JUICY LUCY -HQ/GATEFOLD-

If any one performance can be said to encapsulate all that Juicy Lucy portended, as their career got underway with the new decade of the '70s, it was "Who Do You Love?" The band's first single, spinning off their debut album, it was as fast and mean and dirty as any record could have been, a breakneck tour through the bayou swamps and dirt-track roads of the American South, powered by a guitar to make your fingers bleed. And it gave the band a U.K. hit that still sounds fresh today. But Juicy Lucy were no one-trick ponies. True, their debut album is remembered as much for its artwork (a mostly naked, fruit-draped lady) as for its content, but step inside and the group was locked firmly, and gleefully into the free-freak movement of the age -- while Chuck Berry's "Nadine" was fed through a Hell's Angels nightclub jukebox, "Are You Satisfied" emerged a festival chant spread out over six-and-one-half minutes, as mantric as (almost) anything the Edgar Broughton Band was doing at the time. The band's American roots are seldom far from the surface, of course: "Mississippi Woman" dripped oozing, cracked croak blues, and "Chicago North-Western" essentially offers up a history of the Midwestern railroads, while Glen Ross Campbell's steel guitar breathed Americana over everything it touched. But no matter how powerful Juicy Lucy may have been, it could not paper over the cracks that were already forming across the lineup, and by the time the band came to record its next album, the group that cut this one was already long gone. One can only dream of what they might have achieved, had they stuck together. ~ Dave Thompson