Continental American

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After two singer/songwriter albums for tiny Metromedia Records (Peter Allen and Tenterfield Saddler), Peter Allen began to make inroads as a nightclub entertainer. Then, Olivia Newton-John scored a major hit with his co-composition "I Honestly Love You." A&M Records, which signed him, gave Allen a bigger production budget to make his label debut, and he and producer Joel Dorn used it to bring in horn and string sections and create much more elaborate arrangements than the first two albums had enjoyed. But the added instrumentation was in the service of a retrospective, world-weary concept. Allen opened the album with a revival of the 1930 German song "Just a Gigolo," setting a tone that evoked the decadence of Weimar Germany. "Everything Old Is New Again," the original that followed, sounded like a show tune from some forgotten musical of the 1930s, and frothy as it was, it furthered the mood of desperate nostalgia to which Allen then added with "The Natural Thing to Do" and "Pretty Pretty." The title song recalled all-night partying in Manhattan as something that happened in the past, and "Just Ask Me I've Been There," as its title suggested, was a rueful look back by someone who was older, wiser, and somewhat embittered. "I Honestly Love You," though not quite fitting into the album's overall theme, matched its regret in the story of two lovers with other commitments and forced to part. The seven-and-a-half-minute "This Side Show's Leaving Town," the album's most ambitious track, employed a favorite Allen image, the circus, to depict life experiences in terms of a tarnished theatricality. Allen closed the album with another version of "Just a Gigolo," this one accompanied by the fervent seconding of cabaret legend Frances Faye. Continental American was actually a dour singer/songwriter collection that used show business clichés in music and words to express a world view of regret and resignation.

© William Ruhlmann /TiVo