Guilty pleasure (continued)

JEFFERSON AIRPLANE

What is Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 psychedelic classic Surrealistic Pillow, doing on a list of guilty pleasures? Go ask Starship, the post-Airplane outfit responsible for "We Built This City." Not to mention "Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now," the theme from the 1987 stinker Mannequin, starring Andrew McCarthy.

I still have the tattered old copy of Surrealistic Pillow I acquired in grade school from a babysitter who got rid of her druggy record collection when she headed off to nursing school. But I tend to keep the volume low when I listen to Jefferson Airplane. Discretion is the better part of nostalgia, even it’s still a great album: "Somebody to Love," "White Rabbit," "3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds," "Embryonic Journey" (Jorma Kaukonen’s most famous composition, still gorgeous). Those spooky-pretty Marty Balin ballads — "Today," "Comin’ Back to Me." This is some trippy San Francisco flower-powerful stuff. That song "How Do You Feel" gives me flashbacks, man.

But this isn’t a band that retained its coolness to any degree, let’s face it. When they traded in the plane for the starship, it was all over.

If Surrealistic Pillow isn’t guilty by association, I am. There’s no Starship in my past, honest — everyone grows up sometime. But I’d be lying if I said I was never into Jefferson Starship. I played the first album, Dragonfly, to death, in fact. "Ride the Tiger" is indefensible, of course. But "Caroline" reminded me of those witchy Marty Balin odes on Surrealistic Pillow. That air of poetic doom and drama that drives girls to write lyrics on their notebook covers in fake calligraphy — who could resist it?

While we’re at it, I was also into Red Octopus, the second Jefferson Starship album. "Miracles" was my favorite song for a while. Hey, it was a bad time to be young. But Surrealistic Pillow holds up. It’s time to retire the LP and buy the remastered CD.

— Robin Vaughan

ELTON JOHN

I was delighted to receive the new reissue of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road from the Universal Music mega-conglomerate in the mail a few weeks ago. I’d been pining for a copy of the album on CD and had just played my original gatefold LP version days earlier. Not that I listen to Elton all the time, but his great ’70s discs are, for me, like chocolate and marijuana somehow combined.

There’s a lot of nostalgia in that warm rush. Elton’s mix of melody and hopeless romance, the snarl of Davey Johnstone’s guitar, and the group’s rhythmic wallop were just right for my turn as an early- adolescent-dreamer-misfit smitten with rock-and-roll. I’m still touched by the beauty of "Harmony" and the lead payoff of "Funeral for a Friend" and "Love Lies Bleeding" swooping on into "Candle in the Wind." The weary, sad cynicism of "I’ve Seen That Movie Too" seems so much deeper and more emotionally informed than the contemptuous, self-flagellating screeds of new metal and the bloated ego-and-id spelunking of Korn. Elton, at least in the best of his songs, handled and examined his problems like a man: with dignity and quiet strength. Think of him as a gay Bogart.

Maybe the one thing I think of most when I hear any of Elton John’s albums from 1970 to 1974, besides the quiet hours of contentment or torment I spent in my bedroom listening to them, is my lost innocence. Those albums were the soundtrack for my transition from kid to teen, and they were perfect for those years before I discovered sex and drugs and Hendrix and Pink Floyd, which are all pretty much synonyms for each other. Listening to Elton sing "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" lets me find the soft spots again, and I’m always happy to know that somewhere within me they still exist.

— Ted Drozdowski

JOHNNIE RAY

In some parallel universe where rock-and-roll is never invented, or stolen, Johnnie Ray is still the hippest white guy who ever held a microphone. But in ours, he’s a freak accident of pop history, a singer whose love of gospel and early R&B expressed itself via wrong-headed stylings that scrambled his influences into nonsense. Hearing his million-selling "Cry," or its self-penned flip side, "The Little White Cloud That Cried" — can you sense a theme? — it’s hard to believe he was a genuine star in the early ’50s. His outlandishly embellished sobs and consonant-stretching phrasing would seem to be an unacquirable taste. But the same’s been said of many (other) strong cheeses.

Ray wasn’t entirely cred-free: Sony’s High Drama collects ’40s recordings with tuff jump-blues bands, before he fell into the hands of shlock-king Mitch Miller. (See also "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?") But Ray is best encountered at his worst, on various budget CD two-fers, or — as I did — on the sort of randomly-chosen "best-of" cassettes still found in the bargain racks of truck stops. Here he meets his match in ricky-tick arrangements and an ill-fitting repertoire, including ersatz-Latin perennial "Hernando’s Hideaway," and "Walkin’ My Baby Back Home," a 1930 tune swung neatly by Nat King Cole, but mangled by Ray and Miller into pizza-parlor Dixieland.

By now, it’s sounding like "guilty" is synonymous with "masochistic," but two minor Ray sides exert a fascination that I interpret as pleasure. "Up Above My Head (I Hear Music in the Air)," a stratospheric duet with Frankie Laine (a story in himself), doesn’t have the grit of Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s original, but it’s a joyous Battle of the Belters anyway, overpowering Ray Conniff’s not-exactly-churchy orchestral backing. Then there’s "What’s the Use," a faux-Arabian lament penned by Ross Bagdasarian (of Chipmunks infamy). Ray lays into the lamely exotic lyrics ("My lovely desert rose/I’ll buy you rugs and clothes") as though desperately heartsick, twice extending the word "quail" into something best represented as "kwww-ayul." Even with material this trivial, you can’t deny the man’s conviction; you might even call it soul.

— Franklin Bruno

ROD STEWART

The critic Greil Marcus once wrote that "rarely has a singer had as full and unique a talent as Rod Stewart; rarely has anyone betrayed his talent so completely." That observation has, unfortunately, only become truer with the years. But I’ve foisted homemade Stewart compilation tapes on friends (with titles like: "When He Was Good") in the hope of convincing skeptics that there was indeed a time when the lascivious buffoon responsible for peddling tripe like "Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?" and "Passion" possessed one of rock’s most singularly soulful, raggedly eloquent voices, as both a singer and writer.

Stewart’s late ’60s work with the Jeff Beck Group, and his early ’70’s tenure with the boozy, bloozy Faces produced their share of gloriously raucous moments. But it’s Rod’s first few solo albums on Mercury — The Rod Stewart Album, Gasoline Alley, and Every Picture Tells a Story — that reveal a precocious performer of startling range, depth, and artistic vision, at home equally with winsome folk ballads, swinging R&B standards, and raw-throated, lager-lit rock-and-roll. At times, Rod sounds world-weary and wise beyond his years ("Mandolin Wind"); at others, he’s footloose and fancy-free ("Every Picture Tells a Story") — a young rooster temporarily down on his luck, perhaps, but resilient nonetheless. Sure, after a billion spins on classic-rock radio, the otherwise remarkably well-written "Maggie May" sounds shopworn, utterly exhausted as a song still capable of revealing anything fresh. But that still leaves me about 50 other songs that sparkle.

These days, a new Grammy-nominated Stewart collection of yawners, As Time Goes By: The Great American Songbook Vol. 2 (J Records), is upon us. Do yourself a huge favor and instead pick up the stunning three-disc compilation, Reason To Believe: The Complete Mercury Studio Recordings (Mercury). It’s Stewart’s Sun Sessions. Who would ever have thought that the jet-setting, stadium-pimping, peeping-tom playboy of the ’80s and beyond was capable of imbuing songs — his own and those of idols Sam Cooke, Elvis Presley, and Bob Dylan — with such empathy, pathos, and guileless good humor? Nobody born after "Young Turks," that’s for sure. But remember: Elvis was young once too.

— Jonathan Perry