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Unless you're accustomed to reading the fine print on album
covers, you probably have never heard of David Lasley, so here
are a couple of handles: he's something like a male Laura Nyro,
and his debut Missin' Twenty Grand (EMI-America) is the
finest blue-eyed soul album since Boz Scaggs' Silk Degrees.
A falsetto singer and a stylish pop composer, Lasley has been
an industry pro for almost a decade. Besides making two
records with a trio called Rosie, he has sung backup for
countless other performers, most notably Jams Taylor. And he
has written dozens of songs, often in collaboration with
people like Allee Willis or Peter Allen, including Maxine
Nightingale's "Lead Me On," Crystal Gayle's
"The Blue Side," Patti Labelle's "I Don't Go
Shopping," and the pop-gospel standard "Roll Me
Through the Rushes." These are respectable credits, but
they hardly prepare you for Lasley's solo album; anything but
a typically bland session-player's showcase, Missin' Twenty
Grand is a quirky, personal work that balances commercial
pop-soul with the self-revelation familiar to the currently
unfashionable singer-songwriter tradition.
The album tells a presumably autobiographical story, and the
narrative is strong enough to make such covers as Taylor's
"Looking for Love on Broadway" and Clyde Otis's
civil-rights anthem "Take a Look" as pertinent as
Lasley's originals. The opening "Got to Find Love"
establishes the romantic nature of this odyssey, which begins
with the breakup on the second cut, the sumptuous semi-hit
single "If I Had My Wish Tonight" (written by Dave
Loggins and Randy Goodrum). The funny thing about Lasley's
falsetto is that it sounds curious, even affected, for about
10 seconds and thereafter seems entirely natural -- especially
on a song like "Wish," so passionate that the second
verse trails off midway (perhaps to allow the singer to break
down a la James Brown). This cut is a mini-masterpiece, milked
for every drop by Arif Mardin's superb string arrangement; and
at the very end, while the singer wails, a sort of Greek
chorus led by Bonnie Raitt emblazons the wish on the back of
the departing lover: "'Stead of walkin' away/You'd want
me to stay/You would want me" (note the insistence of
those "w" sounds). Next thing you know Lasley's on
the street again, "Lookin' for Love on Broadway," no
strings in sight.
Suddenly, the side veers into genuine autobiography. We're
"On Third Street," where Lasley recalls his
initiation as a teenager into the hip street life of Detroit
("Met my first drag queen at 15/Didn't know 'til I was
16"). To strolling, Laura Nyro-like piano chords he
constructs a musical movie of summer in the city, the friendly
baker at the English-muffin factory "cryin' at the
counter" over some rejection, being the only white kid in
a street-corner doo-wop group, and getting a taste of
music-biz exploitation. Mrs. Brown "would make us sing
for nothin'/Take the tapes and leave town/And you'd hear you
on the juke box/Under someone else's name/Played by somebody
else's quarter." Like Nyro's sweet kids in hunger slums
and Rickie Lee Jones's Frankie Valli lookalikes who meet Cunt
Finger Louie in the alleys of LA, Lasley's "15-year-old
babies on Third Street" are experiencing that mixture of
sophistication and glowing innocence available only to
inner-city adolescents. And the way Lasley tosses off his
poetically precise phrases captures the fragmentary pleasures
of growing up fast, while he avoids sentimental West Side
Story cliches.
Of course, there was more than fun and games going on in
America's cities during those mid-'60s summers. At first,
Lasley's rendition of "Take a Look" (made famous by
Aretha) seems mawkish here -- partly because of the
treacherously insipid spoken intro, with its cryptic reference
to "the Algiers Motel and the incident that occurred
there in 1967." But what makes "Take a Look" so
disturbing is the notion of talking about racism in a
pop-music context. At a time when even most black singers tend
to thank God and their mothers (in that order) on album
jackets, Lasley dedicates Missin' Twenty Grand to the
"hope that in my lifetime we may all know a world that
does not perceive a boy or girl, a man or a woman by the color
of their skin." Corny? Well, risking corniness to avoid
callousness is what being a romantic is all about.
