my first was the Palm Springs Pop Festival - an event infamous to this day in Palm Springs history for bringing thousands of hippies to town where very few of them stayed in hotels or ate in nice restaurants (duh) but hung out on the strip of highway that formed, even then, a super-glitzy "Beverly Hills Jr" kind of shopping strip. I saw CH at least two or three times - ah those festivals of the late 60s. The Heat, as they were sometimes known, came to be the darlings of the cheap wine and Seconal crowd (AKA, downer-poppling winos) who were cultural cousins of today's tweakers but whose drugs of choice produced a whole different set of symptoms - mostly falling down hard on your face. I did finally fight my way through various pathetically lame versions of "On the Road Again" and "Goin' Up the Country" (horrible imitations of the original vocals, oof!) and found the originals - no freakin' comparison whatsoever - that appear on the "Greatest Hits" dated 1987 that appears as the 'oldest' album in Rhapsody (and has a cover photo that looks like a very bad color Xerox) but contains original versions - unlike so many of "their" other supposed greatest hits packages you have to look to the Burrito Brothers to find a band so hideously disappointing in subsequent versions).Īnyhow, even back in what we newbie seniors like to call the day, Canned Heat were among the first of the hippie bands to be dismissed by presumed hipsters (like my hard-to-please pals). Very sad to see their legacy (such as it was) diluted and contaminated by lame re-dos. I just tried to pull up some classic Canned Heat in Rhapsody - but a problem I'd noticed with earlier subscription services - the amount of product pumped out by subsequent versions of the band, redoing signature songs endlessly and then repackaging them in "greatest hits" albums that apparently don't include the actual hit recordings. I think the popularity of Canned Heat was predicated largely on those two songs and their reputation as a band that would play real long songs, like "Fried Hockey Boogie," a track that exemplified what a lot of folks at that moment in time found intoxicating about long songs: it was a trip through a number of styles and modalities (with lots of solos) built around a simple boogie bump and what appeared to be a central impromptu vocal motif of the timelessness of the blues. But not here, the bass, drums and simple rhythm go chugging along like a steam locomotive. When you hear a band do this stuff, someone always steps out and loses the groove. But the other guys? They're just a hippie chug machine. But on other cuts he's the slide and rhythm as well. The link below isn't the one I mentioned above (can't seem to find it) but check this out. bringing simple boogie to the stinky, unwashed hippie masses. Nothing groundbreaking, but at the same time, totally groudbreaking. The band, made a sound together that was totally them. No studio trickery, or groove enhancement through overdubbed shakers or what have you. Watching them live on the YouTube link, they were making that sound. I can't put my finger on it but I just love that boogie / chug thing they do. But the band? Straight blues 101.Įxcept I think they sound incredible. He's got his sound and you can spot him a mile away. If torn apart, there's nothing unique about them at all except for the singer Alan Wilson. Ya see, I love them, I just can't figure out what it is about them that's so cool. I asked him if he could put his finger on it. #What tuning did alan wilson use for slide tvCanned Heat on one of those European TV shows. I just last week sent a YouTube link to a friend.
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