Same Player Shoots Again

Most Pinball Machines have a mechanism that awards the player a free game, regardless of whether he wins or loses, as long as he manages to score a certain number of points. So it is, friends, in the record industry, where it's OK to be out of work as long as your phone bills are paid up and enough people have your number. For instance, Elton John calls Neil Sedaka and--bang!--Sedaka is on the charts again. Clive Davis gets a phone call and the deposed head of Columbia Records gets a chance to take over a floundering company (Bell Records) and make a dramatic personal comeback with his own label, Arista. Indeed, there were comeback kids everywhere you looked--from Janis Ian to Les Paul--in 1975. Bob Dylan was back in public, actually rubbing shoulders with the people. Grace Slick, Paul Kantner and Marty Balin, ex of the Jefferson Airplane, were back with the Jefferson Starship--making everyone who grew up in the Sixties and went through the whole acid-love trip feel more than a bit old (but happily so).

Yet personal comebacks, however triumphant or bizarre, and musical comebacks--the return of jazz as a commercial factor, for instance, or the breakthrough of reggae, which had been around before but had never quite made it--took a back seat to the comeback of the discothéque, which shook up just about every facet of the music biz. Briefly popular in the Sixties, discos lay dormant through the early Seventies until record companies--frustrated by the diminishing playlists of radio stations and the increasing cost of airplay--noticed, early last year, that records were getting on the New York charts without benefit of airplay. Next thing you knew, the companies were servicing the discos, first through a collective pool, then with individual disco departments. A new way of selling records--just what the world needed--was born. Discos--offering a relatively cheap form of do-it-yourself entertainment--caught on in Vegas, L.A., Chicago, San Francisco and just about everywhere. Fast-food restaurant companies started opening chains of discos. A convalescent home in Los Angeles started one. Murray the K--now, there's a comeback--opened his own disco in New York. Mobile discos (all you need are some audio-visual equipment and a jock) started making the rounds. With the Darwinian explosion of species that follows any music-business mutation, people started capitalizing on every aspect of the craze. TV shows now delineate the latest steps. And equipment makers have really been raking it in, especially as the technology has gotten more sophisticated (one disco, San Francisco's The City, boasts a 13-foot-high jukebox and a computerized $40,000 light show). A disco workshop was held in L.A., and a disco forum in New York (where Madison Square Garden was also the site of a Richard Nader production billed as the World's Biggest Disco Dance Party). Disco bootleggers appeared, too, peddling unauthorized tapes at good profits.

Of course, the discos, which depended almost entirely on records at the outset, started booking more and more live acts. All the record labels started trying to exploit the new market. Barry White, the breathless Buddha of soulzak, turned disco popularity into lots of bucks for 20th Century; Gloria Gaynor did the same for Polydor/MGM; the B. T. Express, for Scepter; Betty Wright and George and Gwen McRae, for T. K. Productions; Carol Douglas, for Midland International; and so on. Motown and Atlantic put out disco records, and so did James Brown. Arrangers like Van McCoy and Bert DeCoteaux started refining and developing the disco style, which involves long tunes, with calculated peaks and valleys in the arrangement--and, with few exceptions, a supersmooth, candy-colored sound. (It was no accident, perhaps, that the year's top disco record--and dance craze--was McCoy's ironically titled The Hustle and, while it was an attractive enough hustle, it wasn't a funky one but a carefully manicured, studio-slick sound.) And faded stars began returning on the wings of disco. Ben E. King, once the lead singer of the Drifters, then a star in his own right with Spanish Harlem and Stand By Me, returned with a new vocal range and a new standard for the lounges in DeCoteaux's Supernatural Thing. Shirley Goodman, who was half of Shirley and Lee (they helped usher in the primal age of rock by urging us to Let the Good Times Roll), had one of the year's early disco hits in Shame Shame Shame, produced after Shirley got one of those telephone calls--this one from her old friend Sylvia Robinson, once the Sylvia of Mickey and Sylvia, now an executive at All-Platinum Records. Frankie Valli--still heard crooning bits of his Four Seasons hits on the mail-order-record TV commercials--continued his comeback (begun last year) with a disco hit. And could anything dramatize the power of the discos better than the fact that Monti Rock, who'd been out of music, made it back with a disco record--and, in fact, became the rock-'n'-roll star he'd always pretended to be on the Tonight show?

