CANNED HEAT: LIVE AT TOPANGA CORRAL (1971)
1) Bullfrog Blues; 2) Sweet
Sixteen; 3) I'd Rather Be The Devil; 4) Dust My Broom; 5) Wish You Would; 6)
When Things Go Wrong.
Another weird discography adventure here. Apparently,
Canned Heat still wanted to release a live album that had both Wilson and
Vestine on it, and they had the tapes to do it, but there was a catch: after
the commercial failure of the previous
live album, their label (Liberty Records) had no wish to issue another one, so they
took the tapes and claimed that they were from their live shows at Topanga Corral
in 1966 and 1967, when they were not yet under contract — when, in fact, the
recordings were really made at a 1969 show at the Kaleidoscope in Hollywood.
This allowed them to release the album on a different label (Wand Records), at
the expense of a little bit of dishonesty, perhaps — but every bit worth the
ruse.
The thing is: maybe Harvey Mandel is the better
known and the more inventive one of the two guitarists, but Vestine actually belonged in Canned Heat: a
straightforward blues guitarist with a rocking heart — with very few special
tricks, yet an ability to get to the heart of the matter where Mandel would
more often get stuck in a psychedelic haze. You get this exactly one and a half
minute into the record, when Vestine takes over from The Bear on ʽBullfrog
Bluesʼ and strikes out a solo almost
on the same level of fire-and-brimstone as Clapton on the famous Cream version
of ʽCrossroadsʼ — too bad the rhythm section is nowhere near Cream in terms of
intensity, because Henry is totally in the zone here: fast, fluent, precise,
ecstatic, everything you'd need from a generic, but heartfelt fast-paced
blues-rocker. Later on, Wilson comes in with his usual «I'm gonna play some simple,
pretty, slow riffs and we'll call that a guitar solo, okay?» approach, and Vestine
waits with impatience to break out from under The Owl's lead and kick some more
ass, and it's really more fun to observe the contrast between Wilson and
Vestine than between Wilson and Mandel.
Unfortunately, the album never quite lives up
to that explosive start. The old blues covers are either way too predictable (ʽDust My Broomʼ? Not again!), or way too
ambitious — it's one thing when they update really old acoustic classics, but
the attempt to outdo B. B. King on ʽSweet Sixteenʼ is certainly misguided:
Vestine does a good job, yet he cannot even begin to hope to capture all of
King's subtle overtones, and it is hard to think of the track as completely
detached from its King association. ʽI Wish You Wouldʼ is rather poorly mixed,
with the repetitive riff groove rising way over everything else, so, even if
there's some nice harmonica playing and another excellent solo from Henry with
a razor-sharp tone, eight minutes of constant "cham-CHOOM-cham, cham-cha-CHOOM-cham"
is a bit too much (at least the ʽBoogie Chillenʼ riff is aggressive, whereas
this one is just nagging). On the other hand, Elmore James' ʽIt Hurts Me Tooʼ
(here renamed ʽWhen Things Go Wrongʼ, but nobody's fooling anybody), suddenly
recorded with plenty of echo, unexpectedly becomes a feast of plaintive,
lyrical solos that take the song way beyond the scope of the original — I think
that Wilson is responsive for the weeping, whereas Vestine delivers the angrier
solos, and in between the two (and the odd echo that seems to feed Wilson back all
of his complaints in a very psychedelic manner), they generate a great feel.
So, kick-ass start, mind-blowing finish, and
some nice, unexceptional blueswailing in between — the record pretty much lets
you see everything that made Canned Heat so cool in their heyday, and everything that prevented them from
becoming a first-rate act both in the short and the long run; in particular,
the work of the rhythm section here is fairly pedestrian, and, with all due respect
for The Bear, he never ever was that great a singer: he just honestly does his
job, but most of the time I just wait for him to move over and let Jimi, uh, I
mean, Henry, take over. Still, the highs are high, and the lows are in the
middle, so it all works out to a thumbs up in the end.
Kick ass or not, the way Canned Heat play Bullfrog Blues cannot hold a candle the way Rory Gallagher did it. Check this.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33Jaodra7AY