Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
For anybody who was in the New York area in the early 1990s and got the hear the seminal live grooves of the album Pocketful of Kryptonite as well as the righteous tones of Blues songs that were ahead of their time by around a decade, the Spin Doctors were a class act to watch and listen to.
In the intervening years, nothing has altered except perhaps for the passage of time tempering the soul and the sound of a generation becoming more poignant than ever, for the Spin Doctors were that voice of a generation, bolder perhaps than Nirvana, more dynamic in many ways but they had one thing that Nirvana didn’t have at the time, the ability to cross over generations and bring the sound closer to all. Anybody witnessing these two bands in whichever city in America they happened to be in at the time would have loved the intensity and arguably the sincerity of one, but they would have adored the passion in the other, and passion is always key to the live performance. Something that is realised in Ruf Records latest live offering in their Songs From The Road series.
The Blues clubs of the once mighty scene may have been dying a slow lingering death as the 20th Century ground its way miserably to its conclusion but for a brief time there was a team of Doctors willing to restore life to the fading giant. From that point history has been cool to the band, it has given the world not only the classic Rock songs that came out of the early Blues period, but also the chance to revel in the future by going back to a time when the past was on its way out and the future of the genre uncertain, top heavy and cumbersome.
If the River was Whisky album was pure genius, a laden beauty of memory to the late 80s when the band played out the songs that would carry their name forward into the new and emerging decade, Songs From The Road captures this memory and gives it the live treatment that should be considered a crime against musical experience to never witness being performed. Along with tracks from the arguably more progressive and certainly hit orientated period of the band’s discography, songs such as Jimmy Olsen’s Blues, Two Princes and Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong, Songs From The Road is a live album in which to relish the reminiscence and take you back to the days of New York Clubs, the powerful night perhaps in an Ohio venue and even to the point of the great triumph of their Liverpool gig at Eric’s.
Live the band are captivating, on an album and without the smoke and mirrors they sound spectacular.
Ian D. Hall