Liza Minnelli - New Feelin' (Expanded Edition) (1970/2019)

In 1970, A&M Records, the label for which Liza Minnelli (who turned 24 years old on March 12) recorded, had an unusual problem with her. Clearly, she was a fast-rising star, but she couldn't sell any records. Nightclubs and concert halls were eager for her appearances; she was an Oscar-nominated movie actress with her pick of roles; and she already had won a Tony Award, though she was now too big for Broadway. Yet, A&M had failed to chart either of her albums or any of her singles for the label, just as Capitol Records before it had charted only with her 1964 debut album Liza! Liza! The problem, of course, was rock. Despite Minnelli's youth, she was strongly identified with the sort of traditional pop that was performed by singers twice her age or more. As most record labels did in the late '60s and early '70s, A&M tried to compromise by getting her to record songs by contemporary soft rock songwriters like Lennon & McCartney and Bacharach-David; this strategy was almost never successful with other middle of the road singers, and it wasn't for Minnelli, either. For her third A&M LP, the company had her try a different kind of compromise. She went back to the kind of interwar standards from the Great American Songbook that she loved the music of Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and George Gershwin but the arrangements were all country-soul as played by the funky Southern musicians at the Fame Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals, AL, for a sound closer to Willie Nelson than Nelson Riddle. It was certainly the most contemporary sounding record Minnelli had ever made. Twangy guitars played chicken-pickin' solos; an organ burbled; an electric bass popped; drums pounded; a punchy horn section blared; and female backup singers wailed with a gospel feel. Minnelli reacted to all the competition by singing louder and harder than usual. She connected with the material as best she could, but the kind of emotional commitment such a style implied (fulfilled in the hands of, say, Aretha Franklin or Dusty Springfield) simply was not her way of performing. The result was a failed experiment. (Oddly enough, however, the album snuck into the bottom of the charts for a few weeks in the fall of 1970, doubtless because Minnelli took advantage of her celebrity to appear on every available network TV variety show and promote it.)