It was, as some record-industry people pointed out, very much like the first rock-'n'-roll explosion, in the Fifties. Like then, the message was put out by the people and spread upward through the business. Like then, a lot of different properties began competing in the new marketplace. Like then, not all critics dug the new (continued on page 156) Music '76 (continued from page 144) sounds. And, like then, it didn't matter because the public was too busy bumping and hustling. Dionysus, who'd been backstage for a while, was again in the spotlight--one comeback of 1975 that shouldn't go unnoticed was the return of the "social position" (that means contact, fellas) in dancing--and rock 'n' roll was, in a sense, back where it started: funoriented, physical, a bit outré and very defiant.

It's no surprise that r&b music is big in the discos, but the success of jazz in the same milieu has raised a few eyebrows. But one of the left-field hits that got the discos rolling was Soul Makossa, by an African funk-jazz saxophonist named Manu Dibango. And among the year's comebacks was Esther Phillips, who rode the charts with a disco version of What a Difference a Day Makes, complete with heavy breathing and the other sensuous touches characteristic of the disco sound (there are always exhortations to "Do it!" superimposed on the music). Certainly, a lot of the jazz comebacks had to do with the use of r&b and/or disco-type material (everybody from Alphonse Mouzon to Stanley Turrentine was doing it), and with the continued interest generated by Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul and the other plugged sons of Miles (Stanley Clarke, a 23-year-old monster on electric and acoustic bass, took his jazz to unprecedented heights on the pop charts). Actually, though, since jazz records started making r&b charts two years ago (again, without benefit of airplay--a Billboard article attributed this to the collective cultural consciousness of the black community), jazz--in its various forms--has been enjoying an all-around commercial comeback. New York--thanks partly to the fervent efforts of radio station WRVR-- has gone particularly jazz crazy, as oldsters Roy Eldridge, Lee Konitz, Helen Humes, Gil Evans and Eddie Durham (of the old Jimmie Lunceford band) returned to 52nd Street, and the number of jazz clubs in The Apple jumped 300 percent in one year. The record companies, of course, were taking notice. Motown, 20th Century, Pickwick International and Polydor all started distributing jazz lines. A&M started a new jazz series of its own, as did Warner Bros. Veteran entrepreneur Norman Granz--he of the "Jazz at the Philharmonic" sessions--made a comeback with his Pablo label, distributed by RCA. Columbia, with such headliners as Hancock and Ramsey Lewis, reported "dramatic" sales of jazz releases. And, to top it off, a number of musicians and music-biz people started a World Jazz Association. All of which, when you consider that most of our popmusic forms are fundamentally jazzderived, proves again that what goes around will come around eventually.

Another form of music on the comeback trail was reggae. Veteran r&b radio listeners may recall the ska, and rocksteady, both reggae precursors; and reggae itself had a brief fling several years ago via Jimmy Cliff's sound track for The Harder They Come and Johnny Nash's reggae-inspired I Can See Clearly Now. But then there was nothing until the past year, which found Bob Marley & the Wailers, Toots and the Maytalls and the revived Cliff all scoring with albums and tours, and inspiring rock writers--who are in a continuous state of hunger for sounds that, like reggae, seem to revive the unadorned spirit of primeval rock--to frantic hyperbole. The deceptively simple music, with down-to-earth messages to match its earthy rhythms, proved to be as intoxicating as Jamaican ganja. Reggae stations sprang up in Boston, New York and Cleveland. Record stores in Brooklyn and Los Angeles began specializing in reggae. A reggae LP was entered in the mail-order sweepstakes. And if any further proof were needed of reggae's ascendancy, it lay in the number of "reggae" records put out by cover artists including Leon Russell, Taj Mahal and Eric Clapton (according to Marley, non-Jamaicans have yet to come up with anything that's close to the real thing). If the new market opened up by the discos was a reminder of the Fifties rock scene, so was reggae, by virtue of its simplicity, its pertinence and its drive. Not to mention its rebellious spirit.

In the personal-comeback field, nobody could claim a more impressive return than Clive Davis. Admittedly stunned and depressed after his sudden dismissal by CBS in 1973, amid rumors of payola and God-knows-what, he was asked by Alan Hirschfield of Columbia Pictures to build a new company on the ashes of Bell Records. Davis' corporate phoenix, called Arista, showed a 600 percent increase in operating profit after one year. And Davis--who was indicted eventually but only for income-tax evasion--hadn't done it by putting out junk but by putting out quality pop artists such as Melissa Manchester and the Outlaws, plus Monty Python's Flying Circus and a whole lot of jazz. The company's first signed artist was the revolutionary poet/singer Gil Scott-Heron; later releases spotlighted such modern masters as Larry Young, Larry Coryell and Anthony Braxton. Arista also started distributing Freedom, a European jazz label previously unavailable in the States and, toward the end of the year, acquired the Savoy catalog (that means lots of great stuff by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, et al.).

