Consumer Guide Album

Lloyd Price: Greatest Hits [MCA, 1994]
There's nothing like this Rock and Roll Hall of Famer from the Big Easy. Now 80 and pushing an autobiography and a Broadway musical based on same, he knows how to take care of business--he's a rough hombre who owned a nightclub and a label in Manhattan before he was 40. But he doesn't sing like a rough hombre. He sings like he's taking care of business, which is why he followed 1959's chart-topping "Stagger Lee" with two lyrics so insipid they could do battle with Frankie Avalon and Bobby Rydell: "Personality" and "I'm Gonna Get Married." And never was he more cheerfully pragmatic than in the 2:25 "Stagger Lee" itself, which remains a fairly grisly murder tale, but one in which the femme chorus that's been chanting "Go Stagger Lee" since 0:45 continues to cheer Stack on as he fetches his .44 and shoots Billy so bad he breaks the bartender's glass. Call me a cynic, but I think it's one of the funniest records in rock and roll. It leads this hard-to-find 18-track package. It also leads the now standard 12-track, 28-minute The Best of Lloyd Price: The Millennium Collection, where I miss, among other things, "That's Love," a/k/a "I Got Married and Liked It," and "Three Little Pigs," designed for what he thinks marriage was designed for, and I don't mean conjugal ecstasy. I mean kids. A−