The Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by former President Richard M. Nixon from a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals under which large portions of some 6,000 hours of White House tape recordings will eventually be released to the public.
—The Times, November 30, 1982
PICK HIT:
The Benefit Concert
MUST TO AVOID:
Bad Rap
Nixon, Haldeman & Dean: Blunder Down the Road (District of Columbia) Not up to their Smoking Gun debut, though audio-wiz producer Alex Butterfield’s notorious “walls of sound” remain serviceable. The B side is dismissable on the merits, but with Dick’s country-bluesy growl on “Can of Worms” and Brushcut Bob’s proto-new-wave incantation of “$900,000,” side one will pass as professional heat-taking at its baddest. But bad is as good as they get on this outing. Which is as it should be, and the profundo-paranoiac high of Nixon/Dean’s smoochfest-asdialectic “They Are Asking for It / What an Exciting Prospect” didn’t change my mind. Bet they didn’t change theirs either. B MINUS
Nixon & Dean: Bad Rap (Panmunjom import) The biggest ripoff of this or any century, with no less than eleven of twelve cuts mere soup’s-on rephrasings of Nixon’s own ’50s and ’60s anthems (all six extended-play “Crises” plus “Pumpkin Papers,” “Communist Issue,” “Anna Chennault,” “Hoover Told Me,” and the man’s all-purpose signature tune, the self-fulfilling “This Thing Burns My Tail”). Besides which, when Tricky isn’t covering himself he’s covering Janis Joplin’s “Bobby Was a Ruthless (Characterization Bleeped),” a charisma-grab not half as perverse as smoothie Dean’s foray into faux-gospel backup antiphonies (“Absolutely!” “Totally true!” “That’s correct!”), musically okay—Tormé meets Torquemada—but commercially misguided. D MINUS
Nixon, Dean & Haldeman: The Benefit Concert (Creep) You can’t play jailhouse mariachi with church-charity-bazaar chops, but these guys can—and did, in the definitive March 21, 1973, concert to aid prisoners of conscience victimized by Sirica-style justice. Unified by the rhythmically haunting Latinfluence of former house band Liddy & His Cubans while aspiring to the bigger, cleaner sound of Vesco & the Mexican Laundry, the gang finds its groove in a three-route statement melding socio-folkie concern (“How Much Money Do You Need?”), absurdist riffs (“Who Is Porter?”), and spiritual smarts (“As God Is My Maker / We Need More Money”)—for sheer ride-this-thing-out staying power, the greatest album of all time. Dean, in superb voice (shoo-in airplay hit: “Cancer”), comes into his own as a soloist forever peerless even by the standard later set in the legendary Capitol Hill sessions. El Tricko, feeling his Quaker oats, pours on that baritone cream and serves up instant classic (“It Is Wrong That’s for Sure”), while Haldeman brings home the metaphysical bacon with late-breaking roboticasardonica, viz. “fatal flaw / verbal evil / stupid human errors / dopes,” and none dare call it doowop. Not that all this means I have to like it, but I love it. And they almost get away with it. A
Nixon, Dean, Haldeman & Ehrlichman: Wild Scenario (Enemies List Productions) Search-and-seize tempos, thesaurus lyrics about “furtherance” and “concomitance”—as long as they kept breaking a few simple rules, there was no reason why this ensemble couldn’t parlay its deeply involved harmonies into a pure celebration of criminal liability or even better. Ehrlichman’s showboat presence here is an acoustic plus, and though his surprisingly apt cover of Liza’s “That Problem Goes On and On” hardly bespeaks the “deep six” poet whose witty improvs would quasi-compensate for the group’s ultimately fatal loss of the Dean pipes, it wears far better than Nixon’s descent into bubblegum-maudlin, “We Can’t Harm These Young People”—so indictably un-danceable that you ignore it at your own peril. B
Big Enchilada (N.Y. Bar Association) How you respond to this morose tribute compilation, which offers touching originals by Kleindienst (“Mitchell and I”), Haldeman (“Cover Up for John”), and Ehrlichman (the catchy title tune, natch) as well as ye-olde-memory-lane perfunctoriana (the Chief’s “Good Man”), depends on your tolerance for sodden wee-hours-in-the-studio sentimentality about an aging master-performer never adequately recorded in his own right. I’d feel better about Henry Petersen wailing “LaRue broke down and cried like a baby / Not fully he broke down / But when it came to testifying about John Mitchell / He just broke down and started to cry” if Petersen knew as much about blues changes as he does about LaRue’s tear ducts, or if I knew as much about Mitchell as I would if somebody had bothered to mike him where it would do the most good. Still, on this one they make you care, or at least they would if they knew how.
B MINUS
Nixon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean & Mitchell: Inaudible (Sony) Dumb title, and every word of it is true. Either Butterfield was asleep at the switch or this is a concept move for the Japanese abstraction market—a waste of plastic and, with Mitchell sitting in, an even worse waste of Enchilada exotica. Giveaway: “Yeah, yeah—the way, yeah, yeah, I understand. Postponed—right, right, yeah / Yeah, yeah / Right / Yeah / (Inaudible).” But they’ve never sounded looser.
C PLUS
Nixon & Kleindienst: Let’s Stand Up for People (Grand Jury) This tortured after-you-Alphonse act recycles the basics of limited-hangout obscurity into strategically meaningless polyrhythms aching to transcend their own pungency. That a lot of it is artfully incoherent must mean Dick & Dick thought the long-overdue synthesis might just come naturally, but the album divides too neatly into standard-issue I-know-you-know hooks, standard-issue you-know-I-know hooks, and standard-issue I-thought-you-ought-to-know-I-know-you-know hooks, plus a defiantly throwaway A-side opener, “Would You Like Coffee? Coca-Cola?”—one of those ersatz-icky coat-the-palate numbers played with such jumpy, nerve-jangled insincerity that it leaves you nursing few illusions about this pair’s ability to cross over to simple pop truths. C MINUS
Nixon & Dean: The Dean Farewell Tour (Washington Post) You want soulful resignation, they’ve got soulful resignation, and they’ve got it with spark (fave: “Feet to the Fire”). You want the rush of live jamming, they’ve got that too, with sound effects (“I Am Sorry, Steve, I Hit the Wrong Bell”). Nifty strokes that put this partnership’s final stamp on an electronic heritage. A MINUS
Nixon, Rogers, Haldeman & Ehrlichman: Really Ticklish (Dash) Even more painful than was intended. Sideman Rogers (who?) may be the turnoff element here, but by this time the group was so beset by personnel instability that distinctions are moot. Synth-zomboid Haldeman’s “Façade of Normal Operations” tells more than it knows, and only Ehrlichman has the spirit to lighten the prevailing funk, mustering a Segrettiesque sense of theater and playfulness for two Randy Newman–type persona pieces, “Suspend These Birds” and “Dean Is Some Little Clerk.” Maybe I’m taking it personally, but it seems to the Dean of American Rock Criticism, aka Some Other Little Clerk, that the dream was over, and not a point in time too soon. F PLUS
1983