Jim Nabors
The Best of Jim Nabors (Sony Music Special Products 15824)

Reviewing a Jim Nabors CD is as easy as smothering a baby, and for the most part, just as satisfying. Easily one of the least appropriate vocalists ever to be allowed near a recording studio, Jim Nabors managed to sustain a very successful singing career based, as far as I can tell, entirely on his benign goofiness and his celebrity name.

In fact, his celebrity itself doesn't actually seem to be rooted in a talent for acting or singing, yet he's one of the most beloved entertainers of the last 40 years. Even those who hate "The Andy Griffith Show" (as I do, to self-mutilating extremes) want to like him for something, and settle on an ironic appreciation of his hilariously awful albums. His masterful torture of "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" is well-known through its inclusion on the first Golden Throats anthology, but the reality is that Nabors was able to mangle pretty much anything he could wrap his buttery baritone around.

The masterpiece of misery here is "Alone Again (Naturally)," which is a totally ill-conceived pop song in the first place, much less in Nabors' hands. Basically a meditation on death and suicide, "Alone Again" wasn't much good when Gilbert O'Sullivan did it, but Nabors performs it so utterly unconvincingly that it somehow attains greatness. You get the distinct feeling he knows he's singing pretty much only for rural grandmothers and closeted gay men over 60.

Through the course of this CD he pushes every conceivable emotional button, yet never manages to convey any recognizable human emotion. The man's owes his success to the fact that the majority of mainstream America thinks with all the depth of one of the lobotomy cases in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Other laughable lowpoints are "Bridge Over Troubled Water" (as epic in its bombastic badness as the original is in serious beauty) and "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree," the original of which I actually love, but this version is as bland as the jar of mayonnaise Nabors obviously consumed immediately before laying down his vocal. Similarly ill-advised covers of "Cabaret," "You've Got a Friend," and "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" deliver chuckles in the expected places.

The disc bogs down a lot in pap like "Speak Softly Love" (the love theme from "The Godfather") and "Sunrise, Sunset." What someone should do is compile a CD of Jim Nabors' real best of, collecting all the wonderfully terrible performances and omitting the treacly standards to offer maximum cringe for the buck. The scope of his tastelessness is not done ample justice here.

It'll take a bit more time and a few more blood clots in my brain before I can work my way up to approaching an Andy Griffith album, so until Ron Howard releases his long-awaited solo album, I'm sated on CDs from the former residents of Mayberry.

I worry only that no one will pick up the baton and keep the legacy alive. Who shall be the wrongheaded crooner for the next generation of sarcastic bastards? Step forward, Reginald vel Johnson. You've got the old folks' trust already … go for it!

Loud Bassoon rating scale

Review by Will X-Force