A jaunty piano riff leads the A-side of this single, backed by drums and a saxophone, with light vocals to accent the bar ends popping up a few times. It rolls along, gathering speed and activity, and then simply fades down to silence. The B-side takes a softer tone, with a bit of a romantic country song flavor to its instrumental playing, and develops its melody neatly in the short run-time. A nice pair, though very quick.
On their debut album, the Village People deliver what would practically be an EP at about twenty minutes of material, if not for the first side being a ~10-minute medley, flowing from “San Francisco (You’ve Got Me)” to “In Hollywood (Everybody Is A Star)”. Not quite as chorus-focused than their later big hits (at least until the end of the medley), the A-side plays up the actual instruments, with just shy of a dozen musicians performing the tight-written rhythms, with twists into big and funky grooves. The Village People themselves do little more than sing, with Felipe Rose, the Native American character, also playing bells.
While the vocals are a little too persistent for the music to launch into a really strong treatment of the central melodies for any of the songs, the arrangements are kept sharp and hooky, even if they do tend to run on into lackluster drop-offs. Significantly less campy than follow-up material would prove to be, there’s a surprisingly straight-faced quality to this first album, matching the serious expressions of the People on the cover.
Here’s the alternate cover art.
And another alternate cover.
Scrambled Brains 