Thursday, 24 January 2019

Canned Heat - '70 Concert


Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not great

I’m not very keen on this album – and I speak as someone who wore out their original copy of Boogie With Canned Heat (and still has the replacement vinyl). It’s sort of OK and the sound quality is adequate but, frankly, it’s a bit dull.

The chief pleasure of the album for me is hearing Alan Wilson playing some wonderful harmonica and bottleneck in places, but there’s an awful lot of very ordinary slow blues improvisation which for me wasn’t the Heat’s strength. They were at their best laying down a solid boogie as in On The Road Again, in some of Wilson’s slightly eccentric songs or in really driving blues/rock like Amphetamine Annie. Here, in a lengthy pause between songs, an audience member shouts out a suggestion to which Bob Hite responds, “Fleetwood Mac do that, man. Better than we do.” I felt that about a lot of this album.

I think it’s telling that I haven’t heard this for a long time and the only thing I remembered when I listened again was, in the same audience exchange, someone shouting “Parthenogenesis,” and Hite’s classic reply “Huh. Yeah. You got the acid?” Musically, it had made almost no impression.

It’s always good to have any recording of the great Blind Owl and the album does have its moments, but even this serious lover of the Heat can only give it a very qualified recommendation.

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