CD Review
John Kay
Heretics & Privateers
(Black Leather Music Inc 2004)
by Robert T. Murphy
Review date: February 2005
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"Keeping the Blues Alive Award"
Achievement for Blues on the Internet
Presented by The Blues Foundation
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John Kay may be more familiar with music fans through his work with Steppenwolf, who have been on the rock and roll scene since the late 60's. What many fans might not know is that in the early 60's, John Kay crossed the country playing acoustic blues wherever he could make a few dollars. Following up on the social commentary of the 60's folk blues era, this CD has 16 tracks (12 original songs plus four songs repeated in an acoustic format) of social commentary in the folk blues format. John Kays recent albums contain a lot of social commentary and this one just raises the bar a bit. His voice is perfect for this style of music. Vocally, he doesn't force the issue and instrumentally, he provides a nice traditional blues based sound which sounds very basic and simple, but the simplicity is deceiving as getting that correct sound is harder than it seems. John Kay has a lot of guest artists on this release and sometimes that causes an overly busy sound but here it works out just fine.
Bottom Line: This is an excellent CD, with just the right amount of grit and basic musical sounds. Some of the songs have a ring of Steppenwolf in them, others have a great basic rootsy sound to them. There is a fair amount of diversity with this release. If you like later Steppenwolf, then you should like this release. If you are looking for heavy blues riffing guitar, you might want to look elsewhere, but for pure vocal and musical entertainment, this CD gets four out of five stars.
John Kay - acoustic, resophonic and electric guitars
John Gardner - Drums
Mike Henderson - electric slide guitar & Harp
John Jarvis - piano
Glenn Worf - Electric Bass and upright bass
Larry Byrom - electric guitar
Steve Cropper - electric guitar
Jimmy Hall - Harp
Ron Hurst - drums
Danny Johnson - electric guitar
Gary Nicholson - resophonic guitar
Lex Price - bass & mandolin
Mike Utley - piano
Michael Wilk - organ, fretless bass, keyboards and percussion
Web sites: www.steppenwolf.com
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