40 Year Itch: Can't Get Enough of the Boogie Blues

[Purchase]

Humble Pie's follow-up to its big 1972 Top Ten hit Smokin' is Eat It, a jam packed double LP with the kind of bluesy boogie that record buyers were apparently craving in the early 70's. Eat It's sides are broken up into four distinctive acts. Side 1 is original rock n roll, relying heavily on The Blackberries, the female back up singers. Side 2 is all R and B covers. The short, mostly acoustic Side 3 is the most listenable 40 years later ( and includes "Say No More") Side 4 is more live tracks that pale in comparison to Humble Pie's Performance: Rockin' The Fillmore  album. You can hear Marriot's enormous talent and the tortured soul that was consumed by drugs and alcohol before dying in a house fire at the age of 44.

 

[Purchase]

Still Alive And Well marks a comeback for the talented blues guitarist Johnny Winter who lost his momentum in the years preceding to a heroin addiction. The album catches fire from the start with the blues cover "Rock Me Baby". There are two Rolling Stones covers, "Let It Bleed" and "Silver Train" which had yet to appear on the Stones '73 album Goats Head Soup. Even classic rock stations don't play this kind of music anymore but Still Alive and Well made a whole bunch of "Best of"  lists at the end of 1973.

 


{Out of Print}

Blues loving California rockers Canned Heat had survived the death of Alan Wilson ( who sang the band's two most famous songs "Going Up The Country" and "On The Road Again") and recorded The New Age, their seventh album. Lester Bangs got fired from Rolling Stone for his sarcastic review of the album:

Most of...the songs are just  some kind of nondescript clinkletybonk tibia-rattling in pursuit of yeehah countryisms so let 'em  dry rot in the grooves.Buy this album if you've gotta lotta money or don't care much what you blow your wad on, but don't pass up any of the really cosmic stuff like the Stooges for it or the shadow of Blind Lemon Jefferson will come and blow his nose on your brow every night.

 

[Purchase]

Made up of three former Savoy Browners and Rod Price, a graduate of Black Cat Bone, Foghat returns with a second album of blues-tinged boogie rock known by fans as Rock And Roll because of the cover art. ( Get it?) They spent most of '73 touring with Johnny Winter. The CD doesn't sound as though it has been remastered.

40 Year Itch : The Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival

Is this the rock fest that killed the Woodstock nation?

 The Erie Canal Soda Pop fest on Indiana's Bull Island certainly drew a huge crowd -- an estimated 200,00 hippies who came from all over the country Labor Day Weekend of 1972 to see Santana, Foghat, Canned Heat , Black Sabbath, the Allman Brothers, Fleetwood Mac, Joe Cocker and Nazareth.

 That's not who showed up though.

 Black Sabbath was a no show. So were the Allman Brothers. Nobody saw Fleetwood Mac. When Joe Cocker saw the crowd he reportedly asked for more money and left when organizers turned him down.

 The traffic was a nightmare.

So were the drugs. Somebody was selling bleach. Two people died. And it rained.

 One very entertaining blogger who claims to have been there writes:

 If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would swear that the festival was a set-up, a sort of psyops to put an end to the ideal of the Woodstock nation. If it wasn't, then it was the biggest f**k up in the history of rock festival promotions.