Leon Russell and the Shelter People is the greatest album which I’ve never talked about, never been drafted into an argument about. It seldom comes up in the best of all time lists, but should.
Yet Robert Christgau disagrees with me: “Russell knows how to put music together, but he still has trouble putting it across. His Okie-cum-Brooklyn (ersatz Nworleans?) drawl is the outcry of a confused homeboy driven to fuse rootsy eccentricities with masscult shtick and flash, and his meaningfulness clarifies nothing.”
