I had moved to Houston from from Austin after graduating with a degree in History, a short try grad school and then fwas given a I-Y deferment in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam conflict. I had written a few liner notes my dad had passed on to me and also a few reviews of live shows for the UT paper, THE DAILY TEXAN so I excitedly offered my services to Houston’s alternative weekly, SPACE CITY NEWS. They gave me the green light so I wrote a few more, solicited some friends and appointed myself as Music Editor. No pay of course but now I had a license to hustle up new releases, score a few t-shirts and scrounge up concert tickets.
Thus, over the next two years I more than tripled my record collection and, over the course of just over two years I penned 255 reviews, for SPACE CITY, Mockingbird and another short-lived magazine.
I did not give a score to movie Soundtracks as I felt you had to see the film and listen to the soundtrack for proper evaluation and to Greatest Hits or other retrospective packages as they rarely contained any new recordings.
I took my cue from Robert Christgau’s CONSUMER GUIDE, the most respected record reviewer then and for many years. He used a scale like school, A-F with the + and -s which meant he had 13 ratings, not counting F- or F+. Not good enough I decided, not for this rookie. No, I instituted a 1-100 grading system and off I went. The reviews ran from 1971-1973 and during that time my top ranked sisc, The allman Brothers, EAT A PEACH, earned a 98, the highest score I assigned. The lowest score went to The English Congregation’s SOFTLY WHISPERING I LOVE YOU, which i said was good for putting people to sleep or curling out a party in your house the has gone on too long. Actually, the worst LP I encountered during this period was Screaming Lord Sutch’s THE HANDS OF JACK THE RIPPER. I later found an even better party-clearer, Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s WHY I AM AN ATHEIST, a 2 LP set which never failed to move guests out the door in scant minutes.
Back to the highest rated, ZZ Top’s RIO GRANDE MUD tied with the Allman Brothers for best with 97 scores going to Hawkwind, John McLaughlin & The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Jethro Tull, Tim Buckley and the Dillards.
Ten more earned scores of 96: David Bowie, The KinksJ, Joy of Cooking The Who, Allen Toussaint, Captain Beyond, Jimi Hendrix, Mike Quarto, the Strawbs and Tom Rush. And another fifteen earned 96s, among this batch was Them, Traffic, Roy Buchanan, Wishbone Ash, David Bowie (again), the Flying Burrito Brothers, Jerry Reed & Chat Atkins, Pink Floyd, Michael Martin Murphey, Freddie King, Houston folkie Don Sanders, ink Floyd and the Rowan Brothers.
Although not among the highest rated I wrote the very first review of Don McLean’s later to be classic, “American Pie”. I was also among the first to single out John Lennon’s “Imagine” as a song that would endure.
How about misses? Oh dear, yes while I professed to “call them as I heard them”, I did not properly praise releases by Poco, Canned Heat, The Band, The Doors, Moby Grape , Ronnie Hawkins and Sly & The Family Stone.
It took tons of chutzpah to do this as I had no musical training whatsoever, only years of listening to music as a consumer so I tried to put myself in a potential user’s shoes when I made my decisions. But I did not let that stop me, just as a lack of singing professionally did not stop me from becoming a solo (acapella) performer in 2021!
As we move along in future editions of the OF AMERICAN ORIGIN blog I will write up some of the actual full reviews of albums which are still revered today. Thanks again for your time and attention