|
Walter Trout and the Free Radicals
Live Trout
This was the live album that almost never happened. Even with a year's worth of preparation, the anticipated appearance of blues-rock legend Walter Trout at the Tampa Bay Blues Festival last March was nearly sabotaged by 24 hours of airline and hotel mis-connections. However, while creeping on the edge of exhaustive collapse, Trout delivered the performance of a lifetime (as fest occupants will attest), with an incendiary set of his high-octane playing. Already an icon in Europe (where he's been a headline attraction and poll topper for years), Trout is definitely the most underrated American blues fretman on the globe. Mars and Venus: lookout! With an ultra-flashy style culled from the Hendrix vein of Stevie Ray Vaughn, Trout relishes in massive Albert King-stretched string bends and Buddy Guy-borrowed power chording, in a rave-up energy derived from Britblues units like Cream and Groundhogs (captured in all its raw perfection by Jim Morris of Morrisound). If you were there, you must own this. If you weren't, hear what you missed and then lie about it to your friends. -peter moore (Ruf America, 162 N. 8th Street, Kenilworth, NJ 07033)
|
