"The sparkle of your china, the shine of your Japan"

On April 6, 1988, Larry Carlton was shot point-blank in the neck by some punk at the door of his Hollywood Hills home. He thought he was going to die, but survived through crippling nerve damage to resume his guitar-playing career. So there you go. Tell me about your bad knee.

An Allmusic second-stringer, lacking the critical smarts of the great Stephen Thomas Erlewine, describes Carlton's second solo offering from 1973 as "disappointing" and his singing as "toneless". Our critic, thumping his desk with his tiny fist, demanded and expected more fretwork and a different voice, yes he did. Well, boo fucking hoo.

That voice first. Toneless? The album is either called Playing/Singing or Singing/Playing, depending on which side of the sleeve you look at. The Playing side has him looking happy, the Singing less so. He needn't have worried. In the same year, Michael Franks released his first solo album [to be featured on FMF©, -Ed.] and Carlton's voice fits perfectly into the same category. Neither aims for a sweaty vibrato or rock n' roll raunch. They can both hit the note, they just don't care to hold onto it until it dies of old age. Laid back Left Coast stylings owing more to Astrud Gilberto than Janis Joplin, which is fine by me.


Not enough guitar? Are you nuts? But this is a songs album first and foremost, so the guitar takes its place, and here's the surprise that lifts this album into the must-haves. The quality of the material. There are no covers of pop hits du jour [French for soup - Ed.] here, unlike his first album. The songs are all-new and all-fantastic, from Allen Toussaint-inflected funk to unexpected tugs at the heart-strings. The kind of songs that are old friends the first time you hear them. And in the too-short running time (remember too-short albums? What happened to them?) he delivers a couple of how-the-freaking-fuck-did-that-happen?!? instrumentals, kicking in the stomp boxes to remind you that at his best, he was the best. And Larry Carlton was always at his best. That's why Steely Dan picked him up and dusted him off and gave him a studio tan for the next few years.

Anyway, to be fair to our Allmusic hack, nobody else quite got a grip on what Carlton was doing with this album either, until the Japanese caught on to it a few zeitgeist-shifts later. It's pop music. You know - the greatest and finest artform ever created.

And the punk with the gun? Who knows? And I think that's the point.