Consumer Guide Album

Jane Olivor: First Night [Columbia, 1976]
The three best-selling record albums of all time are Tapestry, Bridge Over Troubled Water, and The Sound of Music. One way of explaining how unmonolithic "mass" culture really is is to point out how few consumers are likely to own all three. And a way of explaining how stupefying Jane Olivor is is to guess that she not only owns all three, but would put them in her all-time top 10. Live, she enunciates Neil Diamond and John Denver lyrics with the intense credulity of someone who thinks poetry is anything that rhymes; her LP is marginally adventurous, but if she becomes a star it will be by embodying the half of Barbra Streisand that Bette Midler put in the garbage. Recycling should never go this far. C-