1974 Mfsl

The Doobies team up with the Memphis Horns for an even more Southern-flavored album than usual, although also a more uneven one. By this time, Tom Johnston, Patrick Simmons, and company had pretty well inherited the mantle and the core (and then some) of the audience left behind by Creedence Clearwater Revival and John Fogerty, with Johnston songs like "Pursuit on 53rd Street," "Down in the Track," and "Road Angel" recalling pieces like "Travelin' Band," while Simmons' "Black Water" (their first number one hit) evoked the softer side of the "swamp rock" popularized by CCR…

After springing for three double-LP songbook albums in three years devoted to Cole Porter, Noël Coward, and George Gershwin, Atlantic Records tracked Bobby Short to his lair for a fourth two-disc collection in December 1973, setting up recording equipment in the tiny confines of the Cafe Carlyle where Short had maintained a permanent residency since 1968. There, over two nights, the tapes picked up a typical selection of standards by Porter, Harold Arlen, Vernon Duke, and other interwar songwriting masters, plus some more recent material, played by Short's piano trio, which also featured Beverly Peer on bass and Richard Sheridan on drums…

"War Child"'s achievement is in its music: some of the richest in recent memory, the arrangements are consistently stunning in their execution, courting excess but impossibly balanced by admirable dexterity. Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that "Skating On The Thin Ice of The New Day" is one of my favorite songs (a musical epiphany, if you will).

Bob Dylan and the Band both needed the celebrated reunion tour of 1974, since Dylan's fortunes had been floundering since Self Portrait and the Band stumbled with 1971's Cahoots. The tour, with its attendant publicity, definitely returned both artists to center stage, and it definitely succeeded, breaking box office records and earning great reviews…