GROUNDHOGS
Road Hogs: Live From Richmond To Pocono FIRE
It’s blues, Jim, but not as we know it.
The discovery of a set of live tapes capturing The Groundhogs on the cusp of change at two different points in their career provides a gripping narrative of how transformative the progressive movement was in the music scene of the late 1960s.
The first set, caught live at Richmond Athletic Ground in south London in 1969 just after their second album, Blues Obituary, had been released, shows a band clearly chomping at the bit to put the blues behind them as they open with Cherry Red, a song that linchpin guitarist Tony McPhee tells the audience is so new it doesn’t yet have a title. Hearing such an early version nearly two years before it would be recorded in the studio is a real treat.
The sound quality on the Richmond disc may be grainy but the sheer power punches through the murk. On No More Doggin’ McPhee’s habit of radically detuning the strings in the middle of the song doesn’t so much sound like someone playing the blues as divebombing it from a great height. More than half a century on it remains a bracing and dangerous sound.
The sonic quality on the four tracks recorded at Pennsylvania’s
Pocono festival in 1972 is much improved. Appearing in the middle of a larger bill as they tried to break into the American market, there’s no sense of a band pulling any punches or toning things down.
With his quivering bottleneck strafing the length of the fretboard, his extended, angular soloing is more akin to an experimental sound sculpture than belting out tame rock licks.
Frequently swaying between the contrasting poles of near silence and ear-splitting noise, McPhee’s brinkmanship is equaled by Pete Cruikshank’s assertive bass and Ken Pustelnik’s surging drums. Pustelnik would depart soon after, replaced by Egg’s Clive Brooks. However, this set, now featuring numbers from Thank Christ For The Bomb, Split, and Who
Will Save The World brilliantly highlights the trio in all their unpredictable, ragged-edged glory.