Come Saturday Morning (Expanded Edition)

Album review

In the late 1960s, conventional wisdom in the record industry held that traditional pop singers should turn from the showtunes of the interwar era they had been focusing on since Frank Sinatra's concept albums of the '50s and accommodate the rock revolution to the extent of covering soft rock songs written by the more sophisticated of the contemporary rock & roll songwriters, starting with John Lennon and Paul McCartney of the Beatles, and including such others as Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Still in her early 20s, Liza Minnelli may have been younger than many of the rock & rollers, but by 1968 she had been recording like a traditional pop singer for years, and when she signed to A&M Records after three solo LPs on Capitol, the label made the expected transition with her, picking Lennon & McCartney and Bacharach-David songs for her label debut, significantly titled Liza Minnelli. (Also included were tunes by the relatively unknown Randy Newman, Sonny Bono, Minnelli's husband Peter Allen, and her favorite Broadway songwriters, Kander & Ebb.) It didn't work commercially (the idea rarely did), and A&M became gun-shy about releasing any more Minnelli albums, although it put her in the recording studio later in 1968 and then sat on the results. With songs from the rock musical Hair all the rage in 1969 (the 5th Dimension's "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In," the Cowsills' "Hair," Oliver's "Good Morning Starshine"), A&M had Minnelli cut the quirky "Frank Mills" from the score and released it as a one-off single, but that didn't work, either. Then, Minnelli starred in the film The Sterile Cuckoo, which opened in October 1969. Its theme song was Fred Karlin and Dory Previn's "Come Saturday Morning," a wistful ballad performed on the soundtrack by the Sandpipers, an A&M act. The label released both a Sandpipers single of it and a version by Minnelli that included some dialogue she had spoken in the film. When the Academy Award nominations came out in early 1970, Minnelli was nominated, and so was "Come Saturday Morning," which caused the Sandpipers' recording to take off in the charts and led A&M to conclude that the time finally was right for a new Minnelli album, consisting of material from the 1968 sessions, plus of course "Come Saturday Morning," which became the title track. It's another album like Liza Minnelli, combining then-current soft rock favorites like the 1968 Richard Harris hit "MacArthur Park" (actually only an excerpt from the lengthy song, coupled with another Harris-sung tune written by Jimmy Webb, "Didn't We"), the recent Peter, Paul & Mary hit "Leavin' on a Jet Plane" (written by John Denver), and songs by Newman, Gordon Lightfoot, and Harry Nilsson, plus a couple of old chestnuts and another song by Peter Allen. Minnelli gamely handles the newer songs (her reading of Newman's satiric "Love Story" is particularly clueless), but characteristically comes alive only when she gets to sing the old Tin Pan Alley song "Nevertheless (I'm in Love with You)" (copyright 1931), which is more her style. Oscar nominations or not, the public didn't bite, and Come Saturday Morning was Minnelli's fourth consecutive album to miss the charts.

© William Ruhlmann /TiVo