The Credibility Gap's third album, 1974's
A Great Gift Idea, was recorded at a time when the troupe's radio career was on the wane and they were looking for a new avenue for their comedy. As a consequence, the material on this album is somewhat less topical than their radio work and the routines, for the most part, are barbed reflections of the state of popular culture, circa 1974. Anticipating
Harry Shearer and Michael McKean's later forays into musical parody,
A Great Gift Idea features a wicked R&B parody, "You Can't Judge a Book by Its Hair" (which concerns the youth culture's swing to the political right) and a canny satire of
Curtis Mayfield's music for Superfly in the trailer for "Kingpin," a fictive blaxploitation movie based on the life of
Dr. Martin Luther King. (
Lowell George and Richard Hayward of
Little Feat are part of the backing band.) The album also includes a PBS "interview" with a surprisingly bourgeois Sly Stone, an outdated educational film about the dangers of VD and premarital sex (with Michael McKean as a gloriously awkward teen), and "Where's Johnny?," a venomous take-off of The Tonight Show with
Shearer offering a withering yet accurate impersonation of
Johnny Carson as his chat show hits a typically low ebb during an episode devoted to the gay liberation movement. A fair percentage of
A Great Gift Idea is more clever than laugh-out-loud funny, but the best moments are both smart and acidly witty, and the Credibility Gap's no-quarter take on the world around them has dated very little in the decades since its release, and few studio-bound comedy albums of this era are as accomplished as this. ~ Mark Deming