Well, a coupla months on and I finally got round to acquiring this album.
Turns out I love it.
It is the "lost" album. As far as I can make out it has no extra overdubs, but most of it has been remixed. So it's not the masters that Rory (literally) dropped in the bin.
In some ways I feel myself going Rory, Rory, why did you ditch it?? But on the other hand we can't hear the original mixes he ditched.
It would have needed a bit more tidying up, not much mind. And some of the weaker material wouldn't have made it anyway - there's too much for a vinyl LP. But if he'd finished it, for me it would possibly have been the best of the 4-piece studio albums (Blueprint, Tattoo, Against the Grain, Calling Card, and then this).
However, I need to keep in perspective what he was trying to achieve at that moment.
He was trying to do an "American" sounding album as strongly requested by the record company. He seems to have bought into the idea, and had some sort of idea of how he wanted to do this... but it fell short of his own expectations. One of the reasons I think it fell short is that he was always a bit of a "balls-to-the-wall" rocker. It doesn't really show up on the official 4-piece studio recordings. But the producer of these sessions has captured the live Rory guitar unlike any of it's predecessors - there is some stunning playing on here, and you can tell that Rory's already evolving in a more "rock" direction. The producer's also managed to get more out of Lou Martin's keyboards. The stuff does all gel together, better in many ways, for my money, than Roger Glover managed on the previous album, but not how I suspect that Rory had imagined it should from his perspective in the middle of a stage with his amp blasting at him.
And definitely, his band seem to have had difficulty in tapping into the spirit of the songs Rory had in his head. It's all nice performances, but they don't have the bite that the same songs eventually ended up with.
During the middle of it all he seems to have reacted against the direction he was trying out, was getting bored with where a 4-piece was taking him, and ended up thinking "I want an all out rocking 3-piece". I understand he saw the Sex Pistols during the sessions, and Brute Force and Ignorance is reputed to be about a punk band that impressed him greatly.
Now, Brute Force and Ignorance is one of my favourite Rory songs. I suspect it was one of his as well - he played it live an awful lot. Basically, it's actually country music song - when you try playing it, it sounds pretty mellow (except for the intro). But the way he captured it on Photo Finish later with the 3-piece is something else. Same chords, but the attack lives up to the name and the lyrics.
The version on here is almost the same in the guitar and vocal department. But the band is playing something a lot more laid back and, well, stodgy. It's still good, but it's an album filler track, not the "Rory-manifesto", second or third song in the live set, that it became.
For me personally, I can imagine him listening to that one alone on these recordings and going "it's useless, start again...".
I feel a bit sorry for Rod D'Eath, the drummer. He was a fine drummer, but he wasn't best suited for where Rory ended up going. And added to that, I understand that he led the revolt for more wages at precisely the wrong moment - when his employer didn't think he could deliver in the style needed :lol:
SO, although I feel Rory perhaps made a mistake in not putting this out - this is more from a point of view of "you denied me these recordings for 30-odd years!!!". He might even have had more commercial success if he'd gone this direction. But he wouldn't have been able to do Photo Finish and then Top Priority, and he wouldn't have been the metal-blues super-hero that I saw a year or two later.
The second CD, the live album, is the 3-piece live in December 1979. I think he must have been promoting Top Priority. Follow Me is the set opener, and there's a superb version of Off the Handle. These recordings were made just 9 months before I first saw him. It is the Rory that I first saw, the Rory of the Stagestruck live album, but it kind of sounds just a bit more like what I remember than Stagestruck, even its remastered version, manages.
So, Clyde (and any other die-hard Rory fans), you MUST have this album. It's fab and groovy :D
Folks less obsessed with Rory than I am, it is well worth a listen. And CD2 is definitely great if you like the metal-Rory. The performances aren't quite as stunning as on Stagestruck, but the sound is a lot less wearing on the ears :lol:
