Album Reviews

Whenever a record shows up I like to look at the lead out groove area to see who did the lacquer cutting. Sometimes there’s nothing to be found and that’s annoying, but with this double set I thought I was hallucinating because in plain view was “TML-M” a stamp not seen on a slab of new vinyl in decades. TML is the acronym for “The Mastering Lab” and the “M” means the main lathe at Doug Sax’s place.

In the early �70�s, with the second great rock era in its death throws, the rock intelligensia hungered for something, anything that might reinvigorate the softening musical firmament.

Coincidentally (or not?) this more than one year old release came to my attention, and I first played it on the daythe Exile on Main Streetreissue hit record stores. The band has been around for 15 years and has nine albums. I plead appalling ignorance but better late than never.

While two of the three previous jazz records guitarist/arranger Anthony Wilson made with producer Joe Harley were guitar/drum/organ sessions, this one also featuring those instruments is much different.

The first two sides of this double record set spotlight Hooker, his incendiary, coiled-snake stinging guitar, his foot stomping, mutable time-keeping and his chant-like, mournful singing all recorded intimately. Canned Heat co-founder Al Wilson contributes harmonica and piano on some of the tunes that are otherwise all Hooker.

I once pissed next to Dave Mason in the Cambridge Boathouse bathroom back in 1970 something. That has nothing to do with this review except that it’s a review of a Traffic album and Dave Mason was in Traffic but you wouldn’t know that from the cover of their first American album.

If you want to know what the early 1960’s felt like, listen to this lushly and dramatically orchestrated Sinatra, bathed in opulent, moonlit reverb and surrounded by cushiony strings spread out on an impossibly huge, wide and deep soundstage.