I can get pretty emotional about this album because when I heard it, I was so emotionally vulnerable and so utterly alone. Its music has a dewy-eyed summer sunset glow which I revelled in. Though, I really had no one to share it with when I heard it.
So, because of that, it becomes a difficult album to review objectively (perhaps an objective review is not needed anyway!!!!)
There’s a small-town juke-box midnight-cafe that-girl-i’ll-never-forget feel to the album. Some tracks are so unapologetically raw and sore ("Without You", "Clear as the Driven Snow" and the sinister "Evil Woman") and others brim with emotions I knew when I was actually looking to find someone (and found ABSOLUTELY no one) - like "South City Midnight Lady", "Ukiah", "Dark-eyed Cajun Woman". There are also vignettes of small-town rock’n’roll like "China Grove", "
Long Train Running" (these, with "South City Midnight Lady", are the Doobies highest points for many) and the sunny, dewy-eyed "Natural Thing". That leaves the title track, a folk-rock jangler with intricate harmonies and a classic-rock feel to it. I should not forget the song with the longest title, nothing more than a delightful mandolin-jangle segue to "Ukiah", "Busted Down Around O’Connelly Corners".
When I heard the album in 1991, I was living out my own sixties hippie flower-power days(thirty years too late, groan!!!!) and the creativity excited me. The music perfectly meshed elements of folk, country, blues and rock (borrowing from Donald Clarke here) and was a powerful, pleasurable drug, stoking the fertile soil of my classic-rock-hungry mind.
Taking it track by track is like reliving a time in life when I was young, raw, emotionally pack-of-cards fragile, and already totally burned out inside (what’s the difference nowadays anyway - except that I’m neither young nor raw). So I will try, in the interests of letting you know what the album really means to me.
"Natural Thing" has a beautiful laid-back country-blues-rock feel. It’s always like this with good music - the tendency to catch something in me and make me identify so strongly and intensely, that I can never sometimes share. There are those lines about circus performers; and I was one at the time for sure.....out there, heart on my sleeve, on a limb, utterly and utterly alone. And there was no one, just "daily luck".
"China Grove" and "Long Train Runnin" are high accomplishments on the album, both filled with enough of classic rock songwriting to render them among the best rock songs of the 70’s. Both are vignettes of small town rock’n’roll. There’s something about finding the girl of your dreams in a small town.......something very cherished and poignant about it. Why think of finding a girl with these two songs? I haven’t a clue. "Long Train Runnin" is a brilliant blues-folk-rock jangle which the Doobies have never topped.
"Dark-eyed Cajun Woman" is a ballad-type folk-rock-blues thing, with some soaring guitar solos. "The evenin’ is blowin, I hear your voice most everywhere, with your cold-black eyes, dancin’ in the starlight, warmin the cold night air.." was the high point for me - something about those chords struck home. Still, I found no one.......
"Clear as the Driven Snow" is one of those rare super-charged folk-heavy rock- blues workouts. I heard the Doobies first in 1989, and I always suspected they’d have done work like this song in SOME ALBUM. "Clear as the Driven Snow" fulfilled all those suspicions. Something about it is unforgiving, harsh, raw and like surgery without an anaesthetic. Pretty much what I was doing to myself - beating my brains out slowly, deliberately and with great intent and purpose.
"Without You" SEEMS like the token heavy-rock shouter on the album. Actually, it is a good, strong, solid, grooved rock song that treads that thin fine line between becoming UNSUBTLE heavy metal and staying rock with just enough to ride the wave. It’s a classic exercise in walking the razor’s edge.
"South City Midnight Lady". I guess I should leave this well alone, because it’s still too much a song for me. Should I have found someone in those days....well. I shall say no more, because it gets too close for comfort. Just for the record, it is probably the best-loved Doobies song, and is surely the star highlight of the album by a long way. Some emotional button inside me gets pressed and I can never recover.....so ’nuff said for now.
"Evil Woman" is a trashy heavy-rock piece, the kind that HAS TO FOLLOW an experience like the previous song. I don’t like it, predictably, but as just a song, it’s okay.
"Busted Down Around O’Connelly Corners" is the perfect segue, but also lovely enough to stand on its own. It reminded me a lot of "Never Going Back Again" on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album, to which it is definitely superior.
"Ukiah" reminds me most of the photo and the motif on the album sleeves. A mythical place, very well etched using the folk-rock idiom. One of the album’s creative, superlative tracks. The time is early evening; a carriage slowly rides down Ukiah’s main street - turn over the album and see the photo in back......
"The Captain and Me" completes the picture created by "Ukiah" perfectly. Something about that abandoned flyover (cover photo) echoes in these last two songs on the album. There’s enough creative folk-rock jangle to qualify this as a superior work of songwriting.
Thank heavens I got through the review without breaking the dam and bursting into tears!!!!!!!
What remains is to tell of the album’s place in the musical climes of the 70’s. It is without doubt and by a long, long way (travelled by that carriage in the back cover photo perhaps) the Doobies’ finest hour. No other Doobies album comes remotely close to its cohesive, superlative, well-crafted, well-performed songwriting. Patrick Simmons never wrote anything better than "South City Midnight Lady", and Tom Johnston was never on finer form. Undoubtedly, one of the 70’s finest rock albums. I’d recommend it; don’t miss it for worlds!
You’ll find that previous paragraph in most conventional reviews, and it isn’t untrue.....but the album remains what it does for me - I love it so much that I can play it on repeat endlessly when I’m feeling really low and vulnerable, and alone.....I know the hours I knew, and ONLY I KNOW. Maybe the Doobies never intended this.....I care little.
1991.....sigh.