In Concert Classics Featuring Dionne Warwick
Picture: C
Sound: C Extras: C Concert: B
For reasons that are both political and part of the
problems with the music industry in general, many key singers have been left
behind and not always been given their due.
In the case of Dionne Warwick, one of the most important vocalists from
the last half of the 20th century, the lack of recognition, respect
and thanks has been virtually criminal.
Of course, cousin Whitney Houston went on to even greater success and
that succession may have cause some of the displacement in history and memory
similar to Michael Jackson’s success at the same time leaving Diana Ross’
importance minimized unintentionally.
Fortunately, the recent DVD release of In Concert Classics Featuring
Dionne Warwick from 1977 shows why she was so great in a time people may
not have considered her so.
For starters, her approach to popular music was that such
music was not only important, but she treated every record like an event. Her taste and interest in such music was not
only top rate, she could see and hear things in music that most could not. It did not hurt that her early work with
Burt Bacharach and Hal David amounts to some of the greatest and most enduring
music ever created, certainly beyond any Austin Powers jokes or Julia
Roberts hits. When they broke up, many
wondered what she would do akin to Orson Welles trying to follow up Citizen
Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.
At first, it was rough going.
Aside form any personal problems, she added an “e” to the end of the
name and went hitless, except for her first-ever #1 Pop hit, the Then Came
You duet with The Spinners at Warner Bros. Records. She also cut the album Tracks Of The Cat
there, considered one of her best, and even did a duet album with her
well-matched R&B partner Isaac Hayes at MGM Records. When she did this concert, little did she
know a comeback like nothing until Tina Turner was on the way.
The track list is as follows:
1) Love To
Love You Baby
2) The Way
I Want To Touch You/Have You Never Been Mellow/Love Will Keep Us Together/Sing
A Song/This Will Be
3) Sing/This
Will Be/Get Down Tonight
4) Once You
Hit The Road
5) Thank
Heavens for Little Girls/Don’t Make Me Over/Reach Out For Me
6) Windows
Of The World/Always Something There To Remind Me/Anyone Who Had A Heart/Message
To Michael
7) This
Girls’ In Love With You/Walk On By/I Say A Little Prayer
8) I’ll
Never fall In Love Again/Do You Know The Way To San Jose?/Then Came You
9) Alfie
10) Promises, Promises
Most of them are her hits including a healthy helping of
Bacharach/David classics, but what is most interesting is what she does with
the later material that are covers. The
Captain & Tennille songs make sense, as do the Earth Wind & Fire and
Natalie Cole hits, but Disco hits Love To Love You, Baby and Get Down
Tonight are interesting in a different way. In their time, they were considered highly sexual and shocking,
but are now benign versus what we get (usually garbage) musically now. Obviously in all the songs she has here, Warwick
is not trying to be outrageously sexual for those songs, then go back to
standards and classics. Instead, having
the ear and superior grasp of song she always had the knack for, she known
these songs are hits for more than their sexuality or what many critics would
consider pseudo-sophisticated. Donna
Summer rarely does Love To Love You, Baby to boot. Instead, the truly sophisticated, classy
Warwick is tasking over these songs and raising them up from the shtick they
now seem like and bringing out the other reasons they were hits. It is that in part that caused this show to
be the impetus for her hit TV series Solid Gold, the last great and
important music variety show of the pre-MTV era, even if she left indifferent
to the direction the series was taking.
Furthermore, she made a huge comeback in 1979 with her Dionne
album, produced by Barry Manilow and featuring the smash comeback hit I’ll
Never Love This Way Again and the always-pleasant Deja Vu,
co-written by Isaac Hayes. Follow up
albums did well and she later hit #1 again with That’s What Friends Are For
with Gladys Knight, Stevie Wonder (who she later did the underrated Woman In
Red soundtrack with) and Elton John in 1985. Her hits streak even outlasted Solid Gold, which even
featured her return in its final season.
In this 1977 show, Warwick’s voice is in its exceptional
form, backed by an exceptional band and three remarkable backing vocalists who
are sadly not credited anywhere in the program or on the DVD (would someone please
tell us who these ladies are) packaging.
One thing that can be said, this is the way to tour and do a stage
performance. In Concert Classics
Featuring Dionne Warwick is a great performance from the past that may have
revived the career of an American original.
The only problem with the disc is that the 1.33 X 1 NTSC
videotaped image and Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono are nowhere near as clean or clear
as we would hope for. Being TV’s
standards for audio were not high at the time and there is only so much one can
do about old analog tape, the image is much softer than one would like and
sound more compressed than one would like.
This is not Dolby bashing, but just that the source has its own
compression. Don’t let this stop you
from getting this disc, because the concert is too good, even at under an hour,
but it is a shame the fidelity is not higher.
The one extra is a fine interview with Miss Warwick on the occasion of
the release of this DVD and the 40th Anniversary of her work in the
business, running 12:39. She is as
outspoken and honest as usual. It is a
recent taping, needless to say.
By the way, she dropped the “e” by this concert and
everything took off for her again, but it was more than that. We’ll hopefully see more DVD-Videos from
Miss Warwick, including possibly the legendary Hot, Live & Otherwise
concert and high fidelity reissues of her back catalog. Stay tuned.
- Nicholas Sheffo