Davis' closest competitor for comeback-of-the-year honors had to be Bob Dylan, who had been one of his signees at Columbia. A facsimile of some old Dylan/Band rehearsals, The Basement Tapes, was the surprise LP of the summer. Then, Dylan came out of hibernation with the short-lived but memorable Rolling Thunder Tour, a many-splendored caravan--Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Allen Ginsberg, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Ronee Blakley, Bob Neuwirth and Arlo Guthrie were among the participants--that wound its way through a number of eastern sites, with great modesty; the safari proved to America that Dylan was still there, with his powers intact. Along the way, Dylan also found time to play Madison Square Garden, where he drew 20,000 people, at a top price of $12.50, for a benefit on behalf of imprisoned boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. What with Dylan and Scott-Heron, you could say the protest song was making a comeback, too.

Another spectacular comeback was made by the old Jefferson Airplane rockers Grace Slick and Paul Kantner; rejoined by Marty Balin, one of the original group's founders, they re-formed as the Jefferson Starship, got themselves a number-one album (Red Octopus) and went on a triumphant tour, playing music with love messages, unencumbered by the defiance that marked the group's acid songs back in the Sixties (after all, once you find out that the apocalypse is behind schedule, it's only natural to settle down a bit).

Another Sixties figure who made it back was Janis Ian, the New York Wunderkind who wrote Society's Child back when the love generation was coming on strong; after a period of personal and professional drought, she returned with a new material that hoisted two of her LPs onto the charts. Phil Spector, who was nearly wiped out in a pair of car crashes, was back in the studio. And down in Beaumont, Texas, the "Crazy Cajun," Huey Meaux, who'd produced a lot of great r&b and c&w records over the years, was back--after a Mann Act bust (something about a girl and some disc jockeys)--with a new protégé, Freddie Fender (himself an ex-con: marijuana), and a smash hit, Before the Next Teardrop Falls.

Also during 1975: Paul Anka got back on the charts, and the Allman Brothers Band got back on the road. Cupid made a comeback as John Lennon returned to Yoko Ono. Quincy Jones and rockster Paul Kossoff both almost died--from a brain aneurysm and a traveling blood clot, respectively--then came back from their illnesses. Simon and Garfunkel got back together for a TV appearance and one recorded tune. Booker T. and the M.G.'s were planning a comeback, too, when drummer Al Jackson, Jr., was shot to death by a burglar in his Memphis home (the rest of the group was still planning to regroup and come back). And, in your neighborhood record store, you probably noticed that a lot of old and not-so-old albums were coming back to the bins--at $1.99 and $2.99. Which makes us wonder if 1975 was really the year of the comeback, or--for the recording industry, which does not operate on the soundest of ecological principles--the year of the great regurgitation.

Records of the year

In the past, we had our readers pick the best big band, small combo and vocal LPs of the preceding year. This time, of course, the entire poll got transposed into a different key--so to keep everything nice and consistent, we asked the electorate to choose the best LPs in the four musical fields covered by the new format.

Best Pop/Rock LP: Red Octopus Jefferson Starship (Grunt). After a period of disorientation, the old Jefferson Airplane Bolsheviks--Grace Slick, Paul Kantner and Marty Balin--reunited and came back with a nonpolitical album featuring love songs, a relaxed sound and some mellow vocal duets by Balin and Slick (as on the jukebox hit Miracles). It's got to be the most popular octopus in history.

Best Rhythm-And-Blues LP: That's the Way of the World / Earth, Wind & Fire (Columbia). The newest real supergroup in the land, which combines jazz, soul and Third World sounds with a dynamic stage show (deus ex machina and what not), scored big with this album, which included an upbeat chart hit, Shining Star, and a ballad--the title tune--that's sure to become a standard.

Best Country-And-Western LP: Heart like a Wheel / Linda Ronstadt (Capital). Country? Well, yes--but also rock, r&b and lots of emotion as the full-throated minisiren did her thing to songs originally released by the Everly Brothers, Dolly Parton and Betty Everett (You're No Good--which, as a Top 40 single, was the tune that really put Linda over the top).

Best Jazz LP: No Mystery / Return to Forever Featuring Chick Corea (Polydor). This is the record that launched this dexterous jazz-rock quartet into music's rarefied reaches, as Corea, guitarist Al DiMeola, bassist Stanley Clarke and drummer Lenny White--all certified musical heavies--really exercised their chops on electrified cookers (Dayride, Sofistifunk), an acoustic tone poem (the title tune) and the two-part Celebration Suite, which combined both genres. Groups come and go--but a great album is a joy forever.

