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to former toongenre at this point is admittedly questionable. Stevie, who has been known to come out with lines as good as “When you build your house/Then call me home,” compares herself here to the moon, a “highway-woman,” the “kind of woman that’ll haunt you,” a white winged dove, and the sea. It's probably no wonder she rarely finds time on this album to feel for or write about anybody else, although in “Edge of Seventeen,” the album's centerpiece of tragicomic melodrama, she does anguish over lusting like the sea and then laying a 16-year-old boy.

Yet in the end it's all forgivable, even the fact that songs like “The Highwayman” are about vermin like the Eagles. (“ ‘They are the Errol Flynns and Tyrone Powers of our day!’ she exults slyly. ‘So long as I have to live with them I try to make them into the most wonderful bunch of guys I can possibly think up!’”—Rolling Stone) The truth is that Stevie and her equally celebritous friends have devastating personal problems that such awestruck wretches as ye beyond the Gar-rards don’t have to cop to. As she admits in “After the Glitter Fades,” she never thought that she would make it there in Hollywood, but she's got so much money coming in the windows and doors (unless “gold” refers to muggles!) that she contracts temporary amnesia four lines later and decides that “It's the only life I’ve ever known.” Certainly it must get confusing when there's “No speed limit… this is the fast lane/It's just the way that it is here.” And given these harrowing trials of mind and body it's probably a double blessing that she has aforementioned friends (who after all are equally self-referential in their own epics) along for the ride. “Leather and Lace,” for instance, is dedicated to Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter and sung with Eagle Don Henley. Stevie makes Don into a wonderful guy by putting words in his mouth: “Sometimes I cry.”

Still, I must say I have no curiosity whether Stevie fucked Tom Petty and if so who may have dragged whose heart around, nor does anybody I sleep with, nor anybody else they’re sleeping with, nor any of the latter's other lovers (wild, huh?) As I’m sure Stevie would be relieved to know. And I must caution her that according to the Physicians’ Desk Reference, one of the contraindications of the belladonna alkaloids is that in high or prolonged dosage they cause temporary amnesia (!) greatly resembling senility; for treatment of this type of cellular deterioration I would probably prescribe deanol acetamidoben-zoate, more popularly known as Deaner-250, to be administered orally three times daily, though whether via kissing or one's own hand is best left to the individual patient.

The Village Voice, November 25, 1981

Art Ensemble of Chicago:

Rated G

I‘ve never been much of an Art Ensemble of Chicago fan. I first caught them at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival in ‘72, after which they always epitomized for me a certain school of hoodoo-hokum free playing that seemed to emphasize things like beads rattling across drumheads and painting your face, at the expense (I thought) of getting down to the real soul. Even last year's widely hailed Nice Guys didn’t do much to convert me, and when a friend took me to see them at the Public last winter I fell asleep, though I did think Malachi Favors Maghostut's clown makeup was a nice touch. A couple of months later, somebody gave me a copy of Roscoe Mitchell's Non-aah, and I loved it, but for (ostensibly) all the wrong reasons—I thought it was one of the most obnoxious things I’d ever heard, and called up several musician friends to play them that part about two-thirds of the way through side one where Roscoe starts making long disgusting fartlike noises and won’t stop. I told my musician friends, On the Corner devotees all, “This record has given me new hope for jazz!” and we laughed hysterically. But I meant it!

My problem with contemporary free jazz, and the reason I can hardly listen to any of it made after about 1971, is that it is now really a conservative music—every bit as much so as bebop—which has