Contributor

55 items by Jon Landau

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  Band On The Run | ALBUM REVIEW

  Everyone eventually winds up writing about themselves — the problem is finding the best way to go about it. To write about oneself literally, in the first person, presumes a more interesting personal life and philosophy than...

  January 21, 1997 12:00 AM ET
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  Live In Europe | ALBUM REVIEW

  This poorly recorded double-record set shows John Fogerty's musical personality in a somewhat different light from his studio recordings. Although he runs through the songs with characteristic discipline, he seems looser and occasionally more energetic than usual....

  February 1, 1978 12:00 AM ET
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  Mardi Gras | ALBUM REVIEW

  In the future, Mardi Gras may be known as Fogerty's Revenge. After all the carping about his egotism, and after the published complaints from his co-workers about his hogging the show, he has done what I never...

  May 26, 1976 12:00 AM ET
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  Dylan the Mythmaker Makes It Real | ARTICLE

  The Rolling Thunder Revue has come and gone on the East Coast, leaving in its wake an aura of good feeling and anticipation over...

  January 15, 1976 2:30 PM ET
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  Positively 84th Street: Echoes From the Basement | ARTICLE

  Bob Dylan has always sealed his decisions with the unexplainable. His motives for withholding the release of the magnificent Basement Tapes will...

  September 25, 1975 1:25 PM ET
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  Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy | ALBUM REVIEW

  First things first. This is one of Elton John's best albums. He hasn't tried to top past successes, only to continue the good work he's been doing. And he's succeeded, even taking a few chances in the...

  July 17, 1975 12:00 AM ET
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  Just Another Way To Say I Love You | ALBUM REVIEW

  Barry White seemed so filled with self-parody at first that it was easy to dismiss him. But it is becoming increasingly obvious with every additional release that he is a very talented man. His distinction rests with...

  July 3, 1975 12:00 AM ET
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  Rock 'n' Roll | ALBUM REVIEW

  As a performing group, the Beatles began by playing old rock favorites, for dancing, to tough audiences in Liverpool and Hamburg. When they began writing seriously, they discovered that they couldn't compose in the early American rock...

  May 22, 1975 12:00 AM ET
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  Young Americans | ALBUM REVIEW

  The title song of David Bowie's Young Americans is one of his handful of classics, a bizarre mixture of social comment, run-on lyric style, English pop and American soul. The band plays great and Tony Visconti's production...

  May 22, 1975 12:00 AM ET
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  Blood On The Tracks | ALBUM REVIEW

  Bob Dylan may be the Charlie Chaplin of rock & roll. Both men are regarded as geniuses by their entire audience. Both were...

  March 13, 1975 12:00 AM ET
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  Pendulum | ALBUM REVIEW

  Pendulum is yet another promising but unsatisfying album from America's best singles band. The tunes are good, the lyrics adequate with a few exceptions, and the musicianship of everyone in the band has improved. The flaws lie...

  February 5, 1975 12:00 AM ET
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  Wrap Around Joy | ALBUM REVIEW

  Since her landmark Tapestry, Carole King has both oversimplified and overelaborated that masterful album's style until her music has become something more overtly but less effectively personal. The spontaneity and simple joyfulness of her earlier Brill Building...

  November 21, 1974 12:00 AM ET
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  It's Only Rock 'n Roll | ALBUM REVIEW

  It's Only Rock 'n Roll is a decadent album because it invites us to dance in the face of its own despair. It's a desperate album that warns at the end of one side that "... dreams...

  October 16, 1974 12:00 AM ET
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  New Rolling Stones Film Feels Too Stuffed | ARTICLE

  At the performance I attended of Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones, I was handed a Stones' frisbee as I entered the theater. Nonplussed,...

  June 20, 1974 10:45 AM ET
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  Hotcakes | ALBUM REVIEW

  Hotcakes holds up well and represents an intelligent approach to commercial record making. Her past albums were serious-sounding with playful overtones; Hotcakes is playful-sounding with some serious overtones — a balance that best suits her for the...

  June 6, 1974 12:00 AM ET
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  Innervisions | ALBUM REVIEW

  With his last three albums Stevie Wonder has replaced Sly Stone as the most significant individual black innovator in the twin fields of R&B and rock. He has also replaced him as the most popular black music...

  June 6, 1974 12:00 AM ET
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  Let Me in Your Life | ALBUM REVIEW

  Aretha Franklin's Let Me in Your Life is one of the few recent R&B albums that places the emphasis entirely and deservedly on a voice. Many R&B producers have been making records on which the singer is outshined...

  April 11, 1974 12:00 AM ET
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  Court And Spark | ALBUM REVIEW

  On first listening, Joni Mitchell's Court And Spark, the first truly great pop album of 1974, sounds surprisingly light; by the third or fourth listening, it reveals its underlying tensions. The lyrics lead us through concentric circles...

  February 28, 1974 12:00 AM ET
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  Livin' for You | ALBUM REVIEW

  The black urban record buyer has inevitably turned against the rural soul style pioneered by Stax and Atlantic records of the Sixties. They've instead chosen the pop R&B preferred by some Motown producers and the entire Gamble-Huff-Bell...

  February 14, 1974 12:00 AM ET
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  Mind Games | ALBUM REVIEW

  Mind Games is, to my knowledge, the first release from the conceptual country Nutopia, whose existence John and Yoko proclaim in a Declaration on the lyric sheet. Oddly enough, it isn't all that different from the records...

  January 3, 1974 12:00 AM ET