Ronnie Milsap

Good work, Ned! I don't know a soul among my music-loving pals who remembers that song. Keep mentioning it and only get strange looks. I think back in the day when MTV needed video--any video--to program they ran that one. It's a great song.

Holy crap! John Doe and Exene! They love Ronnie's car too!

Hahaha you're right! Wow.

Cached review of the video

Did Milsap handle most of the keyboards? Is it his electric piano on "Stranger in My House"?

Also: Christgau mentions him not once in his eighties Consumer Guide (if you don't count a half-assed jibe directed as much to John Hiatt).

I like Milsap as well, especially his crossover hits, like his 1983 #23 Pop charting "Stranger In My House". The Milsap of the late 70's/hit filled 80's was never a fave with Country music critics who favored traditional sounds. John Morthland in his 1984 Best of Country Music book dismisses this era, and David Cantwell and Bill Frisckies-Warren's 500 Greatest Singles Country book has no Milsap single in its countdown.

His Scepter recordings from the 60s are really good and have been repackaged by budget labels over and over (there's a comp called Kentucky Woman currently available on Itunes). Apparently, Elvis was a regular patron at his legendary late 60s house gig at TJs in Memphis - there are definite similarities between Elvis's American Studio recordings and what Milsap was doing at Scepter. He also cut an album with Dan Penn for Warners in 71 that is worth searching out.

Milsap isn't in the Country Music Hall of Fame, either. Strait, Twitty, and Alabama are, though.

I would think that it's Milsap on piano on "Stranger In My House" but the net is proving useless to answering this. I did learn that it's Milsap on piano on Elvis' "Kentucky Rain", a monster of a record.

Spotify has a few Milsap albums, including this one from 1986:

http://images.uulyrics.com/cover/r/ronnie-milsap/album-christmas-with-ronnie-milsap.jpg

That cover picture is...odd. The album is quite minor: ten songs including one three minute spoken narrative track in which Milsap reminds us that he's "just analyzed what makes Christmas great". It rhymes at least, but seems constitutive of filler.

Inspired by this thread, today I pulled out the copy of Ronnie's 1984 One More Try For Love that I'd payed a buck or two for a couple years ago. Mostly pleasant adult-contemporary fare, I'd say, with occasional audible synths and saxes and one vaguely blues-rock side-closer and one man-woman ballad duet side closer. "She Loves My Car," though, as noted above, is a total CHR for MTV pop-rock move, but even weirder, maybe, is the bleak, spare, cynical minor-key "Suburbia," which makes me think of nothing else as much as the Pet Shop Boys song of the same name from two years later, except Ronnie sounds even more despressed about the subject. Strange - and pretty awesome.

..depressed...(I meant)

some of this stuff is pretty great, but he's sort of a catchword for 1980s amiable pap and a lot of his music really earns that designation.

i watched clint eastwood's thoroughly not-so-good "bronco billy" (i know, i know, it has its defenders; i'm not one) and the theme track, "cowboys & clowns", is by milsap. it sort of sucks. merle haggard shows up in a cameo, and represents a big improvement.

i totally remember "she loves my car" in a heard-it-in-the-supermarket-years-ago sort of way.

I think "pleasant adult-contemporary fare" is a fair description, as is "amiable", if not "pap". It's not particularly demanding music, I guess, though I don't see what's necessarily good about demanding (a matter of taste, I know). Although good songs about heartbreak shouldn't go down that easily (keeping with the "pap" idea), at least if you attend to the heartbreak.

Well, I definitely didn't mean "pleasant adult-contemporary fare" as an insult. Though I also wouldn't say most of the songs on that album leave much of an impression when the album's over; he seems to be very distinctive sometimes, but usually not especially distinctive at all (though I say that as somebody who's still not much of an expert on late '70s/early '80s crossover country, a subgenre I ignored for years).

Something else I wrote about the Greatest Hits CD I have a couple years ago:

Rolling country 2007 thread

My inclination now, fwiw, is to think I overrated that best-of CD at least a little in that post. (Though by "not being an expert," I mean I'm not entirely confident with my own ability to determine what AC C&W of that era is "distinctive," and what isn't. There may well be subtle nuances in some songs or arrangements that I'm just not picking up on.)

you know, i was wrong about the "bronco billy" song. the song that comes at the beginning of the film, "cowboys and clowns," isn't bad. i found myself listening to it a few times, and enjoying it quite a bit. his whole aesthetic is so low-key and straight-ahead that when he does twist the phrasing around a bit, it makes an impression. that said, the concluding song, simply called "bronco billy," is mediocre.

that soundtrack also has the merle haggard/clint eastwood duet "barroom buddies." which proves, without a doubt, that clint eastwood cannot sing. but oddly enough merle haggard does his full-on emmett miller impression on that song, complete with yodel. maybe he was bored and amusing himself?

anyway.

Ha (warning: non-Milsap tangent) I paid $1 for a copy of Hag's live 1973 I Love Dixie Blues a few weeks back, and it is like 50 percent Emmett Miller impressions. They're pretty cool, too! But I still kinda understand why it wasn't one of his more acclaimed albums.

(Okay, maybe not 50 percent...maybe 33 1/3. But he actually mentions Miller once, and I'm pretty sure I've never heard anybody else do that.)

well it's basically a miller tribute album right? at least, that was my impression.

i think leon russell has namechecked miller once or twice.

I've bought the 16 Biggest Hits since I last posted. A third of it IS pap (Christgau actually banished Milsap to his "Meltdown" list in the eighties Consumer Guide), but the other two-thirds is expert mainstream pop. "I Wouldn't Have Missed It For the World" and "Stranger in My House" do lust and cuckolded rage, respectively, very well. No "She Drives My Car," unfortunately; and the "Suburbia" tune sounds interesting.

*She Loves My Car

xp Well, Miller's definitely not mentioned anywhere on the LP cover. And Hag does "I Ain't Got Nobody," "Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)," and "Lovesick Blues" (the latter of which everybody thinks of as Hank anyway), but that's only three songs out of 13. So I wouldn't call it quite a tribute. But maybe people (even Hag maybe?) have described it as one; I wouldn't argue if somebody did.

the full title of that LP is so unwieldy: "I Love Dixie Blues...So I Recorded Live in New Orleans." ok, thanks merle.

anyway, ronnie milsap. you folks know about this song, right? with the lines:

Hey, this ain't country-western!
It's just soft-rock feminist crap!
And I thought they'd struck bottom back back in the days of Ronnie Milsap

honestly i'd rather listen to ronnie milsap than robbie fulks, though.

Christgau actually banished Milsap to his "Meltdown" list

He also refers to "the anodyne likes of Alabama and Ronnie Milsap" in his new Brad Paisley essay, just published this week:

http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Rock-Roll/Paisley-s-Progress/ba-p/1695

yeah, I doubt Milsap will return as a hot critical touchstone. It's a pity that he's something of a critical punching bag, though.

Reviving this to note this pretty cool story about Mike Reid, who wrote a LOT of Milsap's eighties hits -- as you can see here.

"Stranger in My House" is a great song; had no idea he wrote "I Can't Make You Love Me."

just found out the other day that my friend zach is related to ronnie on his mom's side of the family! carry on with the milsap love...

I heard "Smokey Mountain Rain" in the bookstore this morning, forcing me to sing like a fool.

these precious hours, we know can't survive

do we have a thread for most awkwardly falsely casual "oh hi, didn't see ya there, I just happened to be standing here like this" poses album covers?

https://i.imgur.com/ONGfNcO.jpg

he literally didn't see ya there

hahahaha

there's a stranger in my house, somebody here that i can't see

gotta love ronnie

been having so many night dreams about day things in the middle of the early part of the morning lately

help me get the scope amendment cost modification memo off my mind, Ronnie