CANNED HEAT: ONE MORE RIVER TO CROSS (1973)
1) One More River To Cross; 2)
L. A. Town; 3) I Need Someone; 4) Bagful Of Boogie; 5) I'm A Hog For You, Baby;
6) You Are What You Am; 7) Shake, Rattle And Roll; 8) Bright Times Are Comin';
9) Highway 401; 10) We Remember Fats.
A marginal improvement here, but one that
probably came too late: this was Canned Heat's one and only album recorded for
Atlantic, before the industry people took a good look at the awful state in
which the band had put itself with too many drugs and way too much personal
discord and disarray for such a quintessential peace-and-love outfit, and
dissolved the contract in horror. But they did have enough time to produce this
record, for which purpose they moved from California to Alabama and were
rewarded with some precious studio time at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio —
sure enough, with the Muscle Shoal Horns for comfort and assistance.
The shift in sound is immediately obvious:
instead of sounding like a third-rate clone of The Band, the title track makes
them sound like a B-grade contemporary R&B outfit, with a strong, assured
groove, uplifting brass fanfare, and focused piano and guitar parts that almost
seem to be suggesting, in the wake of the New
Age disaster, that we have cleaned up our act, toughened our defenses, and
ready to make a brand new start here at Atlantic. So the country-rock sound
didn't work out — well, life is not always a rose garden, but now, with the generous
support of our friends in the R&B business, here we are now, in the
passenger seat of The Soul Train (sorry we couldn't afford 1st class, though),
making a hot, sweaty dance number out of this Daniel Moore song. Hey, life is
good if you really really make yourself believe in it!
On the whole, the record still retains the laid
back, lazy-friendly atmosphere of The
New Age: the only time it goes for something a lil' more snappy is on James
Shane's ʽYou Am What You Amʼ (yes, a good eight years before Zappa's You Are What You Is — an earlier
chapter of the miserable adventures of the verb ʽto beʼ in popular music) — a
mid-tempo funk rocker with echoes of Funkadelic, with perfect coordination
between bass, drums, guitar, piano, and horns, and I mean it: I have no idea if all the resident band members are
actually involved in the groove, but it totally gets you going. Four minutes of
total precision and friendly aggression, and although you can still sense a bit
of stiffness compared to how any true giants of funk would have done it, I am
still honestly amazed at how well they managed to pull it off, given that Canned
Heat and funk music seemed to be incompatible entities all that time, due to
their preference for Hooker-style boogie and rigid Chicago blues.
Most of the other tracks are merely okay, saved
by an honorable level of diversity (slow soulful blues on ʽI Need Someoneʼ, a
revisiting of rockabilly on ʽShake, Rattle And Rollʼ, a fast-tempo boogie with
hysterical electric guitar soloing on ʽHighway 401ʼ) and a higher level of
energy than last time around, although it is still quite a shame to see Henry
Vestine, once a beacon of hope for Canned Heat's average instrumental powers,
now largely reduced to the part of a bit player — I guess the drug issue affected
him as much as everybody else. Still, it all goes smooth enough until they get
to the last track, which is where the Shitwave of Cheap Embarrassment finally
reaches the shore: ʽWe Remember Fatsʼ is a stupid-beyond-belief medley of most
of the major hits of Fats Domino, one verse or so at a time, lumped in a
five-minute cornball with the intended (actually, explicitly stated in the intro) goal of making all
the fans of Chuck Berry and Little Richard remember Fats Domino as well.
I mean, you'd think, from that introduction, or
that title, or the "goodbye fat man..." outro at the end, that Fats
were dead or something — when, in
fact, he is still alive and kicking well into 2016 (well, not sure about
kicking, but still, he's in a better state, I guess, than most of the original
members of Canned Heat, and that says a lot). Nor does it make that much sense
to say he was not remembered by anybody outside of Canned Heat or the Muscle
Shoal Studios in 1973; and to actually think that somebody's effective introduction to the sound of Fats Domino
could be via a five-minute medley by a barely functional, minimally popular
Canned Heat would be sort of preposterous. So, blame it on substance abuse and
that annoying «educationalist» mentality that often accompanies B-level bands
who think that if they cannot be geniuses, they can at least stake their claim
as schoolteachers.
Still, at least the revitalized sound of the
band on the title track and their totally unexpected mastery of the funk idiom
on ʽYou Am What I Amʼ could perhaps have pointed out a way to a better future —
if only they'd succeeded in overcoming their problems, getting their heads properly
re-screwed on their shoulders, and concentrating on all their primary
strengths. Unfortunately, adaptation to new rules of life past the Flower
Power age proved impossible in the end; after a failed attempt to produce a
second album for Atlantic, they found themselves without a record contract, and
then, after one particularly scandalous gig in 1974, where The Bear is said to
have gone crazy on the crowd — without half of the band's members. Accordingly,
1974-75 should have been the end of the road for Canned Heat; surprisingly, it
was only one more catastrophe over the course of a long, strange, endless
journey, so read on.
And then Wire got their hands on 'to be' and came up with the line 'when you aren't it makes you am'.
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