The R&B horn band is a fine and venerable tradition, and at its best, as in Ray Charles' incredible aggregations of the Fifties and early Sixties, has given us some of the most powerful music of our time. With the stylistic diffusions of the last half-decade, rock bands taking on horns have moved in divergent courses epitomized by the two generic prototypes, Blood, Sweat & Tears and the Electric Flag. Blood, Sweat & Tears borrowed as much from Kenton, May-nard Ferguson and the Fifties big-band tradition as from funk and R&B, while the Flag drew on the latter in an attempt to become a kind of psychedelicized Stax-Volt supergroup.

What we have here are two bands that would like to lay claim to the Ray Charles tradition, but the real antecedent in both cases is the Electric Flag. Not that they were influenced by the Flag, of course, but they are derivative in the same way, with the same messiness and strenuous artificial excitement, but without even the grand sense of sloppy power and overproduction as pure fun the Flag displayed in their first album.

The Edgar Winter album was recorded live, and those who have seen them in concert will testify to their ability to rouse an audience; unfortunately it doesn't come across on record. If their first, studio album was a mite too slick, this one is often sloppy without really being joyful about it. It's one thing just to spill a mess of licks on the floor and get down and wallow in them – anybody should be able to enjoy that–but quite another to run through four sides of perfunctory get-it-on screams. There's no real reason to complain about the stereotypic quality of songs like "Save the Planet" and "Cool Fool," which sound like so many other things there's no point in even listing them, but a band should have the conviction of their cliches. It seems to me that anybody attempting one more run-through of "Tobacco Road" or "Turn On Your Love-light" at this late date is just making it hard on themselves, but the versions included here are not only not fresh, they're plain boring, excessive as hell in the case of "Road" and bar-bandish in "Love-light." Hell, I've heard better in plenty of bars. The Chambers Brothers execrable version of "I Can't Turn You Loose" cuts the one here. Most of the solos in the album are overlong and truly pointless, headed nowhere; Johnny Winter's guest appearance on "Rock 'n' Roll Hoochie Koo" is about as good as anything on the Johnny Winter And Live album. It should be mentioned that as this is written Edgar Winter has a new band, sans horns and with a new young guitarist deep into Hendrixisms replacing the excellent Rick Derringer.

Wayne Cochran is something else again. He and his band the C.C. Riders aren't as "hip" as Winter and White Trash, but they sure would like to be. After playing the grueling roadshow circuit between Vegas and the South for years, Cochran has been signed to Epic and is obviously trying for national success and the shaking off of his redneck-lounge act image. For years Cochran and the Riders have been known as something akin to the greatest bar band in the world, the honky's Little Richard. Unfortunately, it is not only the sort of show that almost invariably refuses to come across on vinyl, but Cochran has beefed up his already always slightly forced grunts and "Yeahs!" and lumbering Otis Redding cops with drug references and quasi-humanist drivel of the sort that's currently eroding the vitality of black popular music so badly. Cochran has always been basically a ham, and offered in the spirit of good fun with which his act has traditionally been imbued there's nothing more entertaining than ham. But when ham tries for hip the juices somehow curdle. And the C.C. Riders are tight and competent and unimpressive.

These two albums would be merely dull were it not for the fact that there is music around akin to what both these bands aspire for that is so much fuller and more "shout-bammalamma" celebratory, tight enough to pull out all the stops and let the raucous good times roll without all the autistic solos and foolish posturings. Try an album released last summer, also on Epic, called The Johnny Otis Show Live At Monterey, and see if it doesn't blow Cochran and especially Edgar Winter clear through the wall and into the back yard. And reflect, perhaps, on how ordinary-looking people making some of the mightiest R&B around must settle for scuffling or just getting by simply because they don't happen to have long hair or pretty unisex threads or any kind of gimmicky freak appeal. (RS 108)

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