Of course, hit potential and total obnoxiousness have never been mutually exclusive, and this is one of the most idiotically irritating albums in recent memory. In Goodnight Vienna it looks like everyone involved has begun to take the joke seriously, as if it was never a joke at all, and from the sound of it, it too contains several potential hit singles. Whether they got the irony or not, the public went for the setup, and Ringo yielded three hit singles. The joke of his work in the Ringo album was that this schlub was being given a Busby Berkeley musical fairyland to kitsch around in, and you were supposed to love the irony and celebrate the fact that Ringo was no longer an embarrassment.
Perry is a producer's producer, which means he can easily swamp the performer who lacks the chops or personality to rise above his cutesy settings. Perry specializes in taking people who have begun to languish in the middling-straight MOR leagues and wrapping them in enough Peter Max musical tissue to make then palatable to some invisible audience of thirty-eight-year-old greenhorn pot smokers who apparently can't connect with Chicago or John Denver and so want their Andy Williams or Barbra Streisand nudged just a silly millimeter or two in the direction of Relevance. Ringo has had help in this offense against nature, of course a sizable slew of the usual ubiquitous plodders, one helluva roster of Big Names who don't mind sitting in just for a larf or two, and, most important, Richard Perry, who may be the single most depressingly facile producer in pop music today. Essentially what he's done, beginning with his last album and continuing unbearably with this one, is to get pretentious about his mawkish hi-folks-I'm-a-rank-amateur-so-what routine, with the result that it's become annoying in much the same way as Sonny Bono's Cher-less pratfalls. He's had his moments since the empire toppled ("Back Off Boogaloo"), but his become a bad joke that's crossed the line into insult. His oafishness, his aw-shucks incompetence are no longer charming in fact, he may be at this point the most irritating ex-Beatle around.
Ringo's Goodnight Vienna can be neither enjoyed nor ignored - it's downright obnoxious, and provides a landslide of incriminating evidence in support of what many of us began to believe against our will years ago - namely, that Ringo is a jackass.
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