Rare Earth are one of those one-time big-time late sixties/early seventies bands whose albums you’re more likely, in the year 2025, to find in an archeological dig than on a record player. Which is to say that, like Blood, Sweat & Tears, Three Dog Night, and many other bands, their music hasn’t aged well. And for the same reason—it’s terminally unhip.
But unlike those other bands, Rare Earth—the most notable band of Caucasians to find themselves in the Motown fold—tried very, very hard to be hip, socially relevant, and counterculture-friendly, in a crass “put your hands together, brothers and sisters” way. As my friend William Honeycutt noted, “They had a very “Right On!” image.” Unfortunately it came across as a shuck, a marketing gambit, a ruse to sucker in your serious long-hairs.
Gil Scott-Heron certainly smelled bullshit, and went so far as to name-drop them as enemies of the people in “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” The revolution’s theme song, declares Gil, “Will not be written by Jim Webb or Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Engelbert Humperdinck, or The Rare Earth.” Personally, I wish he’d dropped the other names (I like ‘em!) and stuck with Rare Earth.
Rare Earth played an organ-heavy combination of rock, blues, and soul, and scored a trio of Top Ten singles in 1970 and 1971. Trouble is by 1972 they were chart radioactive, and would never again record another Gold album. Theirs was a short run—seems the people didn’t want to put their hands together, although their best-known song, 1971’s “I Just Want to Celebrate,” made it to the Number 7 spot on the Billboard Charts.
Their highest-charting LP was 1969’s Get Ready, and that title, when combined with the titles of their next two albums (Ecology and One World) tells you everything you need to know about their “hip” and socially conscious shtick. Calling an album Ecology in 1970, the year of Ecology’s birth, reeks of commercial tie-in. It’s possible I’m being too hard on the band. They could have done worse. They could have dropped the Ecology and gone with Stop Polluting Our Planet, People.
Get Ready features John Persh (vocals, bass guitar, trombone), Pete Rivera (lead vocals, drums), Rod Richards (vocals, guitar), Kenny James (vocals, organ, electric piano), and Gil Bridges (vocals, saxophone, tambourine) and the horns let you know the band was Motown Ready, as does the fact that everybody in the band contributed on vocals. But oddly enough the only song on the album with a Motown groove is closer and Temptations’ cover “Get Ready,” which is great if your thing is songs that go on forever, or more accurately twenty-one and a half minutes to the second. That’s longer than “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” “Sister Ray,” and both versions of “Alice’s Restaurant.” And Canned Heat’s “Fried Hockey Boogie” and “Free Bird” put together! In fact it’s longer than just about any song outside the realm of progressive rock, where long, free-form songs have always been the mortifying norm.
My biggest problem with Rare Earth is Rivera’s lead vocals; he’s got this BIG voice (not as big as David Clayton-Thomas’, but whose is?) but zero soul, which he makes abundantly clear on Rare Earth’s organ-laden cover of warhorse “Tobacco Road,” on which he holds onto that “road” forever before going “ogooglabayeahyeahyeah.” Or something like that. I can’t listen to him sing “I was born in a dump/My mama died/My daddy got drunk” without laughing, which is a pity because Rod Richards plays a mean psychedelic guitar and Bridges’ sax is bona fide soulful. The rhythm’s a bit stilted, but not wooden, a term I’m tempted to apply to Rivera’s voice.
Opener “Magic Key” is up-tempo inspirational, as are the lyrics; these guys truck in “we can all be one” cliches, as is evident from Rivera’s big-throated
“You see, I do want to be
A part of you and a part of me
That’s the means to equality
That’s the real magic key.”
Rivera actually wants to be part of HIMSELF, that’s how big on oneness he is! The song itself sounds like a Three Dog Night outtake, but it does have its merits. Richards once again tears things up with his guitar. And the instrumental break, on which Bridges plays a very deep sax solo with some actual squealing while Richards plays stinging licks behind him, is truly special. Really. Unfortunately the song isn’t memorable enough to make you want to listen to it again, ever. Really.
“In Bed” is more sub-par Three Dog Night with a real bummer of a message (“We’re born in bed in bed we die”) that just gets worse and worse (“Innocent a child is born a being with no past/Then in his eyes a fear takes shape/A fear I feel will last”). Which isn’t very Rare Earth inspirational of them, but then again they didn’t write it—“Magic Key” is the only non-cover on Get Ready. Like Three Dog Night, Rare Earth didn’t write most of their songs. And like Three Dog Night, the songs they did write didn’t exactly make you wish they wrote more of their songs.
