CACTUS: CACTUS (1970)
1) Parchman Farm; 2) My Lady
From South Of Detroit; 3) Bro. Bill; 4) You Can't Judge A Book By The Cover; 5)
Let Me Swim; 6) No Need To Worry; 7) Oleo; 8) Feel So Good.
If you have no idea why this band named itself
Cactus despite none of the members being from Arizona State, take one look at
the album cover and you will see why (and if you need an extra hint, you must
be a sexless saint from Heaven itself). Musically more relevant, though, is the
fact that Cactus were formed out of the ashes of Vanilla Fudge (if fudge can
even be reduced to ashes in the first place), when that band's rhythm section,
Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice, recruited guitarist Jim McCarty and vocalist
Rusty Day and began realizing their evil plan to become the American Led
Zeppelin. Originally, they wanted to have Jeff Beck, but that did not work
because Beck had a car accident — besides, he wasn't exactly American, so the
experiment wouldn't be pure enough. (To be fair, a few years on they did get to play together for a while,
but it still did not work out: Beck never could stand longtime partners).
Anyway, if you are not all that much into
second-rate or third-rate hard rock bands, there is little reason for you to
bother checking out this one. However, as far as ballsy-bluesy heavy rock with
no experimental vibe whatsoever is concerned, Cactus is a good bet. Musically,
it is not even Vanilla Fudge so much whose tradition they are inheriting here,
but Blue Cheer — same brand of loud, arrogant, alcohol-fueled rock, although in
between all four of them, there is definitely a higher level of skill involved.
Songwriting here is just about level zero, but these guys can play, for sure:
in fact, the Bogert/Appice rhythm section may be just one notch below the Jones/Bonham
section, and only because Appice is somewhat overdoing it (he wants to
out-Bonham Bonham so much that he nearly blows his drum set to bits even on
the ultra-slow blues numbers like ʽNo Need To Worryʼ, which is really
confusing).
Appropriately, Jim McCarty is a very good
guitar player as far as not-particularly-inventive guitar players go: he has
no mastery of, or no interest in various tones, effects, and gimmicks, so he is
neither Beck nor Page in that respect — but his phrasing is clever, his fluency
is admirable, and he can do it in a variety of styles, from basic boogie to
blueswailing to garage hooliganry without sounding too boring in any of these.
The vocalist, though, is just a well-spirited (with a passion for the spirits,
that is) gentleman with good barroom standing: no more, no less.
The «highlight» of the album is their cover of Mose
Allison's ʽParchman Farmʼ; the idea is to take Blue Cheer's reinvention of the
track as a heavy rocker and pump it up even further, speeding up the tempo to
insanity and going all-out crazy. The effect is rather facetious — this is one
kind of thing for which the real Led Zep
would never fall, no matter how much they liked covering old bits of
rock'n'roll in their live sets — but as a bang-your-head-against-the-wall musical
joke, it works, and in fact, provides the finest three minutes of excitement on
the entire album. I mean, say what you will about lack of taste and stupidity,
but good old speed counts, especially when it's pumped by professionals.
The problem is that next to the flamboyant
opener, everything else sounds like one major disappointment after another.
The anti-climactic follower is ʽMy Lady From South Of Detroitʼ, a very generic
country waltz that's neither too sentimental nor too humorous; and the
follow-up to that is Leiber &
Stoller's ʽBrother Billʼ, done in a fun, but way too slow manner (for a
twice-as-fun version, check out Eric Burdon's passionate reading on the 1977
Animals reunion album); and the follow-up to that is Bo Diddley's ʽYou Can't
Judge A Book By The Coverʼ, where, actually, the point is that they do it slow, slow, slow, expanding it to six and
a half minutes of your time, much of which is wasted on predictable repetition.
The other point is that sometimes they also show you how they respect contrast
— launching into brief fiery sections of distortion madness, only to slow down
to an acoustic bluesy crawl 15 seconds later. Aaargh.
On the second side, there is one more
ultra-slow blues (ʽNo Need To Worryʼ, which is like their answer to ʽI Can't
Quit You Babyʼ, but they don't know how to make this thing interesting) and an
additional bunch of semi-originals that are either semi-stolen (ʽFeel So Goodʼ
lifts its verse melody from Steve Winwood's ʽI'm A Manʼ) or would be semi-stolen (I think Lynyrd
Skynyrd's ʽI Ain't The Oneʼ may have at least been influenced by ʽLet Me Swimʼ
— although probably they should just both be traced to a third party. Damn
those three-for-a-penny chord progressions). They are at their best when they
just lay down all pretense and boogie — ʽOleoʼ, with a nice barroom chug and a
good bass solo from Bogert, is probably the best track on the second side. Oh,
did I mention yet that ʽFeel So Goodʼ has a lengthy drum solo? Not that you
wouldn't guess if I didn't. An album like this can't do without a drum solo.
One thing I will say for these guys — when they
are at their best (which is not too
frequent), they do lay down a thick, brawny, scruffy, rambunctious sound that
is not very easy to come by (although
they did have plenty of competition from Slade on the other side of the
Atlantic). You'd have it either too «artsy» and experimental, like with Led Zep
or even Deep Purple; or you'd have it much too serious, like Grand Funk
Railroad. These guys are just perfect
for a small evening adventure with a six-pack.
I assume this is a different Jim McCarty than the Yardbirds/Reniassance/Illusion guy?
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_McCarty_(guitarist)
DeleteCactus is just another band that showed how much the US was behind Britain in the 70's - a state of affairs that would continue for several years; in general until American New Wave (Talking Heads and Blondie), regarding hardrock/heavy metal until Metallica (with the notable exception of Eddie van Halen).
ReplyDeleteUnless you have an absolutely insatiable appetite for every heavy 70s group...you could probably skip the albums and just pick up their "Cactology" set
ReplyDeleteNo, these guys don't have a tenth of the unique personality that Blue Cheer possessed. That band was an experiment in and of itself. Cactus, on the other hand, are a perfect example of the sometimes successful (not in this case) show biz formula "3 ace sideman + 1 up and coming front man = super group!" They got a bit of play for having a push from Ahmet Ertegun and a timely mention in Hendrix's last round of interviews, but the whole thing soon collapsed like the charade it truly was.
ReplyDeleteThis Jim McCarty had previously been the guitarist in Mitch Ryder's Detroit Wheels and would later go on to form The Rockets.
ReplyDelete