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H
Johnny gets distracted
Let It Rock
Johnny and the
Distractions
A & M Records
Let It Rock. Johnny and the Distractions' bid for a
national audience, is a polished, slickly-produced
album No doubt long hours were spent carefully
mixing, rewriting and overdubbing to get ev
erything perfect. As a result, much of what is
essential to Johnny and the Distractions' appeal
has been systematically destroyed, while at
times, using the resources available to acts on a
major label, they have aspired to new heights
The key to Johnny and the Ds music has never
been their technical proficiency or musical vir
tuosity, but rather the ur
gency and intensity of Jon
Koonce's voice Koonce is
not a gifted lyricist The
opening lines of So Com
plicated," possibly the al
bum's finest cut, pretty
much sum up everything
Koonce has to say and how
he says it: “Five boys in the
back of a van / night after
night we play, / play and
sing that rock and roll /
'cause that's the only
way / Ten years slip down
the drain / like no time at
all, / didn’t somebody warn
you / you're headed for a
ran
Once in a white he will capture an image with an
interesting line, word or phrase (“Octane
Twilight ’), but by and large he depends on an
emotional response to cliched and conceptually
limited verse, through gut-wrenching vocals so
seemeingly sincere and intense that, frankly, the
words are rendered unimportant
Testimony to the validity of this appeal is their
regionally released first album, Johnny and the
Distractions. On an independent label, it was
rather shoddily produced, but at the same time it
captured the essence of their appeal The very
rawness enabled Koonce's voice to come
through unfiltered and uncensored Koonce. like
Keith Richards during his rare ventures as lead
vocalist, forces your attention not because he s a
polished finely-tuned singer, but because any
body who sings with that kind of intensity, under
those limitations, demands attention His singing
hits at a gut level that technically skilled singers
rarely reach His voice is not so much another
musical instrument, as it is a vehicle for expres
sion
Let It Rock often stifles the raw expressive
ness of Koonce s voice with too much attention
paid to production and not enough to the baser
elements of his sound Particularly wounded by
the production are two of the four carryovers from
the first album, “Guys Like Me" and "Octane
Twilight.”
“Guys Like Me," once their “hit," is easily the
worst song on the album It contains none of the
vivacity of their first album or their live perfor
mances Koonce sounds as if he's dying because
he knows he's just going through the motions —
you can almost hear him cringing as he sings. His
voice sounds lackluster and contrived He's
changed a few of the words in the refrain,and this
also shows how utterly sick Koonce is of singing
it The listener feels as compromised listening to
the song as Koonce must have felt recording it.
Producer David Kershenbaum should be
relegated to producing the next ten Sheena
Easton albums for letting this song onto the vinyl
"Octane Twilight" isn’t as obvious a failure as
"Guys Like Me ” The “national audience"
production has taken most of the engaging
subtlety out of the song The faint piano that ran
through the background in the first album has
been replaced with more guitar, and the volume
of the bass is up so high in the mix it hammers
down your spine I guess musical understatement
is necessarily precluded with making sure the
audience can dance to an
easily identifiable beat All
subtlety is abandoned
when the song reaches the
line “You're a runaway and
I'm a bastard " On Let It
Rock Koonce sings it.
"You're a runaway and I'm
a BASTARD!” Instead of
seducing the listener as the
regional album did, Let It
Rock shoves many of the
finer points down our
throats
The bright spots, how
ever, are worth the occa
sional suffering "In the
Street" and "Shoulder of
the Road," the other two repeats from the first
album, are much improved on Let It Rock, due
mostly to the cleaner, more professional produc
tion
"Shoulder of the Road" kicks off the album,
and is really only improved because the brighter
production allows the listener to hear and feel it
better It's not exactly a rocker, but a cross
between that and a ballad with a climax that will
rival even the most turbulent rocker, and is likely
do send you sprawling out of your chair
"So Complicated” is arguably the best cut on
the album Musically the song is simple, but it
moves full-tilt and unrelenting to the end
Koonce s voice is at its finest on songs like this,
where the chord changes are few and far
between and he's allowed to howl and hoarse it
out without the hassle of changing keys
"So Complicated is only arguably the best cut
because My Desire", one of the strongest songs
in their live repetoire, has also surfaced on this
disc It is the only reasonably slow song on the
album, and shows off the band's flexibility, leav
ing the listener yearning for more It is a truly
wonderful performance that must be heard, if
only to appreciate how good a lousy voice can
sound
The other four songs on the album are basically
nondescript rock and roll tunes that are compe
tent, but not particularly noteworthy One can
only wonder why the album is named after "Let It
Rock", a tired phrase to begin with Perhaps it
was chosen because it expresses Koonces
approach to life: “No time for words / no time for
talk / no time for anything / just Let It Rock "
by gordon brown
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april 28, 1982