Crazy Horse. At Crooked Lake

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Everyone reading this will know of Crazy Horse. Neil Young’s very own bone crunching band whom he wheels out when he needs to let his hair down. There’s no denying that they’ve been involved in some of Young’s most memorable moments and with their partnership going back over 40 years they are invariably caught up in Shakey’s story. Plucked from an LA band called the Rockets, Billy Talbot, Ralph Molina and Danny Whitton became Crazy Horse for Young’s Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere before adding Nils Lofgren and Jack Nitzsche to produce their own album, one of the finest debuts ever. And for most folk that’s the end of the Crazy Horse story apart from their regular gig with the man.
Lofgren and Nitzche went their separate ways and Whitton OD’d and was written into musical history via Young’s Tonight’s The Night. With Young zooming towards fame with Harvest Talbot and Molina scrabbled together a new line up releasing Loose, an album that soon cluttered up cut out bins in record stores with Robert Christgau calling it “the most disappointing follow-up in memory.” Undeterred the Horse again regrouped adding brothers Rick (vocals, rhythm guitar, banjo) and Michael Curtis (vocals, piano, organ, guitar and mandolin) and Greg Leroy (vocals, lead guitar, bottleneck guitar) and recording At Crooked Lake which was released on Epic Records in 1972 to general indifference. Normally they shoot horses past their best but this one was pardoned when Talbot, Molina and new guitarist Frank Sampedro were recruited by Young for his Zuma album. Rejuvenated they even produced a cracker of an album, Crazy Moon with Young playing guitar all over it. Again it sank like a stone but is well worth checking out.
Anyway, this is all a fairly long winded way to say that At Crooked Lake is being reissued by Retroworld allowing folk who want to delve into the Horse to avoid exorbitant prices for previous out of print copies. “Is it any good?” we ask. Well our answer is a qualified yes. Anyone looking for the Whitton/Nitzsche brilliance of the first album will be disappointed and there’s none of the pile driving thunder demanded of Young. In fact apart from the presence of the Talbot and Molina rhythm section it’s probably best to ignore the brand name and approach this as an opportunity to hear another unearthed example of early seventies west coast rock. With the majority of the songs written by either the Curtis brothers or Leroy ( all of whom faded into history although Rick Curtis dallied with the fledgling Fleetwood Mac LA version) there’s a definite sense of the pot pourri music of the time as they dip their toes into country rock, FM friendly rock boogie and CSNY like harmonies. It has to be said that if you crank this up it does transport the listener to the early seventies with the band coming across as a blend of Poco and Grin. The opener, Rock and Roll Band, nails their colours to the mast with fine harmonies and guitar duelling, the type of music the fictitious Stillwater played in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous movie. It’s an invigorating start. Love Is Gone dapples acoustically with some fine acoustic slide while We Ride channels Steve Stills and Dave Crosby to a tee. There’s a couple of gurney country romps present with Outside Looking In sounding like a rough and ready Ringo Starr while 85 El Paso’s floats away on a boozy country vibe. Don’t Keep Me Burning unfortunately falls into generic boogie territory while Lady Soul is packed with clichés that don’t really hold sway these days. Don’t Look Back is a tub thumper of a song (although again the lyrics show their age) with some savage guitar licks but the overall beauty here is the simple acoustic ballad, Your Song which is graced by the pedal steel of Sneaky Pete Kleinow.
Overall a minor entry in the seventies soft rock canon but a welcome opportunity to grab a small piece of the Neil Young jigsaw for those inclined.

Jim Dead. Ten Fires

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What is Americana? The simple answer might be that it’s music (or literature, art) that refers to America, in particular to that continent’s (primarily the US of A) heritage. So a broad church with country, bluegrass, jazz, swing and god knows how many others getting a shout in. But are, for example, Kings of Leon Americana? U2? Jack Johnston? The answer of course is yes and no. Or rather, it depends. It depends on the singer, the song, the listener, the situation and for an awful lot of folk in the end it doesn’t matter. And perhaps therein is the rub. For if it does matter to you then you probably know the answer already.
Americana is a feel, an intuition, a knowledge of and respect for, well, Americana. It has depth, history, tradition. Tradition that harks back to the great immigrations that peopled the USA, that recalls the natives who were displaced by the newcomers, the poverty and violence experienced by the Negro slaves, the violence of the civil war, the culture that grew out of all of these. The tradition continued in modern times, the civil rights struggles, the protest songs, the discovery of their own culture by the late sixties generation which fed into the No Depression generation of the eighties which in itself reached back into the distant past also.
It’s easy for anyone anywhere in the world to be captivated by Hollywood cowboys, Lonnie Donegan records or books by Cormac McCarthy. Dig deeper and chances are you’ll find Americana, a fabulous land with a fabulous story. And best of all you don’t have to be American.
Jim Dead is a man who I reckon has done his fair share of digging. So much so that he inhabits a mythical Americana hometown, Deadsville. Deadsville is a mixture of all of the above however Dead has sculpted it into shape. A dust blown dread place with frontier justice, where gunslingers are replaced by guitar slingers, where the blues are amplified and dragged from the past and shot into Technicolor glory.
Calling up a new version of his band The Doubters consisting of Craig Hughes on guitar, James Duffin on bass and Tommy Duffin on percussion and harmonica, Dead offers up twelve songs that portray Deadsville as a scary place to be. Telling stories of lynchings, drugs and death the band walk throughout the landscape with a powerful swagger. Several of the songs here reach epic proportions both in length and delivery. The combination of Dead’s and Hughes’ guitars conjure up visions of Crazy Horse and the Drive By Truckers. While there are quieter moments such as the opening song Silence has No Place Here, Hotel, (with a touch of Willie Vlautin about it) and My Heavy Heart, My Aching Bones, there remains a sense of doom, of hopelessness in them. However the big hitters here are when the band plug in. The loping Bone Blue Moon has the feel of hank Williams backed by Creedence Clearwater, the song does indeed feel as if Dead is howling at the moon. Untitled has some spooky, almost psychedelic tinges, when Dead repeats the refrain Baby, Baby there is a sense of what could have been if Led Zeppelin were an American band. Hughes’ playing on this epic is spectacular, full of menace, coiled, ready to kill. Mean–Eyed River Snake is a mean tale of the death of a girl as retold by a confused, possibly pilled up youth who may have seen too many drive in horrors. It ends in a confusion of babbling while Hughes’ guitar rumbles in the background. The Hallelujah Revolver perhaps tries too hard here to achieve a proper dynamic, a gospel song from hell it’s the one song where the feel is muddied, Having seen a gobsmackingly good live version done by this line up of the band it’s possible we were spoiled beforehand. Honours must go to the stand out song here however. Jim Landstrom Must Die is a killer track. A deceptively jaunty riff leads into a sorry tale of a jive travelling salesman who gets lynched after selling bottles with “stars that fell from from the sky.” Peckinpaw in parts, “ hang him up by his legs, slit his throat so the streets turn ruby red” the band really gel with some tremendous bass playing and a cracking vocal performance from Dead.
If this album was by a crew from the south west of the USA chances are it would be hailed to the heavens. As it is it’s perhaps the best example I’ve heard so far of a local band setting up residence in that fabled Americana. Definitely one to buy.
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Jim Landstrom Must Die