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Gatemouth Brown - Roy Clark, Makin' Music


Dan Gould

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I picked up a sealed copy of this many moons ago and never transferred it to digital until recently but what a fun afternoon of music-making these guys had.

 

061049.jpg

 

anyone else know of or remember this record? I always think of Roy Clark as the bug-eyed guy making corny jokes but damn he could play. Maybe next BFT I'll slip in their recording of 'A Train'. ;)

Edited by Dan Gould
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I remember seeing that one in the racks and bins for quite a while back then but never picked it up. I remember I was quite unsure what that mix of country and R&B was supposed to amount to, and besides, somehow R&B guitarists that might have gone "all funk" in their later days (I'd been licked in other cases - cf. Bo Diddley and Johnny Guitar Watson) caused me to be overly cautious at the time . I probably was wrong in this case but at the time I thought that NOTHING EVER among his output could top Gate's "San Antonio Ballbuster" album on Red Lightning (a record I still cherish, FWIW). ;)

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49 minutes ago, Big Beat Steve said:

I remember seeing that one in the racks and bins for quite a while back then but never picked it up. I remember I was quite unsure what that mix of country and R&B was supposed to amount to, and besides, somehow R&B guitarists that might have gone "all funk" in their later days (I'd been licked in other cases - cf. Bo Diddley and Johnny Guitar Watson) caused me to be overly cautious at the time . I probably was wrong in this case but at the time I thought that NOTHING EVER among his output could top Gate's "San Antonio Ballbuster" album on Red Lightning (a record I still cherish, FWIW). ;)

 Does that one include anything not on the "Original Peacock Recordings" release? I always assumed that one was exhaustive but if it's not I'll have to find the Ballbuster one next.

As far as the record under discussion it definitely leans toward country and is definitely no oddball combination of genres. Gatemouth could play it all. Roy Clark could just play.

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Yeah, Roy Clark was still the bug-eyed guy making corny jokes, but with chops to chase away all demons. It's a particularly "country" trait, perhaps, it seems that a lot of the badass country players around here approach jazz like that, so hey, let people be who they are, show respect, and wasn't that Gatemouth in a nutshell anyway?

I remember the record in its time...I was a little too hardcore jazzbore to appreciate it on its own terms. I don't know if I'd like it any more now than then, but I've no doubt that I would enjoy it more now than I did then.

Too bad nobody got Glenn Campbell into those kinds of settings...that was another guy who had magic fingers.

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20 hours ago, JSngry said:

Too bad nobody got Glenn Campbell into those kinds of settings...that was another guy who had magic fingers.

That would've been fun.

Back in the 70s, when I was 9 years old, I bought Glen Campbell's "Southern Nights" on a 45. It's one of the first records I remember buying. The "William Tell Overture / 'Lone Ranger' Theme" was on the flip side.

Good memories. :) 


  

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Never did hear that album. Gate was making some good records right up until the end. I got to hang with him for a bit when he sat down on the lawn next to me to listen to Robert Lockwood's big band. And later that night he took the stage with his own big band. This was in the late 90s when he was doing his Gate Swings material.

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  • 1 year later...

Revisiting this one (funny almost exactly a year later) but I just discovered something seemingly impossible to believe. My VLC software is identifying this as, well, check out the attachment.

Now I am pretty sure we've had a discussion of the auto-identify feature and how it can mess things up but ... I transferred this from LP. What are the odds that I would cut off the ends of each track such that all 10 tracks matched this other CD?   :wacko: :blink:

I've had plenty of commercial CDs get misidentified (last week I was listening to a four set disc of Louisiana Blues and three came up right, and one was totally off the wall). But I've never had this happen.

Still a fun listen ...

Roy Clark Auto Play.JPG

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