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Old and In the Way
Review by Owen
A double album, Breakdown/That High Lonesome Sound, by Old and in the Way, a Jam session run out of control, featuring Jerry Garcia on banjo, and a whole bunch of that high lonesome sound. This is the best kind of high energy live album, with reasonable production values, but recording a band that essentially came together for a brief moment, and, finding no commercial success whatsoever, went their seperate ways. The music is fantastic, old-timey bluegrass, with a few new songs that you would never know were new. Garcia's banjo picking is, like, really groovy, dude. But for me the best part is the songs, with such greats as "Working on a Building", "Hard Hearted", "Orange Blossom Special" and "Angel Band", along with a few that I haven't heard before, such as "Panama Red" one of the best bluegrass songs ever written about weed, and "Lonesome LA Cowboy":
"I'm just a lonesome LA cowboy, hanging out, hanging on
to your window ledge calling your name from midnight until dawn,
smokin' dope, snortin' coke, tryin' t' write a song,
forgettin' everything I know till the next line comes along."
And "I Ain't broke, but I'm Badly Bent." One of my new favourite bluegrass songs.
It's a great double live album, featuring some great talent, and it makes up a very nice drive to Edmonton from Calgary with the addition of, Say, Scruj MacDukh Live at the West End Cultural Centre. It gets four and a half pints of that good old mountian dew. It woudl be five pints, but there's no excuse for doing a bluegrass interpretation of "Wild Horses".
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