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Shakedown Street
With few exceptions, Shakedown Street, rife with blind intersections, comes across as an artistic dead end. The punch that producer Keith Olsen provided on Terrapin Station, the Grateful Dead's last LP, has all but vanished here, and Olsen's successor, the usually reliable Lowell George, offers almost nothing to replace it. You can hear echoes of […]
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Can't Get No Grindin'
Muddy Waters has caught up to his legend and made an album of straight Chicago blues, sounding as fiery and nasty as he managed to 20 years ago. His unjustly ignored guitar acts as a fine counterpoint to the lyrics, as well as providing extra energy in its own right. "Mother's Bad Luck Child" and […]
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Hooteroll?
I just found out last Friday that Jerry Garcia buys his comics from the same little shop in Mill Valley that I purchase mine at. As I was searching through some old Marvels, looking for a few that I'd missed last summer. John (the cat that runs Village Music) strolled in and lazily noted that […]
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Lovejoy
Albert King cut his first blues for Parrot records in 1952 and has seen ups and downs in the nearly twenty years that followed, as he pursued the career of an urban bluesman. In succeeding years he enjoyed periods of popularity when he recorded for Bobbin and King, but it wasn't until he came to […]
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The London Howlin' Wolf Sessions
Two new vivid collections of blues from Chess records. The Wolf album is the latest in a long line of recent blues Super Session enclaves (includes Clapton, Winwood, Wyman and Watts) that rates among the most successful of these black-meets-white get-togethers. The Waters two-record set is sort of a BEST OF anthology that culls, from […]
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Endless Boogie [Beat Goes On]
The black blues legends playing with the white up-and-comers. I guess Sonny Boy Williamson II started it all about six years ago with his Live With the Yardbirds album. Successive years have seen a record-rack full of similar efforts … from Muddy Waters, Lowell Fulsom, Furry Lewis and Otis Spann .. all resulting in quasi-successful […]
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Indianola Mississippi Seeds
These two faultless discs span the recording career of the most popular and innovative urban bluesman of the past two decades. The man, of course, is Riley "Blues Boy" King and the albums speak for themselves — the Kent consists of 12 of B.B.'s earliest recordings for the RPM label, primitively produced by Sam Phillips […]
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Cucumber Castle
So you thought that the Bee Gees had orchestrated and harmonized themselves out for a while after Odessa? Well, not so. In fact, they have multiplied. Within the last two months two more albums in the continuing Bee Gees odyssey have appeared. The first of these is a Robin Gibb solo album, the other features […]
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Ladies of the Canyon
Along with the other established ladies of folkdom, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Judy Collins, both Mrs. Harris and Miss Mitchell have been around a while, Some brilliant chick folksingers have vanished — Judy Henske, Alice Stuart and Rosalie Sorrels whither art thou? — but these two have endured. This is Joan's eleventh album and Joni's third […]
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Band of Gypsys
This is the album that Hendrix "owed" Capitol for releasing him over to Reprise Records and significantly, it isn't a studio effort, as his Reprise albums have been. Which is not to imply that it is any better than those Experience albums. The context of the album is vital — Band of Gypsys was one […]
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