RSSToni Brown & Terry Garthwaite [extended]
- Cross Country [Capitol, 1973] B
- Good for You, Too [MCA, 1974] C-
- Terry [Arista, 1975] A-
- Hand in Glove [Fantasy, 1979] B+
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Consumer Guide Reviews:
Cross Country [Capitol, 1973]
In which the spirit and guts of Joy of Cooking, united for maybe the last time (Toni has left to record solo with another label), go to Nashville for some country-fried. Needless to say, they've never enjoyed more professional backing, but especially in Nashville there is a well-known problem with professionals--they never push a song that extra notch. And at least half of these could use the help. Shouldn't be lost: "Midnight Blues." B
Toni Brown: Good for You, Too [MCA, 1974]
I hear Brown got married and had a baby, doesn't want to disrupt her life on the pro music grind. Good for her, really--those sound like wise and even joyous decisions to me. But good for us it isn't because somewhere along the way she lost her music. C-
Terry Garthwaite: Terry [Arista, 1975]
Anyone who can trace the genealogy of a "Rock & Roller" "from Bessie to Billie to B.B. to Boz"--that would appear to mean Boz Scaggs, folks--obviously has eccentric ideas about rock and roll. This turns out to be a virtue. Moving Joy of Cooking's folk-jazz fusion much closer to jazz, Garthwaite emerges as a kind of white, upbeat Esther Phillips, applying a gritty Dinah Washington cast to post-rock lyrics both metaphorical and incantatory. But she's more flexible, happier--her delight in pure sound suggests both scat improvisation and novelty nonsense--and if the long-windedness of the cuts here must be blamed on a singer who's worked too long outside the studio, we can credit their occasional stiffness to producer David Robinson, who deserves to be trapped in an elevator with the Tower of Power. A-
Terry Garthwaite: Hand in Glove [Fantasy, 1979]
I complained about production clutter on her quickly deleted Arista album, but I must admit that David Rubinson injected a brightness that I miss in El Lay jazzman John Guerin's more tasteful work here. That could even be why the songs seem a shade duller this time. But Garthwaite's rhythmic and timbral adeptness remain unique in rock, and I'm grateful these days for any explicitly feminist analysis that is also both heterosexual and antipuritanical. Anyway, the songs are still a lot brighter than most. B+