Various Artists - A Night At The Family Dog: A Ralph J Gleason Rock Classic

Jam yesterday: starring the Dead, the Airplane and Santana

Not two months into the 1970s, and the San Francisco music scene had degenerated from a pointed, passionate, youthful affair into a slog of jamming, jamming, aimless jamming. If you happen to dig the guitar/percussion workout, you’ve really fallen on your feet with this hour of derailed chugging. For anyone with one eye on the glories of earlier and later scenes, however, this is frustrating. Carlos Santana was the man for whom the term “guitar face” was invented, and there are hundreds of classics here: “big quizzical rabbit”; “wank”; “who’s a clever boy?”. The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane are bands with tunes and even a certain menace at their most relevant. Hard To Handle and Eskimo Blue Day have their moments. The descent into all three groups playing three separate songs simultaneously provides the final section of this 58-minute rockumentary, if in no sense a climax.

Eagle Vision | EREDV 472

Reviewed by Derek Hammond
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