★★★★★
Gilley is Jerry Lee Lewis's cousin and reputed imitator. He's also proprietor of the largest country-music club in the known world. But his semi-mythic stature is unjustified. His piano arpeggios never get mean. His voice lacks all of Jerry Lee's shrill urgency--more like Jim Reeves with a (certain) sense of rhythm, or Bob Luman without the bite, or maybe even Perry Como Arkansas-born and Houston-raised. And his taste is mainstream country at best...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-02-27
★★★★★
Live! At Gilleys is the second live album to be recorded in 1985. The other, released later, was on Atlantic's Q subsidiary, but this one was released during Mickey Gilley's heyday. Interestingly, even though they both open with Gilley's classic "Don't the Girls All Look Prettier at Closin' Time," they are entirely different in presentation. Immediately following here is the Kenny Rogers monster "Blaze of Glory," but Gilley's version is a honky tonk stomper...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
★★★★★
This is the album that benefited most from Gilley's Urban Cowboy associations, and there's a perfunctory back-cover shot of some cowboy riding a mechanical bull at Gilley's night club. Though Gilley the Balladeer became pretty formulaic during the progression of the '80s, it was a new wrinkle with this album, and he delivers it convincingly. Gilley says the title track is his best performance ever.
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
★★★★★
Mickey Gilley recorded the ten songs that comprise Invitation Only in 1991, a few years after he left Epic and about ten years after his commercial peak, but the sessions stayed on the shelf until Varese's release of the album in the spring of 2003. It wasn't just that this particular album was left behind; Gilley effectively abandoned the idea of being an active recording artist during the '90s, and he didn't cut another album during the decade...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
★★★★★
This is a curious item in the sense that only part of it was previously available on the box set of various artists entitled Live at Gilley's. This is the entire set recorded sometime before the club closed in 1986 and does not have an exact date attached to it, but it hardly matters...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
★★★★★
Mickey Gilley's recording debut for the short-lived Playboy label proved to be a case of being in the right place at the right time. The label was formed to issue country records and get a piece of the biz pie, and Gilley was looking for a major label, or at least a label with major-label distribution, to get his music over to the public at large...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
★★★★★
It was 1976 and Mickey Gilley was still kickin' it for Playboy Records. And Gilley's Smokin' is kickin' it, period. Produced by Eddie Kilroy -- the only man who ever got Gilley's piano sound right -- and Gilley, the recording lays out ten tracks of piano-pumpin' rock & roll, honky tonk tunes, barroom weepers, and an R&B; tune or two. Opening with his "Don't the Girls All Get Prettier at Closin' Time," the tone is set for a classic...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
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