. Throughout the record, fierce and funny asides roll off him like eager beads of sweat. The joyous, stop - start, Buddy Holly-hiccupy "What Kinda Guy?" is a snappy series of such sendups as "I'll tell you truly/ That I sometimes lie."

One of the best qualities about Alive on Arrival is that Forbert, though he's "Sitting and listening with a young man's ear/To all the rainbow dreams," preaches direct action instead of navel-gazing introspection. It's not that he's against the dreams themselves, but he can't stand the idea of just mooning around waiting for them to come true. In "Thinkin'," after the lines, "I look in your eyes/I see shackles and chains," there's a tragicomic, fall-away "Awwww!" that gently but succinctly savages someone who's been rendered helpless by analyzing to death all of life's options. This kind of stuff is not for Forbert. In the LP's masterpiece, "It Isn't Gonna Be That Way," he gets very hardheaded about it:

You've traveled so far

The wind in your face

You're thinking you've found

The one special place

Where all of your dreams

Will walk out in line

And follow the course

You've made in your mind

Hey, it isn't gonna be that way...

Totally possessed by the passion of his performance (it's difficult to say which is better, his singing or his harmonica playing), he comes up with an answer that would do Ian Hunter proud: "You'll just have to live/And see what you find."

Of course, Alive on Arrival is far from perfect. What's curious about it is that you can skip the whole second half and, with the possible exception of "Big City Cat," not miss a thing. Puffed-up naiveté, archetypal singer/songwriter self-pity, precious sensitivity and meaningless repetition—in short, all the flaws and philosophies scrupulously avoided on side one—dominate side two and sink it like a stone. But it doesn't matter. Because nothing, nothing in this world, is going to stop Steve Forbert, and on that I'll bet anything you'd care to wager.

Ian Hunter doesn't make many mistakes on You're Never Alone with a Schizophrenic. Though he's theoretically old enough to be Steve Forbert's father, he writes and sings more like an especially fatalistic coconspirator: the deadly but protective William Holden figure, in a rock & roll version of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, to a gang of younger, more impressionable shootists. Hunter knows all about the promises of life—and, despite their ominous price tags, he's still exhilarated by them—but he knows about death and taxes, too. His ace in the hole is experience, and he uses, with compassionate precision, high cards that only the veteran professional gambler would dare employ: the ironies of success and failure. Through misunderstanding, young Romeo and Juliet will die for love, but Hunter damn well won't. He'd rather go down fighting, holding out for the chance of a last-ditch miracle, because in the end, old hearts take loss harder. They know what it means.

Quite simply, You're Never Alone with a Schizophrenic is my favorite record so far this year. (Somewhat similar to Street-Legal, it makes Bob Dylan sound sick.) Thanks to co-producer/guitarist Mick Ronson plus keyboardist Roy Bittan, bassist Gary Tallent and drummer Max Weinberg from Bruce Springsteen's E Steet Band, Ian Hunter's lion in winter is given a rock & roll roar commensurate with the combustion of his vocals and vision. Not only do the fast songs here match the great rockers from Hunter's Mott the Hoople days (cf., 1972's All the Young Dudes, 1973's Mott), in some cases, they're probably better. In "Just Another Night," "Wild East," "Cleveland Rocks" and "When the Daylight Comes," Tallent's driving bass pounds like a sprinter's pulse, Ronson's guitars galvanize gloriously and Weinberg's drums crack like bullwhips.

"Just Another Night" and "When the Daylight Comes" are classics in the "Sweet Jane/"Rock & Roll" tradition (Mott the Hoople meets Lou Reed's Velvet Underground): seemingly about nothing, they turn out to be about everything—and it's all in the evocative repetition, not in the raucousness. "When the Daylight Comes," in particular, is a beauty. The ultimate on-the-road composition about women (and writing), it boasts enough braggadocio and bashfulness to more than justify the album's title. While the lyrics lurch from almost primal purity ("Alive shines in your eyes; the hungry years are so nice/Our shadows shake in the lamplight—no writer could explain") toward winsome desperation ("I wanna weave you in words, wanna paint you in verse/Wanna leave you in someone else's dreams"), the song fills up with meaning as you listen to it. "Wild East" is a tribute to East Coast music and mores (as opposed to those of the unWild West), while "Cleveland Rocks" pays witty homage to that fine rock & roll city. "Bastard" is the LP's odd number. It's a love song in the form of a domestic quarrel, with lines like these: "Space cow, I'll chew the bad blood running through yuh/Kiss you as you hit the floor."

Ian Hunter's balladic ambitions have always been based in excessive melodrama, and the record's three slow songs bear this out. Never afraid to shoot for the moon, Hunter generally utilizes the power of the positive cliche for ammunition. More often than not, he hits his target, too. "Ships"—the kind that "pass in the night"—is a lovely tune about the difficulties involved in a father-son relationship. As singer and dad talk by the sea, there seems to be an understanding. But then you think back to Hunter's first words ("I said love's easier when it's far away") and his father's last: "He said it's harder now we're far away/We only read you when you write."

"Standin' in My Light," a diatribe against someone who's preventing the artist's success (more than likely himself), is You're Never Alone with a Schizophrenic's most moving musical moment. An anthem about getting up off the floor and taking another swing, it starts softly with organ and voice, builds slowly as the band comes in and then just goes through the roof on the choruses. Though Hunter denies it, I think the song's about punk rock—a genre he staunchly supports — and the commercial inroads it's made on his brand of rock & roll. There's real love/hate here: "You take my pictures from your walls/Ain't gonna trade with the pain 'n the New York Dolls."

According to Hunter, "The Outsider" is a recurring dream he's had for years. On the surface, it sounds like yet another outlaw number, but its images are surprisingly delicate and timeless. The first two lines could have come from Falstaff, the third and fourth from Warren Zevon:

Death be my mistress—guns be my wife

Breath is my witness—'n the roads are my life

I just skinned my future as clean as a knife

In a bar on the way from L.A.

After the "Just killed a man in a town called Night Falls/I'm damned if I can remember it all" verse, Mick Ronson plays some electric guitar worthy of Neil Young. And Hunter finishes up by railing against what "The Outsider" and much of You're Never Alone with a Schizophrenic are really about: growing up, growing old and dying. On an album filled with the word night, one thing must be said. This man does not go gently.

If ever two LPs complemented each other, Alive on Arrival and You're Never Alone with a Schizophrenic do. While Steve Forbert's still reveling in his first embrace with music and women, Ian Hunter's hoping this isn't the last good kiss. For Forbert, it's simply the end of the beginning. For Hunter, fortunately, it's nowhere near the beginning of the end. Who can say which is more wonderful or heartbreaking. (RS 296)

PAUL NELSON