Drive

by

Robert Palmer

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It's hard not to write with a bit of sentiment given Robert Palmer's recent death, but this album stands as a fine, if inadvertant, tribute to one of the great popular music artists of the past 40 years.

More than anything, Palmer was one of modern music's best arrangers, a talent that is little recognized in the restrictive world of rock music. He put his inimitable stamp on whatever he touched, and never more distinctly than on Drive. He does rock, but it isn't a rock album. He does blues, but it isnt a blues album. Drive is Palmer mining his seemingly bottomless reservoir of joyfully idiosyncratic musical ideas. From his vocal phrasing to the way he refreshes old rhythms, Palmer excites the senses. It is apt that his youthful influences were the likes of Basie and Ellington, because, like them, he didn't succumb to the idiotic predictability that quickly afflicts almost all "rock stars," and especially those who had huge hits. Palmer was still making exciting music in his fourth decade in the rock business! Who else can that be said about? Only Ry Cooder comes to mind. Of course, neither has allowed himself to be confined within the suffocating boundary of rock.

Drive very much deserves a listen, and I cannot do justice to what you will hear. I will say that anyone who can not only equal but best Big Mama Thornton's version of Hound Dog has accomplished something special.

The U.S. release of Drive is missing some songs that are on the U.K. CD. It is worth a few extra dollars to buy the U.K. disc from Amazon UK.