Long time readers are perhaps aware that I consider The Guess Who's 1972 album Rockin' not only said band's masterpiece, but one of the greatest rock records ever made.
And for some reason, I forgot to include something from it on last Friday's tribute to the birthday of Canadia.
So allow me to make amends -- please enjoy the album's closing medley "Hi Rockers!"
Which, as you will hear in breathless wonder, consists of a fabulously dopey comedy routine featuring two members of the band pretending to be drunks in a bar listening to Phil Phillips' greaseball classic "Sea of Love," which then segues into two GW originals -- the gorgeous production ballad "Heaven Only Moved Once Yesterday" and then "Don't You Want Me," the most sublime rockabilly song of all time.
You're welcome.
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6 comments:
The "ROCKIN'" album - never to be forgotten but remembered...
J. Lag
A long time favorite album of mine.
Heartbroken Bopper is the dope! Those twin guitars and Burton's hilarious lyrics really do it for me. Summa cum laude is a big OK!
If you like basic straight ahead rock & roll, this album is the one you have been looking for
I don't want to over sell it but this album has been giving me pure joy for 45 years.
Captain Al!
Had this on quad 8-track. RCA was all about Quad-8. Every damn Guess Who album was released in Quad-8. Very unusual for any band to have their full catalog released in quad. The nice thing about quad 8-tracks was that they only had two programs. This was unlike conventional stereo 8-tracks which had four programs and often split songs into two pieces and rearranged the order of the album's tracks.
"Rockin'" sounded great in my 1970 Mach 1 428 CJ. The car used to belong to one of my boyfriends. He traded it to my dad for the SS 396 the latter had bored, built and modified. Sweet trade. We put in the Panasonic quad unit afterwards. Dad let me drive it whenever I wanted. When I turned sixteen, and had seriously broken it in, dad gave it to me. It accessorized me well:-)
That said, "Rockin'," although humorous, is not my favorite Guess Who album, and I got 'em all through Troiano. "Arrivederci Girl" is a throwaway IMO. Definitely best taken as a whole. It's an "album" album. As far as I can recall, they only ever did a couple of the songs live back in the day.Those being "Bopper" and "Guns." I tried to see them whenever they came through because they were a great live act. Saw every configuration of the band. Interesting that "Live At The Paramount", recorded a mere 3 months after the release of "Rockin'," featured none of its songs, even after receiving an expanded CD version.
All post "Share The Land" Guess Who LP's ended up in the cheapie cut-out bins, which is where I scored them. Still, Allmusic giving "Rockin'" a 2-star rating is kinda extreme. The douches over there don't know fuck-all anyway.
Reissue has a "cleaned-up", non-background jukebox music version of the band doing "Sea Of Love."
VR - enjoy the big bang
Is there anything you neglected to mention?
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