Sonny and Cher: All I Ever Need Is You : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

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John & Yoko. Grace & Paul. Paul & Linda. Sonny & Cher had the formula down years before any of those melodious romances hit the stage and were a hell of a lot more appealing too, although that may not be particularly significant–the same thing could be said for Louis Prima and Keely Smith. And let us not forget Paul and Paula.

The reason that Sonny & Cher are so much nicer to think about than the aforementioned crew of dilettantes, bartenders and their wives is that Sonny & Cher don't put on the same kind of airs. Their paisley bellbottom Sunset Strip days are long gone, they've made a spectacularly successful comeback by selling their love in much the same way the King Family sells household solidarity, garnished with a bit of that good old (what?) rock & roll and showbiz.

How you feel about them at this point pretty much depends on how you feel about showbiz in general. If you think that Johnny Carson is a honk and the Copa just a hangout for alcoholics, if you cannot abide the sight of black ties and/or tiaras between you and your artist-heroes, then you probably don't like Sonny & Cher; I have seen reviews of their recent albums by earnest 17-year-old rock critics lambasting the devoted duo entirely in terms of "us" and "them." And at the recent MCA convention in Burbank, when Sonny & Cher played a long, slick supperclub set climaxing with their eight-minute histrionic orgy on "Hey Jude," I observed people all around me set their faces in that grimace they never pulled out for bluejeaned mediocrities. And those that thought themselves too hip for this schmaltz would make remarks later about the "tastelessness" of it. Why? Because Cher tells Sonny she's not gonna ball him after the show, and drops innuendoes about the size of his dong?

Well, I'll settle for Sonny & Cher being just blue enough for them poor old farts and fraus in the belly of the beast, because I like slick supperclub music, I like glittery Las Vegas-style entertainment without one iota of artistic aspiration. I'll even put on a tie. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I would rather see Sonny & Cher with a bourbon and water in front of me anytime than squat sweating in another concert hall while another rock group runs through amplified oatmeal highlights from the last big album it took them eight months of over-dubs to produce.

On the other hand, there is the possibility that what works in a nightclub may not be so pleasurable on a wax disc spinning in your living room. In fact, Sonny & Cher have a problem that is the exact inverse of that faced by rockers who make good albums but can't play live; which is to say that, like almost all of their recorded post-comeback work, this album is just about as pristinely vacuous as it can be. Nobody expects their basic "gee aren't we lucky to have each other to keep out that bad old world" persona ("All I Ever Need Is You," "United We Stand") to change at this point, but they've filled in, extrapolated on and repackaged it under increasing layers of linseed oil for so long, through so many dinners and prime-time hours, that there is almost nothing left but a posture that is getting as soporific in its saccharinity as Tina Turner's sex-bomb riff is in its monotonous exploitativeness.

Despite the fact of absolute predictability, some of the stuff here works in a marginal way, sounds like something you can actually listen to, and some doesn't. "A Cowboy's Work Is Never Done" is great, opening with a mysterioso riff straight out of Emerson, Lake & Palmer (a famous menage-a-trois), and applying curiously successful quasi-Eastern riffs to the fine oater lyrics: "I used to jump my horse and ride/I had a six-gun at my side/I was so handsome women cried/And I got shot but I never died."

The title song may give your heart a flutter if you bear no aversion to reconstituted mush expertly laid out, and "More Today Than Yesterday" has a great arrangement jubilantly reminiscent of the horns on the Rascals' "With a Girl Like You." "Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again," a natural for the pair, suffers by a jerky carnivalish arrangement that makes the performance sound even more mechanical than it already is; "United We Stand" is recognizable but nothing really happens; and "You Better Sit Down Kids," a Sonny solo that's a highlight of their club act, comes off just as melodramatic and phony here as it did there, and should have been left on the shelf to shine in peace as the classic that it was. The rest isn't worth talking about.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not one of these cranks who goes around maligning love, or even Love. In fact, part of the point of this is that I'm so fed up with the pretentious, unprofessional welters of self-consciousness typifying the contemporary rock concert that I will enthusiastically lap up absolute schmaltz and pap if the show is good and the sequins in technicolor. But I still remember "I Got You Babe" and "The Beat Goes On" and the original "You Better Sit Down Kids." And I remember babe" and "The Beat Goes On" and the original "You Better Sit Down Kids." And I remember Johnny Cash and even flatulent old Tom Jones. And I wonder just what I have a right to expect.