I was going to open this review of West Texas hard rock band Bloodrock by saying something withering, like they weren’t even fit to open for Grand Funk Railroad. Then I discovered Bloodrock did indeed open for Grand Funk Railroad in 1970.
Although the more I think about it, the more I think opening for Grand Funk Railroad makes Bloodrock even worse than I thought.
1970’s Bloodrock 2 was the band’s only taste of success, thanks in large part to “D.O.A.,” a plane crash song inspired by guitarist Lee Pickens’ brush with an actual plane crash. “When I was 17, I wanted to be an airline pilot,” said Pickens. “I had just gotten out of this airplane with a friend of mine, at this little airport, and I watched him take off. He went about 200 feet in the air, rolled and crashed.”
I’m assuming Pickens saw this and decided that remaining earthbound as a rock and roll guitarist was a safer career path.
I’ll get to “D.O.A.” later—the first thing I want to say is that Bloodrock, who I really wanted to like because I’m the world’s foremost expert on and biggest fan of plane crash songs, are an unfortunately mediocre proposition. Bloodrock 2 has its moments, but there’s no ignoring its host of flaws, the most impossible to ignore being that it has too many weak songs, and the songs that have a modicum of punch are saddled with lyrics so funny bad they’re worth quoting at length.
In short, Bloodrock 2 is a plane crash of an album, and the amazing thing is that it not only charted but stayed on the charts for several months.
Bloodrock featured the manly vocals of Jim Rutledge, Pickens (the band’s biggest threat) on lead guitar, Nick Taylor on rhythm guitar and vocals, Eddie Grundy on bass and vocals, Stevie Hill on keyboards and vocals, and Rick Cobb on drums. Hill’s keyboards occasionally take Bloodrock out of West Texas and into Uriah Heep territory, and for the most part, this is not a good thing.
It’s also worth noting that Grundy had the worst mustache in the history of rock and roll. It’s an even worse mustache than the soup strainers sported by England Dan and John Ford Coley, put together, and I didn’t think that was possible. The goddamn thing belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Opener “Lucky in the Morning” is the band’s one stab at pop accessibility, and combines an actual melody and some ethereal vocal harmonies with a couple of nifty jams during which Pickens proves he made the right decision when he abandoned his pilot’s ambitions to play guitar. Think the James Gang and Grand Funk in melodic mode.
“Cheater” boasts some great stinging guitar by Pickens, but lacks the necessary propulsion—it has muscle, but the tempo’s too slow. But its real downfall is it’s flat-out generic. It sounds like hundreds of other also-rans written during the early seventies, and doesn’t have a single distinguishing characteristic. A tattoo might have helped.
“Sable and Pearl” is a kind of proto-power ballad that opens with some church organ by Hill. Then it goes Motown ballad, with Rutledge crooning about the rainbow in his pocket before Pickens tosses off some power chords and Rutledge lifts his voice to sing, “I’ve drunk the wine of kings and dressed in sable and pearl.” It’s all a bit ridiculous. And while the softer passages have a minor charm—the melody is no loser, and the playing is more than competent—“Sable and Pearl” simply comes up short.
“Fallin’” is mid-tempo forgettable—it’s less a song than a mildly cool hard rock riff repeated unto infinity, although it features a tempo change that takes it into milder territory, but does it no favors. And the baroque organ solo doesn’t help either. Meanwhile, Rutledge sounds confused—as he’s falling into a bottomless well, he sings, “Someone come along and shake me/If I wake, I will surely die.” Which raises the question, why the hell does the guy want to wake up?
“Children’s Heritage” is first-generation rock and roll ready-made about the glories of rock and roll—I’m guessing it got the kids on their feet, but the only thing original about it is the lyrics, which are head-scratching. Who follows the generic lines “I like music, it makes me feel so good/And all of my children are gonna like it like they should” with the lines “Some don’t like it, yes it’s true/They can’t do what they wanna do”? And what does that even mean? And lines like “Make my music talk to me” don’t help.
(As for the band’s other children song “Don’t Eat the Children,” which appears on 1971’s Bloodrock USA, I’m afraid to listen to it. But it’s sound advice—your young’uns are extremely fatty and chock full of bad cholesterol.
