RIVER

Personnel: Terry Reid (vocals, slide guitar); David Lindley (guitar, slide guitar, steel guitar); Lee Miles (bass); Conrad Isidore (drums); Willie Bobo (percussion). All tracks have been digitally remastered. Terry Reid, famously, turned down the opportunity to be the singer in the nascent Led Zeppelin, instead hipping his friend Jimmy Page to a little-known guy in Birmingham named Robert Plant who Reid felt would be more suited for the job. Over the course of Reid's peripatetic solo career, his intriguingly off-kilter musical choices proved that he was right to turn Page down. For example, 1973's RIVER, Reid's first album in nearly four years, is a loose, mellow exercise in southern California folk-jazz, very close in spirit and execution to what Van Morrison, Tim Buckley, and Joni Mitchell were doing around the same period. The seven songs are lengthy, meandering grooves powered by David Lindley's dobro and slide guitar parts and featuring Reid experimenting with Morrison's incantatory vocal style alongside his own familiar British blues wail. The 2006 Water Music reissue adds two previously unreleased outtakes from the RIVER sessions, "Anyway" and the hypnotic seven-minute jam "Funny."