Lester Bangs

Rolling Stone -- August 5, 1971

Peculiar Friends
Ten Wheel Drive with Genya Ravan
Polydor 24-4062

The first striking thing about this album is the drawing on the cover: dourly anthropomorphic insects, reptiles and amphibians in Victorian waistcoats congregating in a glade, exactly like Tenniel's original illustrations for Alice in Wonderland. The second striking thing is the big picture inside of Genya Ravan curling her lips toward the microphone and pointing an accusing finger at the audience. Genya's a real dame, and has more tough sensuality than any rock 'n' roll woman in recent memory except Savage Anisette.

Now that we've struck both strikers on this set, we can talk about the rest of the record, which is not only not striking, but in large part a downright Plain Jain. Ten Wheel Drive is a professional but rather commonplace band manipulating all the usual eclectic schticks for the sort of stylistic digest that Chicago attains and Dreams promises to transcend, but which seems to reduce most of their kin to the status of students trying on one new-old bit of business after another. Ten Wheel Drive are better at it, perhaps, than most--plus which they've got Genya -- and as a result are beginning to garner some attention and even take some tentative steps toward the star trip.

That last is their most "peculiar" facet, however--the last two albums have given Genya equal billing with the band, suggesting that some people would like to think of her as one of those rare larger-than-life personalities, a phenomenon, potentially a Joplinesque superstar. Which is interesting, because, on record at least, she's often the weakest link in the group. Her vocals repeatedly strain themselves into a stridency that is at best artificial intensity and at worst inept and unmusical. Janis had similar problems, of course, but she compensated with the force of her personality, hooting and swigging hootch and turning the stage act into a party. Genya live is certainly something to look at, but she hasn't yet opened up and found her moves-she doesn't project the outrageous persona that would distract you and create the illusion that you're seeing something or someone light-years out of the ordinary.

The result, of course, is that the very ordinary music comes to the fore. The songs and playing on peculiar Friends are seldom plain bad; neither better nor worse than the run of their two previous albums, everything clips right along as if programmed by Univac. The writers try occasionally for hard urban pith, as in "The Pickpocket" and "Fourteenth Street (I Can't Get Together)," but it doesn't really come off because they haven't got anything new to say, and the even more hackneyed music resolutely refuses to rescue the words.

Even a good line like "killin' time with a butcher knife" loses out because the song it's from, "The Night I Got Out of Jail" (what a great chance was blown when they wasted that title!), is merely another fidgety Chicago-type arrangement which finds the shrillness which is Ten Wheel Drive's great stumbling block at its height. On the other hand, a more disciplined runthrough like "Down in the Cold" doesn't really succeed either, despite marvelous brass squeals, adequate gospel-funk piano and a Coltrane-growly sax solo. Something is missing, and not just originality, but-emotional involvement?.

Two breaks in the generally lackluster vocal work occur, and interestingly enough they're also the only two relatively ballady things on the album. "Shootin' the Breeze" and "I Had Him Down" are both lyrical and lushly effective, the former especially by some fine muted brass, the latter for Genya's uncharacteristic restraint and the song itself, which sounds almost like something Barbra Streisand might have sung two years ago. If Genya and the New York Wheels would stop trying to be hip and funky and take the risks involved in venturing more fully into traditional pop ballad styles, torch songs, even schmaltz, they might make some beautiful music indeed. The alternative for the band is a stylistic game of marbles; for Genya it's the ersatz Joplinisms which find their nadir in "Love Me," which sounds exactly like you think it does and mushes together a vocal veering between bad Joplin and worse Tracy Nelson, a female backup chorus and a mundane harp solo by Genya herself, resulting in sheer embarrassment for all concerned.

LESTER BANGS

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