Having listened to the new Johnny Winter LP for a couple of weeks, I have to say that I found it disappointing, despite the fact that in several respects it's a more than respectable, even a fine album. But it hasn't the looseness, excitement, intensity, the real power and urgency of the best stuff on the earlier Sonobeat session. Most of the music on the Columbia set sounds tired, fussy, too worked-over and worried out of any real vitality. Undoubtedly there were strong pressures on Winter to come up with a truly "heavy" album that would justify all the hype that followed on his six-figure signing, so perhaps he can be excused for being a bit cautious. I'm damn sure I'd be. But it's too bad he wound up the victim of all the B S that went down.

This could have been a monster of an album. As it is, there are a couple of spots where it almost happens. Much of the difficulty with the tracks that might have made it is that they suffer from excess, as though Winter couldn't trust his instincts to leave well enough alone. He piles everything on.

"I'm Yours and I'm Hers" is an example of this overindulgence. The accompaniment consists of two electric guitar parts, one slide (channel A) the other plectrum lead (channel B), plus bass and drums (with the vocal in the center). Now, it's an interesting idea to have parallel guitar parts playing contrapuntally, but the end result here is just so much busyness. The two parts tend to cancel each other out because instead of being complementary, interlocking parts that work together as contrapuntal voices they pretty much attempt the same thing, with only the minor variations resulting from their not being played perfectly together. If we assume that the slide part was the basic accompaniment, then the other just muddies up the texture because it doesn't add anything significant (not even parallel voicing) but merely duplicates, with an excess of decoration, what the slide has laid down. Though the tune is credited to Winter, an almost identical piece, "She's Mine, She's Yours," was recorded by Jimmy Rushing for King Records seventeen years ago.

The same over-busyness mars the version of Robert Johnson's "When You Got a Good Friend" and again the problem is a two-guitar accompaniment for which no real part has been worked out. An imaginative but unobtrusive bass-guitar part would have been far more successful than the two lead parts—neither of which is properly a lead. It's too frantic. "Dallas," on the other hand, works out well. The accompaniment is a single slide guitar line, played on the National. The piece suggests several of Johnson's song accompaniments but perhaps the major source is his "Terra-Plane Blues," though Winter's playing is not as tightly focused as it was on the Sonobeat "Broke Down Engine," which also used a Johnson-styled accompaniment. This one is a bit sloppy rhythmically and the texture somewhat thick. But, all in all, the best performance in this style on the album. If this is the 13th take, as the spoken introduction suggests, it might go a long way to explaining the rhythmic stiffness.

The same rhythm difficulties plague the trio version of "Leland Mississippi Blues" (Winter's birthplace), with an accompaniment based on Muddy Waters' "All Night, Long." Winter gets into Waters' guitar style nicely playing strongly and with feeling, but a rhythmic sluggishness creeps into the last half of the cut and the piece never quite recovers. "Mean Mistreater," with Walter Norton on harmonica and Willie Dixon on acoustic bass, is a fairly successful evocation of early Fifties Muddy. The guitar playing is authentic, true to the Waters rubric, fairly inventive, and the amplifier sound properly funky. A good, gutty performance marred only by an inaudible, badly distorted vocal. This is such a distinguishing feature of most of Winter's blues sides that I wonder if it represents a conscious artistic choice. If he feels vocals lack muscle, the answer is not to mix them in at a barely audible level but to use a number of recording techniques to help beef them up.

"Be Careful with a Fool" is in fairly conventional modern guitar style—fast, supercharged playing accompanied by bass, drums and an occasional over-dubbed guitar line. A good bit of excitement is generated—particularly in the second and third guitar choruses—but much of this is superficial, the result of speed in execution rather than substantial, musically logical improvised lines. The first chorus burns itself out; starting with a blistering barrage of notes, fast as hell, Winter stops dead when he runs out of steam and realizes he's at a deadend. He recovers and takes a little more care with the two choruses that follow. Vocal is okay, but again under-recorded.

"Good Morning Little School Girl," the old Sonny Boy Williamson song but here credited to "D. Level-B. Love," whoever they may be, gets a solid performance from Winter, instrumentally and vocally. Unfortunately, we are treated to a horn accompaniment that is unnecessary on several counts: the arrangement is woefully unimaginative and played sloppily in the bargain; moreover, it just gets in the way of the guitar part, which is a very inventive, exciting accompaniment when the horns don't obscure it, which is most of the time.

That brings us to "I'll Drown in My (Own) Tears," on which the horns are also present. Doing this was a mistake, pure and simple, and a classic example of sending a boy to do a man's job. Winter should have known better. A flyweight, no matter how agile, is no match for a heavyweight champion, and if you think this simile excessive, just listen to the two recordings. The horns here are fine but, then, they offer a literal recreation of the horn arrangement on the Ray Charles original. The fact that they are well recorded and mixed at a decent level suggests—to me at least—that someone was justifiably self-conscious about their participation on "School Girl" and mixed them in at a very low level. No guitar on this track, but effective gospel piano from Edgar Winter and, at the end, barely adequate vocal support from a chick vocal trio, which just escapes being amateurish.

And that's it. Now that the first album's out of the way and, hopefully, much of the pressure off, perhaps Winter can relax a bit and serve up some of the strong stuff of which he's proven himself capable. Take it easy, Johnny, and learn to trust your instincts. They were right at least half of the time on the Sonobeat LP. (RS 39)

PETE WELDING