Love & The Electric Flag

Love, "Reel to Real, " RSO 4804.  The Electric Flag, "The Band Kept Playing", Atlantic SD 18112.

That old comeback trail is rocky. While you've been gone, a thousand pickers, rockers and bloozers have passed you by and it's a real temptation to wait for everyone to come to you instead of exerting yourself to catch up. Sometimes people will walk back to sit at your feet while you play the oldies. Sometimes you can run and run and never catch up.

Love with Arthur Lee, and The Electric Flag with Buddy Miles, Mike Bloomfield, Nick Gravenites and Barry Goldberg are back. And it's like they never existed. Both albums are weak compared to the late 6O's material they are best remembered for.  What they give us now is Soul Music in the time tested Soul Music Way. They use Moogs. They get monotonous.

Love's album is the sharper, but nothing when put up against "Four Sail" and "Forever Changes. " There's a skimpy handful of smart sounds - enough for two singles. But Love has mellowed to the point of transparency on the other cuts. This, the same group that gave us "7 and 7 is," has lost its raunch. Lee doesn't write the same intricate lyrics, and his voice has been filed down.

But Love is King Gospel when compared to the flaccid efforts of the Flag. Now with three flabby lead vocalists, there's an amorphous globular feel to the album which reminds me of some of the recent work of Blood, Sweat and Tears. When it is boiled down to the skin and gristle, it becomes enormously apparent that Electric Flag embodies an idea whose time has passed. It used to be original to have a horn section behind a rock/blues group- Electric Flag was one of the very first. But now it's the rule, and what was once new is now old hat.

But if you can find either of the two Love albums previously mentioned or "The Best of the Electric Flag" - they're really fine; the groups that delivered them are gone, though.

--Paul J. Grant