Bob Stanley & Pete Wiggs Present State of The Union: American Dream In Crisis 1967-1973

Pay attention to the subtitle of Bob Stanley & Pete Wiggs Present State of the Union: The American Dream in Crisis 1967-1973. That phrase hints at the turmoil in the United States as the Summer of Love rolled into a violent, turbulent 1968 and the country as a whole began to take stock of Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, and the legacy of the hippie dream. Stanley and Wiggs document this shift by focusing on establishment artists reckoning with all of these changes, usually with the assistance of strings and warped echoes of psychedelia. What makes State of the Union such a compelling listen -- and important historical document -- is that the 24 featured artists are divided between accidental tourists, pandering pop stars, and genuine works of art. Often, the line separating these divisions is a little blurry, particularly on Roy Orbison's melodramatic epic "Southbound Jericho Parkway," a winding mini-suite whose darkness pales in comparison to the Everly Brothers' genuinely unsettling "Lord of the Manor." Such extreme swings in tone and style are smoothed over by the fact that all of these selections are big-budget productions, bearing layers of orchestration, studio players, and backing vocals; even when the subject is uneasy, it's music for the easy listening market. What's astonishing about State of the Union is how it reveals that these adult-oriented songs could be as spacy as the underground -- or, failing that, they offer their own mind-altering trip, such as Bing Crosby pondering a post-space age future on "What Do We Do with the World?" Individually, some of the selections could be classified as camp -- this is especially true of covers of pop hits, such as Mel Torme's version of R.B. Greaves' "Take a Letter Maria" and the Brothers Four's sweet, soft take on the Beatles' "Revolution" -- but when presented as a whole, they amount to a prime piece of pop archaeology. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine