Robert Palmer Live At The Wiltern Theatre, Los Angeles: Reviews
In The Palm(er) Of His Hand
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At first I thought I was going to hate last week’s Robert Palmer show at the Wiltern Theatre. I mean, out strut this dashing young man with perfect hair, a model’s face and an immaculate gray suit that looked as if it was torn from the pages of GQ.
The women screamed as Palmer first approached the mike. “Here we go,” I thought. “The only one who adores Robert Palmer more than these throngs of screaming fans is Robert Palmer.” Wrong.
Palmer then proceeded to deliver as unassuming and satisfying a set as they come. Relying heavily on cuts from his latest and most successful Island project, Riptide, Palmer blended soul, rhythm & blues, jazz and pop into a tight 90-minute set that thrust his band into as bright of a spotlight as the one he seemed to shun.
Palmer was cordial, low key and even somewhat shy and his conservative stage movements seemed to reflect the music of his nine-piece band, not the wishes of those in the audience who were wishing for a bit of gyration with their perfectly pleated pants.
Though the set was sprinkled with such gems as the enchanting, Riptide, the driving, Discipline Of Love (both off the latest Island project), and the now classic, You Are In My System, it was, Some Like It Hot (off the Power Station LP), Addicted To Love (his current and only number one hit to date) and the sizzling, Bad Case Of Loving You, that brought the crowd to its feet.
Let’s face it, back in the 70s when Palmer was looking as dapper as ever, he couldn’t buy a number one single. It paid to look more like the Atlanta Rhythm Section back then. Today, we’re in the video age, and to Palmer’s credit, he never abandoned his wardrobe.
David Adelson (Cash Box - May 10, 1986)
GQ-Rock Comes To The Wiltern With Palmer
Even in the '70s, when casual was cool and pop stars were supposed to look the same way on stage that they did on the street, Robert Palmer was a man who knew how to dress himself. The dapper singer also had a way of surrounding himself with gorgeous women, which got him pegged as a debonair womanizer.
His pervasive image was as sort of the sophisticate’s Englebert Humperdinck, a popular singer who obviously enjoyed publicly flaunting his image. If anyone ever tossed any undergarments on stage at a Palmer show, though, you can be sure they were of the Gucci variety.
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That image has carried through, with his blessing, to this day. His latest videos feature an amusingly superfluous array of bouncing bodies, and the band at his two weekend concerts at the Wiltern Theatre was filled out with female musicians probably picked as much for the statuesque silhouettes they cut in breathlessly tight dresses as for their musical prowess.
Now that he finally has a No. 1 hit, with Addicted To Love, the image doesn’t seem about to change. His supremely funny lyric has him gloating a bit over how he’s about to step in and take advantage of a woman’s overwhelming craving for affection.
From that description, it seems as if Palmer ought to come off as unbearably crass, but, beneath the surface, his material has never really been all that sexist or exploitatively sexy and even though he coolly keeps his distance from his audience, he still comes off as a likable fellow.
He knows that a wink is as good as a nudge, and a smirk is as good as a leer, and much of the sleek veneer of what he does is really a knowing smoke screen for the smarts at work in the music.
In Friday’s show, Palmer never exerted himself enough to let his suave guard down - except when he did a little of his trademark laughing/hiccuping, which drew wild cheers - but nonetheless presided ably over a brisk, breezy and versatile 95 minutes.
His fairly recent entry into the realm of stardom hasn’t caused him to toss out his more eclectic influences, happily, with a middle section of Caribbean and even jazz-flavored material sitting quite well alongside the pre- and post-Power Station funk exercises.
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No transcendent musical moments in any of that, mind you, but Palmer has assembled a unit of four men and four women that can effectively put its gloves on the grooves of both urban America and the distant tropical isles that Palmer favors. (The men do carry a much larger share of the weight than the women - this isn’t the Revolution.)
Though he’s very much a singer and not just a sex symbol, Palmer’s no vocal gymnast, and his frequent sharing of stage center with female vocalist B.J. Nelson - in what a lot of times were all-out duets - was a decent and surprisingly modest move.
The mellower, more exotic material in the middle was heightened with the help of especially noteworthy lighting and set design, which turned the stage into something different with each new song (at probably a fraction of the cost of the Simple Minds’ Traveling Megawatt Show a few weeks back, which tried to make the stage look different every 10 seconds).
And, oh yeah... nice suit.
Chris Willman (Los Angeles Times - May 1986)