Is There Life After New Jersey?
The songs of Miami Steve Van Zandt are like found objects; he zeroes in on a particular species of East Coast rhythm and blues, mixes together the standard elements and emerges with a song that echoes and reverberates. As a composer, arranger and producer, he has an extraordinary sense of dynamics, of how to build dramatically and push the song home, and it's Van Zandt who's the real story behind This Time It's For Real.
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Is There Life After New Jersey?
by Mitch Cohan_
SOUTHSIDE JOHNNY AND THE
ASBURY JUKES
This Time It's For Real
_(Epic) _
The songs of Miami Steve Van Zandt are like found objects; he zeroes in on a particular species of East Coast rhythm and blues, mixes together the standard elements and emerges with a song that echoes and reverberates. As a composer, arranger and producer, he has an extraordinary sense of dynamics, of how to build dramatically and push the song home, and it's Van Zandt who's the real stoty behind This Time It's For Real. As forceful an instrument as Southside Johnny's voice is—authentically soulful without being in any way blackface—and as rough and ready an outfit as the Jukes are, in Miami Steve they have a guy who gets on base and knocks in his own runs. Eight of the ten songs are his (three with Bruce Springsteen), the other two are cover versions of Aretha's "Without Love" and Eddie Bo's novelty "Check Mr. Popeye," and nearly every cut swells with the energy that only comes when musicians are doing something they have absolute faith in. As of this album the Jukes, keepers of the flame, have the turf to themselves.
Not only is the album more polished than their debut effort, it sticks closer to the things that the Jukes do best and eliminates some of their flaws. Pure blues featuring Johnny's harmonica and solo voice have been kept to a minimum, replaced by multi-voiced, full-to-bursting productions of cosmopolitan r'n'b. The LP is dedicated to Leiber and Stoller, the pioneers of elaborate settings for rhythm and blues, and the Jukes do the tradition proud, even to the point of bringing in L&S's two main groups, Th*e Drifters and The Coasters, to do back-up singing on songs in their respective genres (mariachi romance and comic relief). When they need voices for a heartlifting doo-wop number, they get the Five Safins. There isn't a Van Zandt .song without at least an infectious chorus, but a few go beyond the appropriation of the cliche into the realm of the classic. The title cut is a rousing statement of theme, "Some Things Just Don't Change" and "She Got Me Where She Wants Me" could be vintage songs newly unearthed, and "Little Girl So Fine" and "Love On The Wrong Side Of Town," both co-authored by Springsteen, have it all: sweep and sentiment, passion and hooks. There hasn't been such stirring use of horns and strings since the golden age of The Drifters.
A lot of the Jukes' mystique is adolescent, both in the hanging-out camaraderie that they exploit—their liner notes, filled with nicknames and private references, are like a high school newspaper—and in the songs themselves. In "She Got Me Where She Wants Me," Johnny does a spoken introduction explaining to the guys why he's not palling around with them as often as he did; "First Night" is virtually a testament not only to new-found love, but to the men-in-groups close harmony of the school corridor and street corner. Southside Johnny, Van Zandt and Springsteen, all in their late twenties, have absorbed not only the sounds of the records they grew up with, but the sense as well. They got their ideas about love from this music, and it's like an affirmation of their past to perpetuate those ideas as well as the musical standards that embodied them. They don't distance themselves from their material like revivalists and they're not commenting ornthe styles they've borrowed; they plunge right into it all.
Like Rocky, the Jukes' second album is a modest triumph of old-fashioned values made all the more important because the values it represents—direct appeal to the emotions, restatement of belief in romantic/heroic myths, streamlined aesthetics, taking your best shot and beating the odds—have been so infrequently exppunded lately, Johnny and the Jukes are heavyweights, but Van Zandt is the LP's Stallone: the one with the vision and the muscle to pull it off. If things were as they should be, as they were in the heyday of the studio system and rhythm and blues, Rockys and Jukes would be proliferating in neighborhood movie houses and roadhouses all over the country. But as things stand, This Time It's For Real deserves all the cheers it can get.
