Edgar Winter Roadwork Albums, CDs, Vinyl Records and LPs

Edgar Winter - Roadwork

Edgar Winter
Roadwork

The R&B horn band is a fine and venerable tradition, and at its best, as in Ray Charles' incredible aggregations of the Fifties and early Sixties, has given us some of the most powerful music of our time. With the stylistic diffusions of the last half-decade, rock bands taking on horns have moved in divergent courses epitomized by the two generic prototypes, Blood, Sweat & Tears and the Electric Flag. Blood, Sweat & Tears borrowed as much from Kenton, May-nard Ferguson and the Fifties big-band tradition as from funk and R&B, while the Flag drew on the latter in an attempt to become a kind of psychedelicized Stax-Volt supergroup.

What we have here are two bands that would like to lay
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claim to the Ray Charles tradition, but the real antecedent in both cases is the Electric Flag. Not that they were influenced by the Flag, of course, but they are derivative in the same way, with the same messiness and strenuous artificial excitement, but without even the grand sense of sloppy power and overproduction as pure fun the Flag displayed in their first album.

The Edgar Winter album was recorded live, and those who have seen them in concert will testify to their ability to rouse an audience; unfortunately it doesn't come across on record. If their first, studio album was a mite too slick, this one is often sloppy without really being joyful about it. It's one thing just to spill a mess of licks on the floor and get down and wallow in them – anybody should be able to enjoy that–but quite another to run through four sides of perfunctory get-it-on screams. There's no real reason to complain about the stereotypic quality of songs like "Save the Planet" and "Cool Fool," which sound like so many other things there's no point in even listing them, but a band should have the conviction of their cliches. It seems to me that anybody attempting one more run-through of "Tobacco Road" or "Turn On Your Love-light" at this late date is just making it hard on themselves, but the versions included here are not only not fresh, they're plain boring, excessive as hell in the case of "Road" and bar-bandish in "Love-light." Hell, I've heard better in plenty of bars. The Chambers Brothers execrable version of "I Can't Turn You Loose" cuts the one here. Most of the solos in the album are overlong and truly pointless, headed nowhere; Johnny Winter's guest appearance on "Rock 'n' Roll Hoochie Koo" is about as good as anything on the Johnny Winter And Live album. It should be mentioned that as this is written Edgar Winter has a new band, sans horns and with a new young guitarist deep into Hendrixisms replacing the excellent Rick Derringer.

Wayne Cochran is something else again. He and his band the C.C. Riders aren't as "hip" as Winter and White Trash, but they sure would like to be. After playing the grueling roadshow circuit between Vegas and the South for years, Cochran has been signed to Epic and is obviously trying fo

Edgar Winter - Roadwork CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

Edgar Winter - Roadwork