Look, I’m going to be straight up with you. I am not reviewing 1974’s Live ‘n’ Kickin’ by dubious supergroup and power trio West, Bruce & Laing because I either like or dislike the band, or because I find them interesting in any way, shape or form—I don’t. I am reviewing Live ‘n’ Kickin’ solely because upon its release Village Voice scribe Tom Hull saw fit to give it an E+, a grade which, so far as I know, doesn’t exist. I was a terrible student whose only talent was for academic fiasco, and I never received an E+. Nor did you or anyone else, I’m willing to wager.
But suffice it to say that the moment I saw that grade I knew I had to listen to Live ‘n’ Kickin’. Only a surpassingly vile, incompetent, or beyond-belief mediocre piece of shoddy workmanship could warrant a grade like that, and snarling Dobermans, electric fences, and fleets of screaming Stuka dive bombers couldn’t stop me from gently lowering it on to my turntable the way you might a stick of unstable dynamite and listening to it.
And sure enough it’s a perfect example of live self-indulgence, complete with lengthy drum and bass solos, both being the banes of the lesser classes of rock bands of that benighted era. The trio make a primitive din and in general sound like a subpar Humble Pie, except the LP’s four songs meander like an Alzheimer’s patient who has escaped his rest home.
The band jams on and on, each player showing off his chops with utter disregard for what his band mates are doing, and the occasional coherent moment passes by like a flash of lightning and is lost forever. They’re headed elsewhere, our threesome, that elsewhere being the grandstands, where they spend their time pushing one another aside to get their fair due of applause from a far-too-easy-to-please audience.
There’s no denying guitarist Leslie West and drummer Corky Laing of Mountain gave us the great “Mississippi Queen,” and bass player Jack Bruce was brilliant in the overrated supergroup Cream. But here they simply don’t cohere, as they prove on opener “Play with Fire,” which is a sort-of cover of the Rolling Stones classic. I say sort-of because while the lyrics are the same the music is from their song “Love Is Worth the Blues.” It’s a thirteen-plus minute monstrosity that lumbers along like a gut-shot rhino, and when they speed things up things don’t get any better.
The band simply doesn’t mesh, or care that they don’t mesh, and as a result the song goes from bad as in incoherent to straight downhill like an avalanche of mastodon shit. If shambolic first-take jam sessions are your cup of dung you may like it, but if the Laing drum solo is your thing (the luded-out audience appears to like it) I have to wonder about your IQ. The song’s only good moment occurs after it’s over, when Jack Bruce says, “That’s a very, very, very old song. Written in 1897.”
“The Doctor” is a band original with a savage West riff and is heavy as a pyramid, but it too devolves into pointless noodling faster than you can say “Turn it off!” Boy can that fat guy play the guitar, but he has no idea where he’s going and the song soon slows to a pathetic crawl before petering out completely. Where’s the doctor when you need him? Not in the house, that’s for sure.
Of course things pick up again, but to no good end, and the song is followed by a version of Cream’s “Politician” that will leave you wishing John Wilkes Booth had been in the audience. The band doesn’t sound together, the rhythm has a wooden leg, and you get the distinct impression the song’s melody has wandered off in search of some place to hide from the musicians. It’s a bloody mess, worse even than a Civil War hospital.
“Powerhouse Sod” boasts a funny title and not much else, and has the great distinction of wandering about like a blind man from its very first note. And things, which you’d think couldn’t get worse, do, when Bruce launches into an interminable bass solo so ham-fisted and dull you’ll find yourself wondering if the guy’s much-vaunted talent was the product of smoke and mirrors.
Where was that stupid with the flare gun when he was really needed? Because Bruce’s solo goes on and on, as tedious as your next door neighbor lecturing you on the menace of crabgrass, and when the band finally rouses itself to put a stop to Bruce’s solo about all they’re capable of doing is tripping over one another’s egos until they once again bring the song to a dragging halt. There is no melody, this is no song, and if you see it coming I’d advise you run.
I’m a snide and dismissive person, but I listened to this album with the dead certainty that I would run across at least one redeeming moment that would convince me that Tom Hull had given it an E+ because he’d just lost everything down to his Dachshund Snappy in an ugly divorce, or been diagnosed with leprosy.
But I looked in vain. Live ‘n’ Kickin’ is beyond redemption. West, Bruce & Laing dissolved after this album, but given their total disregard for what their band mates were playing it can truly be said they’d dissolved as a band before recording it. The only thing I gained by listening to it was the answer to an important question. To wit: Is an E+ worse than an F? Live ‘n’ Kickin’ is proof that it is. Much worse.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
E