Best Pop/Rock LP

Best Rhythm-and-Blues LP

Best Country-And-Western LP

Best Jazz LP

Music Hall of Fame

It's no surprise that Stevie Wonder made it this time; he finished second to Elton John a year ago and he hasn't exactly faded since then. Stevie is the first black performer to make the Hall of Fame since Jimi Hendrix, in 1971, and the first bona fide r&b artist to make it since Ray Charles, in 1968. Saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, who died during the year of a massive stroke, finished sixth; he was not among the leaders last time around. Neither was John Denver, who came in ninth. Others who did not place a year ago but made the list this time were comebackers Neil Sedaka and Grace Slick, upcoming rocker Bruce Springsteen and reigning idols Linda Ronstadt (who also won in two categories in our poll), Gregg Allman and Olivia Newton-John. Gone from last year's list were the late trumpeter Bill Chase, Doc Severinsen, Jerry Garcia, Maynard Ferguson, B. B. King, Charlie Parker and Leon Russell. Upward progress was made by Peter Townshend, Paul Simon, Jimmy Page, Joni Mitchell, Barbra Streisand, Chuck Berry and David Bowie; among the backsliders were Keith Emerson, Ian Anderson, Neil Young and Buddy Rich. The top 25:

Readers' Poll

Unprecedented is the word for what happened here. Categories appeared, disappeared and merged as the poll itself got split into four parts. So, needless to say, there was plenty of carnage and waste at the top. It didn't affect Elton John; winner of three medallions last year, he did it again this time (hohum). Hall of Fame winner Stevie Wonder, who had a first, two seconds and a third a year ago, also made another strong showing as he won in two divisions of the Rhythm-and-Blues category--and made the list in three divisions of the Pop/Rock category (fourth on keyboards, third among the composers, ninth on drums). Doc Severinsen, a perennial double winner, did it again, too, in the Jazz section, as trumpeter and as leader of the readers' favorite group. Another double winner was fiery (and sexy) Linda Ronstadt, who was the readers' favorite female singer in both the Pop/Rock and the Country-and-Western fields; a year ago, Linda didn't win anything (she was seventh among the female vocalists). Besides Elton, Stevie and Doc, the only repeaters from last year were Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton, on bass and guitar, respectively, in the Pop/Rock sweepstakes; Buddy Rich (best jazz drummer); Edgar Winter (a medalist as the number-two alto player a year ago, he won--a surprise to some, we're sure--the new woodwinds competition in the Jazz section, which combines the tenorists and altoists with the clarinetists, baritone players, flutists and whatever); and Lionel Hampton, whose vibes category, small though it may be, stayed intact because it couldn't really be combined with anything else. All our other medal winners are new, and two of them didn't miss double victories by much: Roberta Flack was the top r&b female vocalist, according to the electorate, and second to newcomer Phoebe Snow as a jazz singer; José Feliciano was voted top jazz and fourth-best rock guitarist. Most of our new medalists weren't even listed a year ago; they include Phoebe Snow, a medalist in the Jazz field and a write-in entry in both Pop/Rock and Rhythm-and-Blues; Ray Charles, top jazz male vocalist, who finished among the bandleaders but not the singers in '75; Kris Kristofferson, who turned out to be the readers' favorite c&w composer; Roy Clark, ace country picker; and the winning groups, the Eagles and Average White Band, in the Pop/Rock and Rhythm-and-Blues categories, respectively. But the changes at the top don't really begin to indicate the extent of the violence below. For instance, in the Rhythm-and-Blues division, 23 of our top 25 male vocalists were not listed a year ago (Stevie and Marvin Gaye are the only two who were). And of our leading r&b composers, only the top two--Stevie and Isaac Hayes--made the list in '75. of course, the same is true of our Country-and-Western winners: Only three of the top 25 male vocalists--John Denver, Gordon Light-foot and Charlie Rich--were mentioned here last year and only one of the top 16 composers (Tom T. Hall). In fact, only three of our top 20 male vocalists in the Jazz section--Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra and Joe Williams--made it last year. Performers in these fields have been pretty much covered over by the Pop/rock avalanche during the past few years, so the results this time would appear to smile on our intention--stated in December, when we published the revised ballot--of opening up the poll so that more people could win medals. Here's how it all came out.

1976 Playboy Music Poll Results

Pop/Rock

Male Vocalist

Female Vocalist

Guitar

Keyboards

Drums

Bass

Composer

Group

Rhythm-And-Blues

Male Vocalist

Female Vocalist

Composer

Group

Country-And-Western

Male Vocalist

Female Vocalist

Picker

Composer

Jazz

Male Vocalist

Female Vocalist

Brass

Woodwinds

Keyboards

Vibes

Guitar

Bass

Percussion

Composer

Group