Rare Earth turns out a presentable cover of Traffic’s “Feeling Alright.” It’s not very light on its feet, mind you, and anything but definitive, but if you can look beyond Rivera’s generic vocals Rare Earth’s cover has a lot going for it, including a phenomenal guitar solo and some funky organ work by James. And you’ve got to love the way Richards says, “Excuse me while I play my ax,” even if the solo he plays after uttering those words isn’t nearly as electrifying as the solo he played before it. But let me say this for Richards—he deserved better than Rare Earth.
“Train to Nowhere” has organ chug-a-lug but the song itself is a nothing burger, but what do you expect of a cover of a song by Savoy Brown, the most startlingly average English blues band of all time? That said, the original is far superior, and (I get tired of saying it) the only reason on God’s polluted planet to listen to Rare Earth’s take is Richard’s blistering guitar, which comes in all badass fuzz from the start. He plays explosive fill after explosive fill, delivers on a King Hell solo that is all fuzz and sizzle, then throws in another short solo to take the song out.
Which leaves us with “Get Ready,” which ended up being the band’s highest charting single after the powers-that-be trimmed almost nineteen minutes off the baby, which is akin to buying a 23-pound turkey and tossing out everything but a wing. And they still didn’t manage to trim all of the fat. (Kidding.) Rivera’s powerhouse vox actually works on this one, although if you listen to Smokey Robinson’s vocals on the original the word that comes to mind is desecration.
I actually listened to “Get Ready” in its entirety, and you can thank me for my service. The first thing that struck me was the canned audience applause, which the band does not use sparingly. Their imaginary crowd goes nuts. We’re not dealing with a song here—we’re dealing with an old sitcom.
What follows is a brief rundown.
Several minute instrumental introduction, very slow, that sounds nothing like the song. Features sax and guitar. Then the song comes in, Rivera doing a very decent Don Brewer imitation. Cool backing vocals, big big bottom. Sax comes in, disappears.
“So tweedley-dee, tweedley-dum/Look out, baby, ’cause here I come.”
Beginning of endless instrumental breakdown. Long, long, unconscionably long bass solo. Richards comes in sounding like Mick Taylor. Organ comes in, sounding like an organ. Guitar and organ trade off licks to no good end. Organ tries to do a Ray Manzarek imitation then gives up. Gets really squiggly, what a show-off. This goes on for, I don’t know, seven hours. Make that an even nine hours. I think about anti-macassars. The crowd roars. Do they know something I don’t?
They do! Because in comes Richards again, sounding like Mick Taylor again. The drummer fancies things up. Richards plays the same riff over and over again to no good end. Then he finally lets loose, and thank Christ. But even he begins to bore at points. Audience goes mad and sax comes in. Is John Persh’s trombone in there too? I’m ashamed to say I can’t tell. The constant pounding of the drums has given me a blessedly deafening headache.
Sax goes wild for a too brief moment, then Richards comes in playing really freaky, total fuzz, cool, but. It’s followed by a drum solo that lasts, I don’t know, the length of Kali Yuga. By the time it was over I had converted to Christianity, then become a Hare Krishna, and finally joined a cult that worships Sting. Then the gang comes back in singing “Get ready here I come!” for maybe thirty seconds before two different band members say “Thank you” to the nonexistent audience.
And that’s it. Now you know how the song goes and you’ll never, ever have to listen to it your own damn self. I’ll say it again: Thank me for my service.
I went on Facebook in an attempt to determine the relevancy of Rare Earth in the twenty-fifth year of the Twenty-First Century, and the comment that seemed most on the money came from my good friend Gillian Cornelius, who is lovely inside and out and who wrote, “I had to look them up and listen to part of a few songs because although I’d heard of them, I couldn’t remember anything they’d done.” In a second post she added, “Well, I did recognize one song. The name of which I’ve already forgotten. Whatever the big hit was.”
I think that’s the finest epitaph you’re going to get on Rare Earth. They came, they played, and they played so fine and so funky no one under the age of 69 remembers them.
Overdone Earth, anyone?
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D
