Published on Apr 28, 1999
This is a painful review to write. I mean, really painful; I’m
sitting here wanting either a bottle of Jack Daniels or a morphine
drip. The definition of ‘excruciation’ for a music reviewer is when
he gets a CD he desperately -wanted- to like…
And then listening to it was a process equivalent to having
major dental surgery.
With no anesthetic.
With Roseanne standing on your hands.
First off, there’s the unjustness of the fact that there’s
enough talent in this incarnation of Jefferson <whatever> to
run any three rock bands. The core of Paul Kantner, Marty Balin,
and Jack Casady is back together for the first time in fifteen
years. They added Slick Aguilar, who played with David Crosby for
many years, and T Lavitz, an itinerant keyboardist whose credits
include time with the Dixie Dregs and Widespread Panic. New lead
vocalist Diana Mangano, an utter unknown before her time with the
current band, has a decent set of pipes, and indeed is reminiscent
of longtime Jefferson * vocalist Grace Slick. In addition, recent
comeback miracles by bands like Fleetwood Mac mean that this is a
guaranteed formula for success. All those Grecian Formula and
Ensure baby boomers have debt loads to spare. So why has this CD
sunk without a trace?
Perhaps it is because, o ye shades of the sixties, this CD sucks
rocks. I mean, this is -bad-. Bad, bad, bad. -Incredibly- bad.
Redolent with badness, gleaming with utter badness, so bad in fact
that the EPA should be called to dispose of this CD. Bad. (Did I
mention it was bad? I thought I did.)
Within fifteen seconds of hitting play, the first wave hits you.
Paul Kantner’s voice (I -think- it’s Kantner; I can tell it’s Marty
Balin’s voice on other tracks, and this guy isn’t him.) hasn’t aged
well, at all; indeed, if it was wine, I’d use it to clean my
baseboards. It croaks and groans along like a half-dead tree in a
gale; only occasionally does it have any resemblance to the actual
tune of the song. The songs themselves, at least the Kantner-penned
ones, range from mediocre to downright ugly, but Kantner’s
‘singing’ sounds more like mating season on the moose ranch.
Marty Balin’s -voice- has aged much better. On the other hand,
his songwriting hasn’t improved since the day he wrote ‘I got a
taste of the world when I went down on you’ (“Miracles”, 1978). It
still slides oilily along like Leisure Suit Larry on the make,
slinging seventies cliches of love and grooviness.
The musicianship of the supporting players is competent to
talented. But there’s only so much you can do with Kantner’s
cliche-laden northern-California-radical politics and Balin’s stale
pickup lines. These two can do better. I -know- they can. But this
isn’t it.
This CD was…painful to listen to. Somewhere along track 8,
“Shadowlands”, where Diana Mangano sings soulfully “What am I doing
here?”, it was all I could do not to respond “Ruining your
career…” And by the end, with Mangano wailing something that
sounds like Ravi Shankar’s psychotic sister, I was in utter
emotional shock. Please, save yourself the money. If you want to
buy a Jefferson <insert vehicle here> CD, their 1970s and
early 1980s catalog, including the excellent
Red Octopus,
Modern Times,
Earth, or
Freedom At Point Zero is now available. They’re out, they’re
remastered, they’re wonderful. Run from this CD like it has the
plague.