So, this album is known far and wide as the breakthrough for Foghat, because it's the one which contains "Slow Ride". The one which contains the cover picturing Roger Earl with his fishing line in an open manhole cover. The one where the band totally went over to the pop-blues side of the fence, and forsook their blues-rock masters. And you know what? It's a damn fine album, anyway. Fool for the City is a raunchy party album, to the extreme. The title track kicks things off in classic Lonesome Dave style, with a dopey, yet personable tale about a dude who prefers the action of the city to boring country life. And the music feels like a bunch of loud, screeching hot rods on dark pavement, leaving tire tracks. The insanity continues with "My Babe", the sing-along old Righteous Brothers cover which Humble Pie formerly mixed into their version of "Rollin' Stone". Here, it's just another excuse to party and head bang to Price's slide licks. Up next, is the main course - the full enchilada of "Slow Ride", which runs for over eight minutes - not the shortened version most people hear on the radio. Essentially, the band breaks it down into two sections - the easy-struttin' initial half, which has massive, sleazy strip-club overtones - and the furious, race-to-the-finish second part, which builds and builds until a final, ultimate climax. Definitely, "Slow Ride" is something which could have been only been made in either the 70's, or maybe the 80's, and it is an all-time sleaze-rock classic. The rest of the album, incidentally, is a gradual comedown from that raunchy high. They throw in another, brutish cover ("Terraplane Blues", given over to more slide guitar and dominance from Earl's thunderous drum kit), a more playful toss in the hay ("Save Your Loving For Me"), getting back to bar-room basics ("Drive Me Home"), before rounding off on quite the subdued note (the soft-rock ballad "Take it or Leave it"). Again, the main thing here is how pop and out front this album is, compared to the ones that came before it. And it works pretty well, even though it is short, both in amount of songs and in run-time.
Canned Heat's second LP of `68 is an expansive affair, reflecting the excessive spirit of the times. The sheer amount of content is what matters here, especially towards the end with the experimental "Parthenogenesis" collection followed by TWO - yes, two - twenty minute live versions of the "Refried Boogie", complete with extended solos from all instruments. This also includes the band's other big hit "Going Up the Country" which became the unofficial theme of Woodstock. But with the emphasis on lengthy jams it may not be a good idea to make this your first Canned Heat album to listen to.
Zephyr's debut record is usually dismissed as either a Big Brother & The Holding Company clone because of frontwoman Candy Givens and her Janis-like vocals, or as just the project which launched guitar God Tommy Bolin's career. There's a kernel of truth in the former sentence and more than enough fallacy, for they were really a loose, heavy-blues, jazz-inflected ensemble better suited for the stage than the studio, having not that much in common with the folk-leaning San Francisco sound. It's difficult to distinguish one song from another and better to enjoy the overall vibe and great interplay between the musicians. One drawback is the muddled production, which tends to hoard the instruments together and somewhere there is Candy's howling voice in that maelstrom. But this is a nice album from a gutsy band that deserved better.
Out of the horde of hair metal bands from the 80's, Winger was one that got a bad rap for a number of reasons - one of them being that their most notable song celebrated underage relations. All of the members had paid their dues as part of other groups (most notably Kip Winger with the comeback version of Alice Cooper), and eventually came together in New York City to form Winger. They had reasons to be confident, they were experienced and professional enough, and despite the show-off tone at certain points ("Seventeen", "Poison Angel"), there is a mature, evocative thread running through the record, making it one of the better second-wave glam debuts.
