 Richard Harris It's possible to appreciate A Tramp Shining on a number of levels. Some may genuinely love the melodramatic Jimmy Webb compositions as interpreted by the wildly self-absorbed Richard Harris. Others may marvel at the sheer incredibleness of this oddball creation and thereby enjoy it on a "so bombastically bad it's good" sort of level. I myself violently hated this upon the first few listens, yet it remained in my tape player—there is a very unwanted addictive quality to A Tramp Shining that is just unrelenting, but begins to be very, very satisfying. In time, I passed through "so bad it's good" and came to truly love the album, though I would be hard-pressed to explain why to any degree of coherence. "Paper Chase" and "Name of My Sorrow" are highlights, and great songs whether you think they're good-good or bad-good, while "Dancing Girl" and "A Tramp Shining" are tremendous tests of the listener's patience (along with the obtrusive "interludes" that stop up the flow of the album after nearly every track). As for the famous centerpiece of the album, "MacArthur Park" continues to divide music fans some 35 years after its composition and 25 since its incarnation as a disco mainstay. It's an opinion everyone must form by themselves, and one that in many ways can illuminate what type of music listener you are. Jimmy Webb gets some props for classics like "Wichita Lineman" and "The Highwayman" among others, but he hasn't been embraced the same way Burt Bacharach has recently, perhaps because he's a bit earthier and less associated with the lounge-music trend. It's hard to imagine a young songwriter given the sort of control and artistic latitude that Webb was given in creating A Tramp Shining, and quite a bit harder to imagine one creating such an impressive album with the vocal contributions of an actor rather than a singer (and Harris is definitely an actor, not a singer, as evidenced by his numerous albums of "singing"). It would be somewhat like Billie Eilish producing an album for Paul Giamatti. Or Jared Harris!
Which makes it all the more impressive that A Tramp Shining works so well, with its lush orchestrations, rockin' harpsichords, and intentionally over-ambitious approach. This is so much a Loud Bassoon type of album—I'd be willing to bet that if you hooked up a bunch of electrodes to all of the writing staff's brains and fed it into a computer which would then create the perfect album for everyone's taste, it would be something like A Tramp Shining—ridiculous, tuneful, pompous, and sublime (coincidentally the name of my uncle's law firm). This is available on CD; I shall have to get a copy. All the easier to skip those damn interludes.
Review by Roy K. |
