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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