As long as Elton John can bring forth one performance per album on the order of 'Someone Saved My Life Tonight,' the chance remains that he will become something more than the great entertainer he already is and go on to make a lasting contribution to rock.

It didn't matter that Charlie Chaplin may not have been a great director or a great anything else. He made great movies.

It is by now beyond question that Elton John is a competent and classy entertainer. Few people who have achieved his popularity have succeeded in maintaining his standards for performance and professionalism.

On first listening, Joni Mitchell's 'Court And Spark,' the first truly great pop album of 1974, sounds surprisingly light; by the third or fourth listening, it reveals its underlying tensions.

When the Beatles cut old rock n' roll, they were recording music still in their performing repertoire, and besides, they never thought of the music as old.

'Dance to the Music' was just Sly Stone being his natural crazy self right from the beginning. The man was an original and his first AM hit was nothing if it wasn't the example per excellence of the Sly Stone music machine.

James Taylor may be an all-American boy but he isn't Horatio Alger, and the lionizing of many rock stars by the rock press has as much to do with old fashioned rags-to-riches stories as does the straight culture's deification of its idols.