Talk about your supposedly fun things I’ll never do again; it would take a million chimpanzees playing electrical instruments 100,000 years to make the ungodly synthesis of southern rock and progressive rock work, and I am here to tell you that Augusta, Georgia’s Dixie Dregs are not those chimpanzees.
The amazing thing? I used to OWN this band of daring genre blenders’ sophomore LP, 1977’s Free Fall. What’s more, I actually listened to the damn thing. I simply cannot come up with a more glaring example of the dangers of rampant marijuana abuse.
Oh, and have I mentioned that the Dixie Dregs play nothing but instrumentals? They don’t want the warming sound of an actual human voice to distract you from paying close attention to all of the whizz-bang playing. Or the best education in musical theory and composition a couple of degrees from Georgia State University can buy. Who needs Ronnie Van Zant when you’ve studied with Alice Shields? She’s a bona fide protege of Wendy Carlos!
But about the whole southern rock/prog fusion thing: It’s more or less a red herring. The Dixie Dregs attempt the impossible on only two tracks, and both tracks are less Dixie than dregs.
“Moe Down” works if your taste in hoedowns runs towards Aaron Copland. This isn’t the kind of thing you’ll want to square dance to. This is the kind of thing you’ll want to take notes on for your advanced course in The Cooption and Trivialization of Appalachian Culture. Talk about your aesthetic distance; the Dixie Dregs might as well be looking at southern culture from Mars.
And things don’t get any more south of the Mason-Dixon Line on the inaptly entitled “Refried Dixie Chicken,” which does a grave disservice to both Little Feats’ “Dixie Chicken” and Canned Heat’s “Refried Hockey Boogie” and sounds like a very, very subpar cut by Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society. I’m no expert, but I think I know the sound of a refried synthesizer when I hear one. That said, if you have jazzbo pretensions and want to show off to your jazzbo friends, this is probably the one to play.
For the most part the Dixie Dregs sound like a Kansas that got upgraded to musical first class, and the upgrade doesn’t do us, the listeners, any favors. There’s no denying that when it comes to chops, these sharpies have the guys in Kansas beat hands down. But most people like a little emotion with their music even if it’s ersatz emotion, and at least with Kansas I get a couple of risibly “deep” songs that I secretly love (“Dust in the Wind”!).
And when they’re not one-upping Kansas, the Dixie Dregs are doling out the fusion lite (see “Holiday,” “Night,” and the classically tinged “Sleep”). These may be southern boys, but they’re wearing boots made out of 100 percent Spyro Gyra. And that’s not cow shit on their heels, either; it’s the aromatic dung of George Benson, carefully collected after he was force-fed a generous serving of Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
I can only recommend this album to music majors, closeted prog-loving Skynyrd fans living in terror lest somebody discover their shameful secret, and people who think Kansas would have been a great band if they’d just gotten rid of all those annoying human voices. Do such people exist? They must. SOMEBODY bought this record, and I will never forgive myself for being one of them.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D
