Elton John - 11-17-70 CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

that. The cover of the album documenting it's in black and white (there's no such thing as color radio) and of course so's his reputation as the new Jagger.

Well some people call him Jagger but not me: he's just Jose Feliciano with a twist of Johnny Mathis. That ain't bad when it's free over the airwaves every once in a while. But if you have to turn back the hands of time and pay for the trip then you might as well just sit there feeling bad that you missed the original show. Well at least the album does one thing, it removes any specialness the event might have had as a forgotten fragment of ephemeral hokum. "Honky Tonk Women" is on it but is there one town in the US of A that doesn't have a band with "Honky Tonk Women" in its repertoire? And "Take Me to the Pilot" but you can hear that elsewhere, too. So even ephemera are filled with little more than the tried and true anyway.

Movie soundtracks are something else again. They're not free but they sure cost less than an album and you get a picture along with it at no extra cost. Most of the sales from albums thereof are reputed to be of the souvenir variety, y'know because the movie was so super. But then rock guys started doing soundtracks for pictures they weren't in and for pictures nobody'd ordinarily bother seeing anyway. So a situation arose where maybe people would catch the movie for just the soundtrack by a big name otherwise irrelevant to the film, take a chance with it, that sort of thing. Like go see The Family Way because McCartney did some of the music, or Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush because of Traffic and Spencer Davis. But once you've been burned a couple times like that you're not even gonna bother with even just the album. Particularly when the stuff packaged on the album is unavailable anywhere else. Which is the case with Friends.

I mean I didn't even wanna listen to this album at first, even though it was free. (I don't know about you but I got it free.) But even a tubercular owl deserves a chance so I put it on. And here's what I discovered: "Variations on Michelle's Song" and "I Meant to Do My Work Today" both contain introductions composed by Paul Buckmaster! That's right, Paul Buckmaster. Yes that's the same Paul B