![]() Getting Glyn Johns to produce This Time Around, the Stuart/Prophet duo (backed by Coman, a drummer and an old-fashioned keyboard player) keep messing around in old Stones turf, but the resonant Memphis mood that made sense of the previous LP is in short supply here. For once, Green on Red has realized its downwardly mobile ambitions. Again switching easily among rock, blues and country idioms, what’s left of Green on Red sounds relaxed and confident, a warm and boozy vehicle for Stuart’s amusingly wry regrets and social observations. Stuart’s raspy whine announces itself as the record’s only consistent focal point alternately overblown and ragtag arrangements don’t help selfconscious tunes like “Clarkesville” and “No Man’s Land” stand on their own slender merits.īacked by a local lineup featuring Alex Chilton bassist Rene Coman and co-producer Jim Dickinson, Stuart and Prophet immersed themselves in Memphis ambience to record the loose and likable Here Come the Snakes, an overtly Stonesy record that travels the backroads of American music to fine effect. ![]() ![]() With drummer Keith Mitchell, fresh from work with David Roback and Kendra Smith, joining the lineup, the freeway cowboys oddly add gospelly backup singers to the country- blues-rock mélange on The Killer Inside Me, roughly produced by Jim Dickinson. ![]() The music is adequate (for a loose, amateurish C&W bar band), but the fake accents and predictable lyrical imagery turn this would-be sincerity into a pretentious muddle. At its most effective, the mini-album includes a cover of Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away.” Otherwise, the band tries far too hard to fit into the boots of hard-drinkin’, populist-minded Amuhricuhns for the contents to be taken seriously. The country-rocking No Free Lunch makes it hard to believe that Green on Red was ever remotely connected to psychedelia. (Original US copies were pressed on green vinyl and as a 10-inch the CD adds a track.) Stuart’s boozy singing suits the sloppy playing and demi-melodies the band’s comfortable enthusiasm covers a lot of the record’s flaws. Gas Food Lodging introduces guitarist Chuck Prophet IV to the lineup and adopts a full-scale countryfied sound, a mangy cowpoke hybrid somewhere between Pat Garrett-era Dylan and old Neil Young. Unfortunately, Dan Stuart’s not much of a singer and his songwriting could likewise be stronger. At the LP’s relative weirdest, Chris Cacavas’ organ- playing sounds like several genres from the ’60s, but only mildly Gravity Talks never becomes as intentionally mannered as its predecessor. (The title track uses chipper organ and reeling vocals to evoke “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine).”) Elsewhere, Green on Red largely abandons its previous style in favor of unembellished rock and folk- rock. Gravity Talks has a simplified and, in one spot, Dylanized feel. Good studio sound helps convey the sincere nostalgia. Filling the seven tracks of Green on Red (not actually their debut: that was a little-known self-released 1981 red-vinyl 12-inch, with five songs and no overlap) with buzzing guitars, droning organ and pretty melodies, the quartet delivers transcendental lyrics in a monotonic stupor that precisely suggests total pharmaceutical oblivion. But early records by the Phoenix, Arizona- born Green on Red alternately recall the fuzzified raunch of the Electric Prunes/Seeds and the merry flower power of the Strawberry Alarm Clock. ![]() Many of California’s psychedelic revival bands originally drew on spacey/chaotic sources like the Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd or classic trance-inducers like the Serpent Power. ![]()
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