ALAN PRICE: A GIGSTER'S LIFE FOR ME (1995)
1) Boom Boom; 2) Rockin'
Pneumonia And The Boogie-Woogie Flu; 3) Rollin' Like A Pebble In The Sand; 4) I
Put A Spell On You; 5) Good Times / Bad Woman; 6) Some Change; 7) Enough Is
Enough; 8) Whatcha Gonna Do; 9) A Gigster's Life For Me; 10) (I Got) Business
With The Blues; 11) How You've Changed; 12) Old Love; 13) What Am I Living For;
14) Say It Isn't True.
Liberty was pretty much the last of Alan Price's
attempts to record a more or less complete LP of new material. Either he ran
out of inspiration, or he just got tired of all his records selling poorly (he
probably makes more royalties off ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ these days than he
does off his entire solo career anyway), or both, but anyway, the fact remains
that Alan Price as a productive songwriter entered a period of decline in the
1980s and kicked the bucket in the 1990s.
Playing and touring was another matter, though,
and for those purposes, sometime around 1994 Alan formed a «supergroup» of
sorts, called The Electric Blues Company and featuring some of his old friends
and colleagues — Peter Grant, who already played with him in the 1980s, on
bass; Bobby Tench (formerly a sideman with Van Morrison, Freddie King, Jeff
Beck, Ginger Baker, and many other far more famous people than himself) on
guitar; and Zoot Money, one of Britain's most renowned sidemen, on guitar and
keyboards. (Drummer Martin Wilde is the only dark horse, and I can sort of see
why).
For the most part, these guys just played
together, soending a lot of time on the road; in between touring, they did,
however, venture into the studio as well, recording the dull-titled Covers in 1994 (haven't heard that one
and would be very reluctant to try it out — not another version of ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ, dear Lord!), and the
slightly more colorful Gigster's Life
For Me in 1995, which was picked up by Sanctuary's «Masters Of Blues»
series and for that reason remains the somewhat easier available album of the
two. And, clearly, the more interesting, because it focuses on slightly more
obscure material than Covers, as
well as offers at least a couple Price originals for those few admirers who are
always waiting.
Unfortunately, unlike the surprisingly enthusiastic
Thom Jurek from the All-Music Guide who even resorted to the word
"terrific" to describe the album, I can only confess to having been
deeply and profoundly bored all through Gigster's
Life's inadequate hour-plus running length. Unless you just got to have yourself some
retro-oriented, uninventive, run-of-the-mill blues-rock from 1995, the record
has very little to recommend it, and, most importantly, it does not sound like
a proper Alan Price record — true to its name and nature, it sounds like the
results of a session on which Alan Price is a bit player. He does not even sing
lead vocals on most of the tracks (Bobby Tench and Zoot Money handle them, and
both sound like your average rockabilly singer in the local bar on a Saturday
night), although on the rare occasion when he does, the level of excitement sweeps up considerably: for instance,
Rudy Toombes' ʽRollin' Like A Pebble In The Sandʼ is a nice jazzy ballad —
nothing special, just nice.
But there is nothing nice whatsoever about limp
versions of old classics like ʽBoom Boomʼ or ʽRockin' Pneumoniaʼ, played with
some pretense to rock'n'roll energy but sounding totally uninspired and pro
forma. There is nothing nice about yet another
version of ʽI Put A Spell On Youʼ — even the old rendition from the late
Sixties was nowhere near the true capacities of Alan Price, and how could he
ever hope to compete with the likes of Screaming Jay Hawkins or John Fogerty
thirty years later? There's nothing nice about a long, lazy, unfocused
rendition of ʽWhat Am I Living Forʼ, a three-minute R&B song at best that
has been slowed down to five. There's totally nothing nice about yet another
version of Jackson Browne's ʽSay It Isn't Trueʼ — eleven minutes? you must be
joking. Most ridiculous of all, there is nothing nice about the band selecting,
out of all of Eric Clapton's catalog, ʽOld Loveʼ from the Journeyman album: I have actually always thought that this blues
ballad has potential, but it was not properly realized with the original
arrangement and neither was it properly performed here (Eric can sometimes make
the song come to life in concert, and maybe these guys could, too — who really
knows? — but in the studio, it only shows a brief sign of pulse in the
transition from verse to chorus).
The only thing I can say in favor of the record
is that Bobby Tench is a damn good guitar player when he really puts his heart
to it — based on some of his solos (most notably on the Boz Scaggs cover ʽSome
Changeʼ and on the Peter Green cover ʽWhatcha Gonna Doʼ), I wouldn't really
mind seeing him live. Sharp, crispy tone, great control over sustained notes,
kick-ass punchy licks, the works. But even that is only present on just a few
songs. As for Alan's originals, the title track, co-written with Bobby, is an
unconvincing stab at pop-reggae, and only ʽHow You've Changedʼ features him in
his trademark Randy Newmanesque mode, but the song is too slow and the vocal
hook is too lazy to make much of a difference.
Bottomline is: if the guys actually had a good
time recording this memento of themselves in the studio, we should all be happy
for their veteran egos, God bless 'em and all. But as for everybody else, the
record deserves, at best, a cursory listen, just so you could make sure that
Alan Price was indeed alive and well in the 1990s (we know that, as of 2016, he
is still alive, but I know next to nothing of any touring or recording
activities of his in the past ten years), and a thumbs down just because I'm
pretty sure these guys could do better if they wanted to do better, but they
probably just didn't want to.
No comments:
Post a Comment