The best of Canned Heat is exactly what Canned Heat wants it to be: good-rockin blues music suitable for balling, dancing, doping, boozing, whatever your thing happens to be, all of them at once maybe. It's a tight band with a tough bass player and a heavy lead guitar, and, if only these were the good old days out of which Canned Heat draws its style and its best material, we might have one really good album from them instead of three so-so ones. In the 1940s, a blues band would put out 78s for years, and finally, if their output warranted it, the parent record company would assemble the best into an album. Today the accent has shifted from quality to quantity; and one result is far too much Canned Heat.

A Best of Canned Heat album, culled from all this bulk, would be a gas. It would have "Rollin' and Tumblin'" and "Catfish Blues" and "Dust My Broom" from the first LP; "Evil Woman," "Amphetamine Annie," "An Owl Song" and "Fried Hockey Boogie" from Boogie; and from Living the Blues it would take "Walking By Myself," parts of "Parthenogenesis" and lead guitarist Henry Vestine's solo on "Refried Boogie." That might be a bit much for one LP, but you could drop even a couple of those without heartbreak.

Until such a record exists, the best bet is probably the Boogie album, side two, where Canned Heat gets it together pretty well. They take "Amphetamine Annie" at a nice, chomping, Muddy Waters-like clip, belting these dope lyrics about this chick who's "always shovelin snow":

Your mind might think you're flyin', babe,

On those little pills,

But you ought to know it's dyin', 'cause

(Chorus) Speed kills ...

And somehow it's a happy thing, even to the weeping over Annie's death at the end. Along the way, Vestine rips off a preaching, cooking solo. He's nearly always strong, with his big buzzy sound and saxophone-like phrasing.

"An Owl Song" is perhaps Al Wilson's strongest vocal outing to date — his peculiarly high crooning mumble grooving along over a kicking, chugging rhythm section. Vestine is really down on the blues "Marie Laveau." And then comes "Fried Hockey Boogie," which is, at once, the best and the worst of Canned Heat.

It starts with a lot of words from Bob Hite, the lead singer, about the beneficial attributes of boogie-ing, and then a lot more chatter out of Hite all through the whole thing, while you're trying to hear what the musicians are laying down. He talks far too much, and the way he talks—a hype black plantation accent that doesn't make it, sounding instead like the interlocutor at a minstrel show—is perfectly offensive. "Doncha feel gud naow thatcha lissen tuh all at boo-geh," he intones over Vestine's storming solo, and reminds us at the end: "An' don't fo-git tuh boo-geh!"

Hite, like all the rest of Canned Heat, is white, and as a means of getting the blues sound he wants, he tock lak lotta dem cats done tock on dem Li-braree uh Con-gress records. And on "Catfish," the first album, when Hite bellows "Ah been knocked out all night . . . Ah's drunk, don't know whut ah'm doin ... But ah do feel lak boogie-in ..." it's Tomming in white-face, no other way to slice it; one big drag.

Such is the ethnic cul-de-sac in which an "authentic" white blues band like Canned Heat places itself. If they simply copied the old stuff, it would be easy enough to write them off entirely, but the fact is they approach nearly every tune afresh. Canned Heat's got its own flavor, its own identity, and not many rock bands can cut them on the energy and musicianship. It's pointless to complain that they do a lot of things old bluesmen have done before, since they make it no secret that this is their point of departure. Indeed, Vestine and Hite have two of the largest blues record collections extant, Wilson is an authoritative researcher into early blues, and the band was begun as a sort of tribute to the music they love.

Either you dig the idea of playing old blues in more or less the old style, or you don't. (Canned Heat does muddy the water even more, however, with a lot of sad packaging. What other band would distribute bumper stickers saying BOOGIE? And what other band would choose nicknames for its players like "Mole" and "Bear" and "Blind Owl" and "Sunflower"? Can you dig "Blacksnake" Hendrix? "Groundhog" Dylan?)

A quick look at the rest of Canned Heat's output. You'll enjoy the first album if down-home country blues blowing is your thing. They lift a few licks from here and there, but the finished product is their own and its wails. On Boogie, we find the rhythm section beginning to loosen just a bit, to get more things going, still blues basically, but in the direction of rock. There's still no indication on Boogie, though, of the more personal direction Canned Heat has taken in performance lately. They have begun to use "Refried Boogie" as a vehicle for free playing—for improvisations that often depart completely from tempo, key and the basic chord structure, while retaining the blues feeling. They get into this on "Refried" on Living the Blues, though they have done it better. Only places this comes across well are on Larry Taylor's bass solo (not too far out, but nice), and Vestine's volcanic ten-minute excursion. Trouble with "Refried" is that it's 41 minutes long, two whole sides, and only Vestine and Taylor are up to that kind of extended soloing. Al Wilson can play screwy little things, but over the long haul he gets plenty tiresome. And while all long drum solos are boring, Fito De La Parra's are excruciatingly so; it would be hard to think of a less imaginative ten minutes than his "Refried" stint.

Oddly enough, Canned Heat seems listless almost everywhere on the new two-record release. A lot of it sounds so much alike it's hard to distinguish among tracks. The exception is "Parthenogenesis," a 19-minute, 54-second, psychedelic adventure which Canned Heat almost brings off. Had it been edited with more care (and De La Parra's heavy-handed drum solo excised), "Parthenogenesis" (the title means development of an unfertilized egg, appropriately) might have worked. As it is, it sandwiches some heavy Vestine, some crazy blues piano (the album notes don't say who's playing), and a pretty little neo-raga by Wilson on mouth harp, in amongst some dull singing and second-rate electronics.

A problematic band, Canned Heat. There's plenty wrong with them, they're still discovering who and where they are, the best is probably yet to come, etc., etc., etc. But still, and despite each and every objection, it's hard not to dig Canned Heat. (RS 23)

JOHN BURKS