Review: Andrew Gold, Fraternal Order of the All

Several years ago, I heard a tune on Music Space via my Dish Network subscription, and eventually called DN’s customer service number to find a way to contact Music Space’s customer service people to learn the title of a Beatles tune played through their service that I had somehow managed to miss in the colorful blur of the seventies.

Turns out the name of the tune was Rainbow People, and the artist was Andrew Gold, not the Beatles.

I have always had a warm spot for some of Gold’s hits, namely the high-school buddies anthem Thank You For Being A Friend (later misappropriated by the TV show Golden Girls) and Lonely Boy, another high-school anthem for guys like me - I was almost an outcast, saved from that fate only by my own well-disciplined and valuable but small following which was made up of boys and girls who had been stupidly rejected by the cliques which I had no use for whatsoever.

I had always considered Gold to be a nice sounding “one trick pony,” talented but limited in depth and staying power.

That was before I heard Rainbow People, and started tracking it down, and ended up with the title of a wonderful album I couldn’t buy for any amount of money for several years.

As time passed, I discovered that Rainbow People was part of an album Gold produced merely to satisfy his own creative urges, and perhaps satisfy a few of his rabid fanboys.

That album’s name varies, but is generally known as Fraternal Order of the All - a make-believe band Gold wrote himself as the lead singer/guitarist of just to have all kinds of sonic fun spoofing the great masters of sixties through eighties rock and roll.

There have been lots of “spoof” albums (predictably, Louden Wainwright III comes to mind…) but I have never heard a collection of this magnificence. Andrew pulls this stuff off so easily that none of it sounds like a spoof of any sort.

You listen and keep checking the CD’s libreto to make sure that you’re really listening to Gold, and not a licensed, unreleased track from a major name.

Fraternal Order of the All clearly falls into the niche of “vanity production,” mainly because there are scant credits for other artists besides Gold himself.

Not that it matters one single iota - the album is so clean and so much fun to listen to that you really don’t care if there was a cast of a few or of thousands.

Speaking truthfully, I keep wondering why this talented bastard chose the “steadily employed studio musician” path instead of carving out his own slice of the pie.

I found my copy at Amazon, but this has been in and out of production since its release so you are really better off doing a Google search for it. Don’t be afraid of spending $35 or so if you like sixties and seventies pop and rock - it’s a great addition to your collection and fun to listen to as well. (Here is 55 seconds of Rainbow People in .wav format to stimulate you into looking for Fraternal Order, cheerfully hosted by Real Amateurs Project.)

~ pagemoneky