Additional information
Liner Note Author: Kieron Tyler. The Larry Page Orchestra's output, like much '60s and early-'70s instrumental easy listening music, gained some hip cachet decades later. Still, this 21-song anthology, collected from five albums done by the LPO from 1967-1970, consists largely of trivial versions of rock and pop hits and standards, including chart-toppers like "Light My Fire," "Venus," and "House of the Rising Sun." The arrangements of these aren't imaginative or even high-temperature, and the few songs written by arrangers (and sometimes co-written by Larry Page himself) are among the more interesting, if only because it's not overly familiar material done much better by others. Give them points, though, for covering the obscure Paul McCartney composition "Love in the Open Air," heard in McCartney's soundtrack to the film The Family Way. "Theme for a Dream," written by the Boudleaux-Bryant songwriting team responsible for many Everly Brothers hits, is actually rather fetching and sultry, with ghostly wordless female vocal interjections; "Wake Me When the Sun Shines," one of Page's co-writes, is a pleasant bossa nova jazzer with more scatting female vocals; and "The Lonely One" might have made a nice moody theme for a Swinging London film. Those are the highlights of a disc that suffers from too many drawn-out lounge saxophone solos. If you get bored, you can always look at the pictures on the sleeve of the foxy topless woman posing with saxophone and violin. ~ Richie Unterberger
