Visions of Sonny Vol. 3: Sonny Goes To Washington

To the rest of the world, Sonny Bono's inauguration as the Mayor of Palm Springs didn't seem like a big deal; hell, half the moneyed cities in California are run by former entertainers. In the '80s, to see who could have the political leader with the most film and TV credits came to be a source of civic pride. But Sonny Bono, Congressman, took a little getting used to, despite the ground already broken by Iowa Republican Fred Grandy. Just five years earlier, Sonny had been doing those witty, self- deprecating Nike ads with Bo Jackson, poking fun at himself in a way that Capitol Hill doesn't usually tolerate. But they had to make room up on The Hill for Sonny and his crackpot humor. And whatever you thought of his conservative agenda, he will be missed.

Album three in the Sonny and Cher canon is In Case You're In Love, released in 1967 when the world was changing and acid rock was in full swing-- in other words, when music had passed the cornball duo by. Their brand of fluffy pop, which still had some relevance in the mid- sixties when kids could remember the teen idol era, was now painfully sappy and out of date. Somehow, though, the album manages to be of at least passing interest, mostly on the strength of its weirdness and an overall so- bad- it's- good quality.

Bono's would- be youth anthem "The Beat Goes On" opens the album, with Sonny hoping to sum up "the craziness in the streets" the way that Barry McGuire had done with "Eve of Destruction." It works as a camp classic now, with Sonny belting out "Men keep marching off to war" and Cher answering with "Electrically, they keep a baseball score." Huh? Hey, don't try to figure it out, just remember: no matter what happens, the beat goes on.

Also scoring high on the bizarro meter is the dixieland-ish "Podunk," where the two trade lyrics in poorly- executed accents that give the flavor of a drunken duet between Ethyl Mermen and W.C. Fields. "Stand By Me" and "Groovy Kind of Love" are the obligatory terrible covers, but the closer, "Plastic Man," is another oddly compelling car wreck of a song. It's the staunchly anti- drug Bono's commentary on the "trippers" of the day, with both Sonny and Cher chastising druggies for living a synthetic existence. Any one of the song's lines would be hilarious in a sample, and somebody has got to do it, if only to keep Sonny's memory alive. May the beat go on.

-Mark Richard-San