As I understand it, the major problem in recording Otis Rush in the past has been material; it was reputedly the chief stumbling block to his having done an album for Vanguard when they had an option on his services. Atlantic's Cotillion subsidiary has overcome the difficulty by having the team of Mike Bloomfield and Nick Gravenites take over the production of Otis' first album for them. They've come to grips with the problem by writing a batch of new songs for him: "Me," "Working Man," "You're Killing My Love," "My Old Lady" and "Can't Wait No Longer" are credited to the pair, while "Reap What You Sow" (from the third verse of which the album takes its title) adds Paul Butterfield to the composer credits. The remainder of the album consists of remakes of two of Otis' old Cobra singles, "My Love Will Never Die" and "It Takes Time," and versions of B. B. King's "Gambler's Blues," Chuck Willis' "Feel So Bad," and Ronnie Shannon's "Baby, I Love You," a recent Aretha Franklin hit here given an instrumental treatment, the album's only one.

The album was recorded at Muscle Shoals' noted Fame Studios with its house band augmented by keyboard player Mark Naftalin. Basic instrumentation throughout is standard rhythm section of organ and/or piano, second guitar(s), bass and drums, plus three or four horns; all contribute to a very big sound which is both the result of the recording and the orchestrations. As might be expected, the production is first-rate in every respect—very hip and contemporary-sounding, adequately reflecting the taste of its producers. It's a top-notch modern blues album.

I'm of two minds about it, however, and I'll try to explain why. I can readily appreciate the problems involved in trying to produce an album of contemporary blues that doesn't merely reproduce Otis' earlier recordings (after all, times have changed). I also recognize the fact that Mike and Nick have been very successful in achieving this.

But at the same time I must admit that the LP doesn't excite me much. I could say that the charts, while good, do not represent that much of an advance over or departure from what is being done on a lot of current blues albums, that most of the arrangements in fact have an unrelieved sameness of approach to them, that Otis' voice is occasionally buried in the mix, that the textures of the music are always very busy, or that the playing is sometimes a bit ragged (the stop-time breaks on "Gambler's Blues," for one example), and so on.

But my biggest bitch about the album is that it doesn't sound a hell of a lot like Otis Rush—at least not the Otis Rush of those great old Cobra sides, or the Otis Rush we used to hear in Chicago. What's most saddening about all this is that Otis is one of the most exciting and distinctive of all the younger bluesmen around, but here just about every vestige of his distinctiveness—that which made his music characteristically his own—is gone. He's just one element of perhaps a dozen involved in the production of any of these numbers. It's my impression that just about any capable singer-guitarist in the modern blues idiom could have been substituted for him and the end result would have been changed very little.

Take the matter of Otis' singing. The first couple of times I played the record I thought I was listening to a vocal cross between Nick Gravenites and Albert King. The latter is quite understandable in view of Albert's great influence these days; it's perhaps inevitable that a young, aware blues musician would adopt certain aspects of Albert's greatly successful style. But quite often here Otis phrases like Nick does and it's no accident, of course, that this occurs most frequently on the Bloomfield-Gravenites compositions. And the reason for this is simple: Otis learned the songs from a tape of Nick performing the songs to guitar accompaniment. Otis apparently hadn't time to familiarize himself with the new tunes sufficiently enough to make them his own. So what we get on them is Nick Gravenites filtered through Otis Rush.

And I guess that's pretty much what this album's all about: Otis Rush is merely used as a vehicle for the articulation of certain ideas about modern blues that are ultimately the property of Mike and Nick. Not that this is so bad, of course, if those ideas are basically sound—which they are; but my point is that it's not Otis Rush.

Please don't construe the above as a total put-down of the album, however, for it has much to recommend it. There's some fine playing and singing all through the record. High point of the set, as far as I'm concerned, is the remake of "My Love Will Never Die," which is very much on a par with the earlier version; Mike and Nick have retained all the power of the original and made it completely contemporary in feeling. And much the same is true of "It Takes Time," a tune very reminiscent of "Little By Little." Otis' long version of "Gambler's Blues" is full of tasty things, and the arrangement and colors of "Reap What You Sow" are a gas. Several of the new tunes Mike and Nick have written are very fine—particularly "Me," "You're Killing My Love" and the very macho "Working Man"—and will doubtless go into the repertoires of a number of bands. On the other hand, "My Old Lady" is a little too coy to be successful and "Can't Wait No Longer," despite Otis' manful efforts, seems more properly designed for a singer with a different set of emphases and abilities than Otis has. The instrumental "Baby, I Love You" is adequate but scarcely more than that.

Finally, a few words on the stereo mix, which is bafflingly inconsistent. The basic spread usually finds Otis' voice in the middle, flanked on the left by lead guitar and horns and on the right by the rhythm section. On some numbers, however, Otis' guitar jumps to the middle, which is understandable on the instrumental of course but inexplicable on "Working Man" and "Killing My Love" (it's also somewhat distant-sounding on this track). On "Reap What You Sow" and "It Takes Time" the horns suddenly pop up in the middle behind the voice, while drums and piano join the lead guitar on the left. On "Can't Wait No Longer" a vocal chorus join the drums, second guitar and piano on the left, while the horns and bass are on the right; there is no lead guitar on this track it seems. (RS 34)

PETE WELDING