Bare/Sleeper Wherever I Fall

Raven's third Bobby Bare disc of the 2000s is a two-fer, not an expansion, presenting his two 1978 albums Bare and Sleeper Wherever I Fall on one disc, adding two bonus tracks from 1983's Drinkin' from the Bottle, Singin' from the Heart at its close. As it happens, Raven has already put out some of the songs from these two albums as bonus tracks on Down & Dirty...Plus and Drunk & Crazy...Plus, but it's a blessing to have the full albums finally hit CD for the first time. Both Bare and Sleeper Wherever I Fall are cut from the same outlaw cloth -- they're earthy, funny records that take their own sweet time -- but they have some significant differences, primarily noted in the presence and absence of Shel Silverstein songs. Bare, Bobby's first album in his eight-album run for Columbia in the late '70s and early '80s is, like his last few for RCA, built primarily on Silverstein tunes. Eight of its ten songs are from Silverstein's pen and the two aren't -- the Dr. Strangelove-ian black humor of "Finger on the Button" and the character sketch "The Gambler," later popularized by Kenny Rogers -- feel like they could have been written by Shel. This is familiar ground for a singer who has been singing Silverstein since 1973's Sings Lullabys, Legends and Lies, but there's a bit of a shift in content and approach, as the songs here are bit vulgar, like Shel's tunes for Dr. Hook, and the production is appropriately looser and dirtier, pointing the way to very rowdy Down & Dirty and Drunk & Crazy without every getting that wild. Sleeper Wherever I Fall feels like a temporary corrective to this trend, containing not a single Silverstein song and placing Bare a bit closer to contemporary 1978 trends. He's warm and smooth on the lullaby "Sleep Tight Good Night Man," his first song that could comfortably fit within the emerging Urban Cowboy trend, and he follows that mellow sound through the sleek "What Did It Get Me," the lush melodrama "Goin' Up's Easy, Comin' Down's Hard," and a smooth soulful version of Rodney Crowell's "On a Real Good Night." These are balanced by some outright rockers -- the laid-back funk of "Hot Afternoon (Arizona Desert)," covers of the Byrds ("I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better"), and the Stones ("The Last Time"), the slow swamp blues of "The Way I Feel Tonight" -- and a song or two that splits the difference, like the mock-gospel pop of "Healin'." It was a record designed to appeal to mass audiences, the way that Bare didn't, and it worked musically and, to a lesser extent it worked commercially, with "Sleep Tight" almost reaching the country Top 10. In retrospect, it seems a bit like a transitional album, a stop-gap before Bare returned to Silverstein songs, but when he did return he retained much of the rock edge of Sleeper, as well as some of its slickness. In that regard, it works well paired with Bare: these are the albums that ushered in the down & dirty, drunk & crazy Bare of the early '80s and it's possible to hear the roots of the sound here.