Is it possible to judge an album without listening to it? The answer is yes, provided the one doing the judging is a highly sensitized and professionally accredited music critic (such as yours truly) who possesses the rare ability to intuit the music on said album based on the packaging that encases it.
I don’t do it very often, mind you, because it’s not standard industry practice and the intuiting work leaves me with a throbbing headache that can last for days. But I went ahead anyway with Crosby, Stills & Nash’s 1990 release Live It Up. And I am prepared to say without actually having listened to said album that it’s seven miles of putrid sushi, a dung beetle’s delight, a medieval torture device, a tour through David Crosby’s intestinal tract in a glass-bottomed boat, and should come with a toe tag.
But on this one I don’t think you even need be a pro. Just take a look at that cover. Freud would have had a field day. What we have are four hot dogs skewered on sticks on the moon, for Christ’s sake, and if you’re at all sentient the first three questions you’ll ask are 1) Why four hot dogs when Tube Steak #4 Neil Young isn’t within 1,000 miles of this turd? 2) Did no one dare to tell this pampered trio of folk rock prima donnas that cover practically begs for stupid dick jokes? and 3) Why the hell didn’t they get rid of one hot dog and change their name to Three Hot Dog Night? This is one album that even your least intuitive layman can judge by its cover, and I’m guessing that none but your most diehard CS&N fans were blind enough to pay real folding money to take it home with them.
I don’t suppose any of these questions really need be answered, especially by the three senile has-beens who produced the music on the vinyl cringing behind that cover, praying no one will pull it from its sleeve and gaze upon its naked, shameful ghastliness. But what I should say now is that I actually did listen to said album, and not because I’m afraid of receiving hate mail from apoplectic CS&N fans (I love hate mail) but because I don’t want to be sued for journalistic malpractice and be disbarred. And, no surprise here, one painful listen confirmed everything I said about Live It Up in the opening paragraph. The album is a tour through David Crosby’s intestinal tract in a glass-bottomed boat, and the sights and smells are awful to behold.
What makes Live It Up such an abominably ugly mole on the face of existence? Simple. Every iota of the band’s signature folk-rock sound has been airbrushed out like a purged official in a Stalin-era photograph from the large majority of its songs, replaced by the big, bright, drum-heavy sound that dominated the era. Live It Up could be a Phil Collins album, or an Asia album, or a Starship album, or an album by any other number of animated fossils flailing generically about in an attempt to sound halfway relevant. On some of its songs you wouldn’t even know you’re listening to CS&N–lobotomized by their futile desire to keep up with the times, the Three Geriatrics sacrificed the very qualities that made them so uniquely annoying in the first place.
It’s hardly worth the effort to describe these songs. The title track is one of three songs not even written by the trio—hardly an auspicious sign—and the LP’s worst offender. Its huge drum beat, big bland dance rhythm, that synth riff that was whoring itself out all over the place at the time, and that chorus of voices singing “Live It Up!”–it’s a terrible, malevolent, horrorshow of a song. Nash sings lead, as he does on half the album’s tracks, but you can’t tell it’s him—you could slip Phil Collins in there and no one would be the wiser.
Nash also sings lead on power ballad “If Anybody Had a Heart,” and same deal. The song could have been written and performed by anyone—anyone determined to sound like everyone else, that is. Stephen Stills sings the super-sized “Tomboy,” and the only good thing I can think to say for the song is you can at least tell it’s Stills who’s doing the singing. The song itself has a vaguely Caribbean feel, and suffers from its big, slick arrangement. And lyrics like “Tomboy/Always with the wrong boy/You need a strong boy” are proof positive that Stills lost his shit completely somewhere along rock’s four-way street.
Stills also handles lead vocal duties on “Haven’t We Had Enough,” which amazingly enough sounds like a CSN&Y song. It’s blessedly devoid of the state-of-the-art studio treatment inflicted upon the LP’s other songs, and my god—is that an acoustic guitar? It’s hardly one of the band’s better songs, mind you, but it’s better than follow-up “Yours and Mine,” on which Crosby is in full political mode—the kids of the world have guns in their hands, they’re being killed in pointless wars they didn’t start, and isn’t it awful? Well yes it is, even more awful than the time Crosby almost cut his hair, but not quite as awful as this song with its giant Cecil B. DeMille production and all-too-busy percussion.
Stills sings lead on the relentlessly upbeat Stills-Nash composition “(Got to Keep) Open,” which has a humongous Caribbean sound and (imagine) a real pulse. This is Yacht Rock and I’ve heard worse, but that said one listen and you’re guaranteed to wake up the next morning like you’d gone on a tequila binge with Hunter S. Thompson. Nash sings lead on the sui generis “Straight Line,” which was written by some guy named Tony Beard who probably produced it by tossing two million terrible songs of the time into a blender.
Nash once again handles lead vocals on “House of Broken Dreams,” which like “Haven’t We Had Enough” at least has the common decency to sound like the CS&N of yore. Unfortunately it’s utterly nondescript, and like every other song on the album never made it into the band’s live repertoire, which is a prima facie admission on their part that Live It Up was so much shark chum. Instead the band locked it in the attic like a mad aunt, then sound-proofed the walls and floor so as not to have to hear it moaning to be let out.
The ballad “Arrows” is all chiming synthesizers and a perfectly sterile environment perfect for growing biological weapons. And it would make a good biological weapon, perfect for paralyzing and hence rendering helpless entire populations with boredom. As for Crosby’s vocals, they sound pureed as if they’d been tossed into Tony Beard’s blender. The dolphin in closer “After the Dolphin” isn’t a Flipper type dolphin which is good because I had the gnawingly unpleasant suspicion it would be an impassioned plaint about that personable creature’s extinction, which would a terrible thing, even more terrible than having to listen to the Threesome of the Damned keening and ululating about it.
No, it’s a lament about the advent of air warfare against civilian populations and the Dolphin in question is a pub that gets blown to smithereens will all its patrons. Nash wrote and sings it presumably because he’s English and has read up on the Battle of Britain, a subject he’ll be happy to bore you to death talking about.. I’ll say this much for “After the Dolphin”—while it has same huge mechanized drums and “totally today!” vibe as most of the songs on the album, it actually has a smidgeon of character. You’ll won’t find too many songs about pubs being flattened by German bombs, and that’s a fact.
What can I say about Live It Up? Other than the hot dogs on the cover are uncooked, the songs on the album are overcooked, and I’m glad I’ve always hated rock’s most precious supergroup because it saves me from having to weep over Live It Up, which like your average frankfurter is composed of all the parts of the pig that are generally considered inedible.
I didn’t have to listen to this album to know it was tubular hog anus, but now that I have I’m here to warn you against foolishly following in my footsteps. No one asked for Live It Up, no one deserved it, and it’s too late to do anything about it. You can’t unmake a hot dog. All you can do is impale it on a stick and hold it to the fire until it’s pure carbonized asshole, the same way you would CS&N if it was legal. Alternative title? Greetings from the Weinee Factory.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
F
