DARK SHADOWS

DARK SHADOWS

JULIAN LENNON Valotte (Atlantic)

Mitchell Cohen

Give My Regards To Broad Street, a motion picture written by, and starring, Paul McCartney, opens across America in October, closes across America by November.

George Harrison decides to concentrate on a career as a film producer, retires from the music business. Nobody seems to notice.

Ringo Starr, unable to get a U.S. record deal, appears in the miniseries Princess Daisy, and hosts Saturday Night Live on the fourth anniversary of John Lennon’s assassination.

Valotte, by Julian Lennon, stands as the nation’s #18 LP, 18 notches above that of his aforementioned Uncle Paul (who, it is recalled, wrote "Hey Jude” for the tyke, then only five years old). Julian was born when “From Me To You” was #1 in England.

It was twenty (two) years ago today...

The public’s attitude towards the Beatles becomes stranger as time rolls on. Try to play a friendly game of Trivial Pursuit: you will be bombarded with Beatle questions. Can’t escape the damned subject. Genus Edition, Baby Boomer, Silver Screen, all probing for nuggets of information re the Fab Four. I mean, I used to play my Beatles records instead of studying.

It’s disorienting to be reviewing an album by John Lennon’s son (although I don’t find it at all awkward to lust after Tony Curtis’s daughter, so all things are, pardon the pun, relative). The inclination is to pat the thing on the back, to give it a “nice job, lad,” but Valotte simply isn’t a first LP by some modestly qifted, introspective young singer-songwriter making low-key rock in the company of professional studio musicians. On that scale, the record is OK, but compared to the work of some of his U.K. contemporaries—Roddy Frame of Aztec Camera, say, or Lloyd Cole, or the guy in Orange Juice—it doesn’t sound particularly dazzling. Lennon’s way with words is humdrum (typical: “I can see your face in the mirrors of my mind”), and not only in contrast with dad’s verbal genius. Julian comes across as a gloomy kid— self-absorbed, confused, occasionally bitter. One song is called “Lonely,” another, “Well I Don’t Know” (a phrase that also pops up in “Say You’re Wrong”). And on the concluding track, “Let Me Be” (paging P.F. Sloan), he snaps: “You say you’ve got problems/l’ve got them myself.” Two innersleeve dedications are pertinent in this regard. The first, to “My mother Cynthia for all she’s had to cope with!,” the last, “And to my Father...” There’s a universe of unresolved emotion in those ellipses.

There’s nothing on Valotte that explicitly refers to John Lennon, and nowhere you can turn on Valotte that doesn’t remind you of him, and that’s the source of the album’s poignance. The first thing you hear on the LP is Julian’s voice and, there’s no getting around it, it’s spookily reminiscent of John's. Heredity accounts for a lot, but not for the phrasing, the inflections, the mannerisms, the way Julian draws out syllables or suddenly shoots into falsetto. Even his melodies have cadences that evoke John (70s John, mostly: the time of Julian’s impressionable early adolescence). Look at the words “sitting on a pebble by the river playing guitar.” Now think of the tune John would write for them, how he’s sing them. Julian has every nuance down.

People are reassured by how much Julian resembles John. It’s comforting, and gives a sense of continuity that they don’t get from Yoko’s records. That’s fine. When you hear that unmistakable Lennon timbre singing “I found another girl who’s completely true/Oh yeah,” how can a part of you not be moved? Julian certainly comes by his voice, as well as his confusion, honestly, and this may be the record he felt he had to make. Phil Ramone’s over-polite production indulges Julian’s solemn stance; the spunk of a youthful, rocking band might have undercut the LP’s weariness. It’s only when he breaks into a scat at the end of a couple of tunes—his one distinctive vocal trait—that Julian Lennon shows signs of being able to shake off some of the gloom and come into his own.