Armed and Crazy

AMG Review of Armed and Crazy

Stephen Thomas Erlewine
All Music Guide

If Take This Job and Shove It found Johnny Paycheck and his producer Billy Sherrill flirting with self-parody, its 1978 follow-up Armed and Crazy found the pair going over the edge, creating a glitzy, gaudy send-up of their previous records. Sherrill starts relying a little on gimmicks -- the choruses of the title track are punctuated by a synthesized wail -- and a whole lot on studio tricks of the day, including fuzztone guitars, Fender Rhodes electric pianos, and beats that allude to disco. Combine this with a bunch of seriously silly songs -- tracks that merely sound silly, like the slippery shuffle "Leave It to Me" to the sheer goofiness of "Let's Have a Hand for the Little Old Lady" -- and Armed and Crazy veers a little bit too close to comedy, and it's not all intentional. Just because it is silly doesn't mean it's not enjoyable, as there's enough professionalism in Sherrill's craft and Paycheck's delivery to make the album enjoyable, although there are just enough truly good songs reminiscent of their prior peaks -- the stripped-down ballad "Thanks to the Cathouse (I'm in the Doghouse with You)" which, ironically enough, isn't a joke; the slow-burning "Just Makin' Love Don't Make It Love"; the sly self-aggrandizing wit of "The Outlaw's Prayer" -- to make it easy to realize that Armed and Crazy is a shadow of the pair's prior peaks.