Love arrives on side two with "Treat Willie Good."
Is it Detroit in the '60s or New York in the '80s? Unclear,
but Willie's wife comes to the singer for advice about her
man, who's having an affair; he counsels her to let him go and
to feign ignorance. Easy for him to say -- in a classic
"Chuck E.'s in Love" twist, the singer turns out to
be Willie's lover. And they celebrate their love in a ballad
almost as gorgeous as "If I Had My Wish Tonight";
it's called "Never Say," and it was written with
Willie Wilcox (Todd Rundgren's drummer, Lasley's collaborator
and co-producer, and, possibly, the namesake of "Treat
Willie Good"*) Another surprise: a gay love song that
forsakes cheap pathos for a delicate complexity. The middle
verse is as close as it gets to explicit: "Two boys walk
along and I think they look like brothers/My friend turns to
me and says, 'I wonder if they're lovers?'/One's a little
older and he looks a lot like me/I wonder why it takes so long
for everyone to see." Of course, nothing spells trouble
in paradise like vows of eternal love, and these lovers retire
to euphemisms on "Roommate," in which we learn that
when things get tough or the rent comes due, Willie splits.
The endearingly ungrammatical "Where is Charlie and
Joanne" is Lasley's oddest song here -- it's as fragile
and ephemeral as the bond of love between two people. The
arrangement features a flourish of piano, some harp plucking,
surges of acoustic guitar but practically no beat; the melody
is carried by Lasley's double-tracked vocals, to which the
other instrumentation adds impressionistic comment. the
fragility of the arrangement underlines the song's meditation
on the shocking breakup of a golden couple like Charlie and
Joanne, what the demise of that seemingly sturdy relationship
says about the narrator's own relationship, what it says about
the unstable state of the world. Following hard on this song's
heels, the cynical album closer, "Take the Money and
Run" (written by Don Paul Yowell), seems both jolting and
inevitable -- people are too painful to deal with, let's get
into money and possessions. In the end you always get ripped
off. or maybe it's just that when love is gone, work is always
a solace. But the chorus also suggests that "life is a
circle," and sure enough, if you turn the record over
again, our hero's got a freshly laundered heart on his sleeve
singing, "We have got to find love."
Did I make this story up? Maybe. Maybe there isn't a story
here at all, just a bunch of nice, unconnected pop songs.
Maybe I look too hard for stories. Even if there is one, it's
hardly profound: boy loses boy, boy goes back to home town to
relive memories, boy meets-get-loses married boy, boy gets
disillusioned and leaves it all behind to become a high-paid
session musician. Who cares? What's attractive to me is the
double edge of David Lasley's work, his ambivalence about love
and money and the past and himself, his flair for melodious
pop (Peter Allen/Carole Bayer Sager school) and his penchant
for private imagery (a la Laura Nyro and Rickie Lee Jones),
his racially ambiguous falsetto (sincere like Smokey, at times
torchy like Sylvester but minus the camp), the bittersweet
charms of innocence and experience.
The title suggests that Missin' Twenty Grand is an
elegy to something. Judging from the poem-song of that title
printed on the back of the album, "Twenty Grand"
might be the name of the group little David had with his
sister Julie and Rosie and Willie, or perhaps it's the
nightclub in Detroit where these cute little white kids would
get up and sing Mary Wells songs. One wag has even suggested
that the title refers to the advance Lasley had to return to
David Geffen, who signed him in the early days of Geffen
Records (no record was ever completed). To me, the album is a
tribute to the kind of idiosyncratic, lifelike record that
used to be the rage of the music business but now gets treated
like herpes. You'd be lucky to find Missin' Twenty Grand
in the stores now that "If I Had My Wish Tonight"
has run its course -- they have to make room, you know, for
all those meaningful albums by Asia and Rick Springfield. But
the record's worth seeking out as a curiosity if nothing else
-- a white boy's homage to Motown, a between-the-lines gay
romance, the last of a dying breed of singer-songwriters.
Boston Phoenix, June 15, 1982
*In a thank-you note for this review, Lasley assured me that
Willie Wilcox is NOT the Willie of "Treat Willie
Good."
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