Milwaukee

Elliott Murphy credited his 1984 album Party Girls & Broken Poets to "Elliott Murphy and Band." His 1986 album is credited solely to Elliott Murphy, but he poses with the members of his band -- bassist Ernie Brooks, drummer Jesse Chamberlain, and keyboardist Art Labriola -- on the cover, and Brooks and Labriola get some co-writing credits on the songs. The prominence given the group is significant, just as the title is. Milwaukee is simply the name of the city in which the album was recorded, but that's reflective of Murphy's life at the moment, playing in a band and traveling from town to town. That life takes its toll clearly, as is reflected in some of the songs on the LP's first side. Murphy likes to write in the third person, as if his songs are musical short stories, but that gives him a frame for autobiography, and songs like "People Don't Listen," "Out for the Killing," and "Niagara Falls" paint a portrait of a man who may have been on the road too long, and who certainly has drunk too much liquor while paying too little attention to his relationships. The relationship issue is engaged again on the second side in songs like "Runnin' Around" and "Clean It Up," the latter finding the narrator, alone, encountering husbands and wives, and wondering how he lost "a love so true." It all comes to a head in the final track, "Going Through Something (Don't Know What It Is)," in which the singer follows the title in the chorus with the words: "I don't feel like an adult, I don't look like a kid/Caught in the grip of a rock & roll dream/Like 20 years of loving someone you've never seen." Murphy and his band present tight rock and folk-rock arrangements of the songs, which are typically catchy and well sung. But they sound like the work of a veteran rocker who's either getting ready to settle down or, at least, wondering why he never did. ~ William Ruhlmann