Robert Palmer: Best of Both Worlds: The Robert Palmer Anthology (1974-2001)

When Robert Palmer dropped out of pop culture’s radar, it was easy to remember his three big, slick, and somewhat disposable mainstream rock hits and think he was just an ’80s music industry product, merely a suave version of Bryan Adams. But to do so would be to forget that Robert Palmer was really a charismatic lounge lizard, an egocentric, sharp-dressed ladies man. At his prime, he was the man.

Hip-O does a great service to Palmer’s career with The Best of Both Worlds: The Robert Palmer Anthology, an appropriately-named two disc retrospective that covers both his slick ’80s arena rock and the other, more diverse phases of his career — like when he was trying out authentic reggae, funk, new wave, and even Rat Pack standards on for size.

It’s true that Palmer didn’t actually write that much of his own material — a distinction that today could sink most pop or rock stars — but his taste was impeccable. His early, ’70s-era material — like the first three cuts, all pulled from Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley — feature Palmer backed by members of Little Feat and Meters and sounding loose and funky as he rolls through a mix of covers and originals. His cover of Allen Touissaint’s “Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley” in particular is a song that is woefully underrated and underplayed on classic rock radio. Palmer’s terrific lead vocals are backed by his loose, funky, and ultimately rocking backup band — it’s a song that, if you know Palmer only by his ’80s output — is likely to surprise you.

But through most of the ’70s Palmer went through a chameleonic phase, bringing lesser-known songs forward and signing them, lounge-crooner style, for a large audience. And if Palmer’s versions of classics like Toots and the Maytals’ “Pressure Drop”, Gary Numan’s “I Dream of Wires”, or Moon Martin’s “Bad Case of Lovin’ You (Doctor, Doctor)” hadn’t been recorded, then it’s quite possible that many would’ve never heard them. And while Palmer spurned some great originals during this period (such as the hard rock of “You’re Gonna Get What’s Coming” or “Pride”), the best songs come in the shape of the covers or the songs written for him, like two of his biggest early-period hits: “Some Guys Have All the Luck” (later made more famous in a lesser version by Rod Stewart) and the Caribbean-flavored “Every Kinda People”.

The second disc begins the foray through Robert Palmer’s MTV era. The first half of the disc runs through his Power Station, Riptide, and Heavy Nova hits and proves that this period of Palmer’s career is due for a reevaluation, even if some of the hits — like “Simply Irresistible” — really weren’t very good.

Granted, these ten tracks are dripping with ’80s cheese. Slick, flashy synthesizers and excessive percussion dominate each track. The guitars sound canned and cold, processed and produced to the point where they have no soul, ironically something that Palmer’s early career could never be accused of. But given the recent reassessment of electro, and the nostalgia-like pursuit of this type of flashy production by bands like Ladytron and Freezepop, a lot of these songs are pretty interesting. The two singles that Palmer recorded as part of Power Station (a supergroup he formed with members of Duran Duran) are especially good examples. While their cover of “Get It On (Bang A Gong)” is more interesting as an example of how clueless people had become about good music during the Reagan era, the mega-hit “Some Like It Hot” holds up quite well today. The excessive syn-drums may be an accurate snapshot of what 1985 sounded like, but the song itself is a sleek, lean, party-friendly summer hit, and it’s still catchy as all hell.

A good deal of the lesser-remembered material from this period, like “You Are in My System” and the arena rocker “Hyperactive”, seems fresher today than the bigger hits, also largely because the synthesizers don’t seem so gauche now, nearly 20 years later, as they did, say, ten years ago. And, unsurprisingly, Palmer’s biggest hits (“Addicted to Love”, “I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On”, and “Simply Irresistible”, not so coincidentally the three that featured the famous music videos where Palmer sang in front of a chorus of identical, short-haired, disaffected-looking models) are here.

When the ’80s ended, Palmer was placed into a strange position; he was aging, and the type of music that made him into a superstar was now horribly out of fashion, having been displaced by grunge and rap. More importantly, there just wasn’t a place for a pop singer famously known for his snazzy dress, highly stylized music videos, and cover tunes.

Which is why Palmer retreated into decidedly “adult” material beginning early in the decade. But he did even this gracefully, kicking the new part of his career off with a hit cover of “Mercy Mercy Me/I Want You” and segueing into pleasant, if undistinguished, adult contemporary pop like “Know By Now”.

Best of Both Worlds isn’t likely to spawn a wide re-estimation of Robert Palmer’s lengthy, diverse career, but like most good extensive hits compilations, it manages to cherry-pick some of the greatest moments from his career and proves, at the very least, that he wasn’t the one-sided pop star that his best-remembered hits suggest.