Long Island Blues

Long Island is a queer place to live and an even queerer place to visit. And God knows it must be the queerest place of all to start a rock band...an unlikely origin for a group like the Vanilla Fudge, the band that made re-interpretation of other writers' songs respectable again.

Back in 1967 and '68 the Vanilla Fudge were doing versions of "Ticket to Ride" and "Eleanor Rigby" that made George Harrison stand up and take notice. And then of course there was always the classic "You Keep Me Hanging On", a hit so big that they were never able to duplicate it. The new arrangements were made long and drawn out by the liberal use of a screaming, powerful Hammond organ and a perhaps too heavy use of fuzz box and wah-wah pedal. The songs were full of three part vocal harmonies and surprising changes in rhythm. But most of all they were psychedelic.

But the Vanilla Fudge broke up with the passing of the psychedelic age. Carmine Appice, the drummer, and Tim Bogert, the bass player, asked Jeff Beck to come over from England to see if they couldn't cash in on the success of the "heavy" sound being popularized by Cream and Jimi Hendrix. But Beck was involved in an auto accident and never made it. So Tim and Carmine hung around Long Island wondering what to do. Somehow they got hooked up with Jim McCarty, former lead guitarist of the Buddy Miles Express, and vocalist Rusty Day. This meeting produced a group and an album, both entitled Cactus.

Both the album and the group were received with less than overwhelming enthusiasm, and Atlantic, their recording company, rushed out another album, One Way or Another. Still, no success. Finally someone down at Atlantic wised up, and for Cactus's third album, Restrictions, they brought in Geoffrey Haslam, one of their best staff producers, and Eddie Kramer and Dave Palmer, two of the finest engineers in the business.

The result of this meeting of the superstars of the control room is that Restrictions is far better than anything Cactus has done to date, yet it falls short of what other groups like the Faces or Humble Pie are doing these days. The album is good; it's just not great. Restrictions' most glaring weakness is a lack of good original material. The album is hopelessly flawed by such inane cuts as "Token Chokin" and "Alaska," with each of the members of the band having a finger in the awful pie.

But when Cactus settled down and writes a good song, oh what a monster! Witness "Restrictions," the title cut and perhaps the best song recorded by an American group this year. Reminiscent of something the Vanilla Fudge at their faster (and better) moments might have done, "Restrictions" is full of tight harmonies, clever and absorbing changes in rhythm and structure, and strong instrumentation. The song barrels along, never letting up for over six minutes, and when it's all over you wonder if you haven't been run over by the Long Island Railroad.

Two other tracks worth mentioning are a tremendously powerful version of Howlin' Wolf's "Evil" and "Mean Night in Cleveland", a number based on an old blues riff. Given the strength of these two cuts, both of which are excellent. Cactus might well consider changing directions (or is it assume a direction) and try to bring blues rock back into popularity.