0 Robert Cray Band, "Smoking Gun" (1987)

March 21, 1987, #22
(listen)

I am a fan of Robert Cray and his one and only hit is no exception, not least in that it comes from probably my favorite album by him, Strong Persuader. I like to think of that album, and Cray more generally, as one analog to the Beatles' work of the mid-'60s in terms of the broad and varied approach taken to love and relationship song to song, which I informally dubbed the puppy love song project. Call Robert Cray, especially on Strong Persuader, the all grown up love song project. As with the Beatles, the scope is appreciated only across the songs, as each one is more or less a unique point unto itself. For example, in "Right Next Door (Because of Me)," the singer is the outside disrupting agent in a married couple, who live in the next apartment, from which he can hear them fighting. The singer has been sleeping with the woman. He hears the man accusing her of being unfaithful. He listens to the fight and fills in the circumstances for us with a blend of regret and satisfaction. He takes no action. In the #22 hit "Smoking Gun," by contrast, the singer is the cuckold realizing he is in an adulterous marriage. In the classic spectrum of grief, denial is giving way to anger, though by and large it is still just simmering anxiety. But the singer seems to know if he presses the issue now he's liable to catch her with "that well-known smoking gun." I like the way the lyric traffics in one of the most difficult aspects of these situations—the images one conjures (or, God help us, sees). The singer is not yet the abject figure of "I Guess I Showed Her," a bruised cuckold now living in a motel (to make another comparison from the Strong Persuader album). But he's surely on his way, though the guitar playing suggests the person in this song may have the greater portion of rage about him.

Detail: Robert Cray Band, "Smoking Gun" (1987)

0 Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1988)

Robert Cray's follow-up to Strong Persuader is a pretty good album, and the follow-up to that, 1990's Midnight Stroll, is not bad either, though I admit that's about where I stopped following along so closely. It's arguable that the public at large did not and does not think any such thing. In fact, nothing ever again came close to the success of Strong Persuader, which even produced a #22 hit in 1987 with "Smoking Gun." More than anything, that says something depressing about the commercial prospects of blues beyond an occasional novelty breakthrough, but that's not news to anyone at this point. Taken purely as product, I think Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is about nearly as good as it gets. There's a lot of work to do here but it's getting done: the vocals are adequate, the guitar playing is good—often outstanding, perhaps even better at its heights than Strong Persuader (the rave-up on "Across the Line," say). Most important, the songwriting is fine, still overwhelmingly concerned with lies, pain, and motel rooms, in interesting verse-chorus-verse forms and Memphis-tinged arrangements with horns. But, yeah, if I think about it enough, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is a shade off Strong Persuader, I suppose. The stories aren't quite as interesting, swinging wild too often, lurid and unlikely. The vocal lines tend to blur off into the background that they occupy in most songs, seductive chanting and melody with no particular thing to say. "Your Secret's Safe With Me," for example, starts from the narrative strains Cray can be so good at, but feels a little lazy, ultimately settling for a B-movie blackmail trope that enters territories of distractingly unpleasant. So that's a shame. But at worst these are just problems of degree. The unique strengths of Strong Persuader are what make it good—and unique. After that it's just a matter of deciding where and how comfortable you are with Cray. For me he can fit like old shoes. I keep a Cray playlist and just let it rip on occasions, and that's how I know him best now. The songs from Strong Persuader often stand out, but they aren't the only ones, and not a few of the others are located here: "I Can't Go Home," "Night Patrol, "Laugh Out Loud." Some real winners here.

Detail: Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1988)

0 Strong Persuader (1986)

By consensus, by acclimation, by the rule of all that is obvious, Robert Cray's breakthrough fifth album (counting Showdown!) is his best. You can almost measure and compare the love Cray fans have for it by how many other albums by him they have had occasion to own (on that scale I am at about a 6). But I have never yet known anyone to claim another by him as better. The template for everything that makes him great is here in these 10 songs, where in retrospect he is clearly about the business of taking down low-hanging fruit. As a guitar player, he's perfectly adequate, even given to moments of brilliance; as a singer it's about the same, though closer to merely adequate. What's most interesting about Robert Cray to me is his songwriting, and more generally and broader than that, the way he builds songs, the story elements he uses. So many of these songs are practically literary, a voice carrying on with a story but somehow also conveying a broader context that often belies, or undercuts, or sometimes emphasizes what the singer is carrying on about. In "Guess I Showed Here," a guy is crowing to himself about all the pain he is causing his woman by leaving her, because he thinks she is having an affair. But he sounds less and less convinced, mulling in the last verse, "Now she can have the house / And she can keep the car / I'm just satisfied / Staying in this funky, little old motel / I'm so mad / Well I can't stand it." In "Right Next Door (Because of Me)," even more starkly, the singer hears the woman he has seduced fighting with her man in the apartment next door (more here). Another element of Cray's songwriting becomes evident comparing the two. He does not have just one persona, nor just a single story, to tell. There's a multiplicity to these songs—which may not have a single story to tell, but ultimately all tend to connect one way or another around deceit in matters of love—that reminds me of a parallel multiplicity to mid-'60s albums by the Beatles. In those songs it is puppy love whereas Cray's are sophisticated and cynical, but the same shifting viewpoints across horizons of experience within the stories of the songs is there. So one result for me is that, as I return to Strong Persuader now and then, I notice that different songs step out differently from the others, or rub against each other in new and different ways, and I identify with these narrators in different ways. It still can seem new when I come back to it. One constant always, of course, is that these songs are excellent blues jam workups within the verse-chorus-verse structure and a perfect pleasure to let just play.

Detail: Strong Persuader (1986)