“Dier Not a Lover” (great title) opens with some frantic percussion and has momentum to spare—Pickens plays a catchy riff and the organ follows suit, although the organ solo that follows falls into English prog-lite territory. Not so Pickens’ solo, which is cool.
But as is always the case on Bloodrock 2, the stupidity of the lyrics is in direct proportion to the beats per minute. The song opens with Rutledge sitting alone in his “liberated room,” which I didn’t even know Room Liberation was a thing. But that’s nothing, nothing compared to this:
“Living alone at the bottom of a sheet
Vicious spots console there, but my soul they cannot see
Rainbows and whales and things I cannot be
Think about the love that would seem so good to me
I’m a dier not a lover, in the death you’re s’posed to fall
To a place in this earth, find the castle in the fog, fog, fog.”
“Rainbows and whales and things I cannot be”? Why, that’s one of the greatest dumb lines ever, and don’t even get me started on the vicious spots with poor vision.
“D.O.A.” should have been great—it’s this morbid opus sung from the perspective of a guy breathing his last in the debris of a commercial airliner following a mid-air collision, and how could you possibly go wrong? Bloodrock goes wrong, and they make it look easy.
It opens with this very odd organ riff, half carnival and half funeral, before going big. Then the vocals come in, and they’re even bigger, and you hear sirens after which Rutledge goes melodramatic with a vengeance. And all the while, the organ is playing this repetitive riff as Rutledge slowly bleeds out. Then the vocals go Major Tom huge with the band singing, “I remember/We were flying along/And hit something in the air.”
Have I mentioned that the tempo drags? And the melody, such as it is, isn’t sitting in First Class, but flying serf class?
And so it goes, on and on, Rutledge playing the deathbed scene for all it’s worth until about the six-minute mark, when the drums kick in, and the band turns into a Gregorian choir, and the organ and then the guitar finally make things happen. Pickens in particular shines. But then things slow down, really down, before going out not with a bang but with a quotidian death rattle.
“Fancy Space Odyssey” is bass-powered lightweight boogie and pretty cool from title on down—Rutledge sounds like Jim Dandy Mangrum would if Jim Dandy Mangrum could actually hold a tune, and it’s great when he ad-libs, “Kill, kill” like he’s siccing his pitbull Bobby No-Touch on you, unlucky listener. But the lyrics are a Superfund Clean-Up Site and worth quoting at length:
“Sardines on the cushion
Squeeze ’em hard, don’t push ’em
All the kids are knocked out
On artificial rock out
Everyone’s conditioned
For the proposition
And the band is starting to blow
What a show, what a show, what a show, what a show, show, show.”
That “All the kids are knocked out/On artificial rock out” is worth keeping, but “sardines on the cushion”? And we’re supposed to squeeze them and not push them? Why not? They’re sardines! Push ‘em all you want!
And then you have these lines that no one (I’ve checked multiple lyric sites) seems to be able to figure out. “Trying to reach some monkey engrossed in a silver ball’s turn” is one interpretation. “Tryin’ to reach some rock engrossed in a silver Boston” is another. Me, I hear the “Boston,” but frankly, both interpretations fall into the realm of the ridiculous. And is that “the band is starting to blow” supposed to be a compliment?
And this is the Best Song on the album!
Bloodrock 2 actually made it into Chuck Eddy’s book Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe, which I used to think was quite the honor until Eddy admitted to me that he only chose albums from his personal record collection, most of which he seems to have culled from the dollar bin at the local used record store. It certainly explains the inclusion of bands like Nitzinger, Budgie, Cactus, and (wait for it) the Jimmy Castor Bunch.
So I’m taking the presence of Bloodrock 2 as a 500-bester (it occupies the #388 spot) with a very large grain of salt. Make that a salt mine’s worth of salt.
Bloodrock has a lot in common with Nitzinger, Budgie, and Cactus, if not the Jimmy Castor Bunch. They were rock also-rans, and Bloodrock 2 is the proof. So-so songs and sublimely dumb lyrics fatally distract you from the fact that the guys in the band could actually play, although they’d have been better served by keeping the Anglophile keyboard player on a shorter leash.
Any final comments? Yes, just this. How do you fuck up a plane crash song?
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D
