'A' Is Also For...
Jun. 6th, 2018 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
waitingmanMeanwhile, on my mid-week day off, I'm still touring the music collection & still stuck in the 'A's
'The Amazing Rhythm Aces'
A band that fused the best bits of Nashville & Memphis - country, soul, R&B, a little funk, a little folk... Slide guitars & saxophones basically. They were the band that really won me over to American country music, having previously dismissed it all as rhinestone studded schmaltz. The Aces & Australia's own Flying Emus were my guides into all the good stuff - bluegrass, Hank Williams, Gram Parsons... even some Dolly Parton that wasn't duets with Kenny Rogers!!
I also loved that their albums were called things like 'Too Stuffed To Jump', 'Toucan Do It Too' & 'How The Hell Do You Spell Rythum'
The Amazing Rhythm Aces were pretty much a 70s band - the last 'proper' album came out in about 1981 - though various original members re-formed in the 90s, but never really recaptured the magic or mojo of their initial tenure. They toured Australia in about 1979, but I was both too young & also completely unaware of them back then. When the rejigged combo came to Sydney in the late 90s, I was incredibly excited & took a fellow guitarist along to the gig, promising great songs, incredible musicianship & lots of fun...
It was, frankly, a shit gig. The older members seemed tired & unenthusiastic, refusing to play many of the songs from their heyday & concentrating instead on lacklustre newer material, while their younger, new guitarist was kept on a tight leash, never allowed to really take off, the way that original guitarists Barry 'Byrd' Burton, or Duncan Cameron had. My friend & I apparently became quite vocal about this travesty, as an older couple in front of us said we'd ruined the show for them. My response was that the band had done a good enough job of that without any help from us...
It was hard to listen to Aces albums for a while after that. but as their back catalogue eventually found its way onto CD in the early 00s, I began to fall back in love with them & dim the memory of that gig
THIS is how I remember them now...
'The Amazing Rhythm Aces'
A band that fused the best bits of Nashville & Memphis - country, soul, R&B, a little funk, a little folk... Slide guitars & saxophones basically. They were the band that really won me over to American country music, having previously dismissed it all as rhinestone studded schmaltz. The Aces & Australia's own Flying Emus were my guides into all the good stuff - bluegrass, Hank Williams, Gram Parsons... even some Dolly Parton that wasn't duets with Kenny Rogers!!
I also loved that their albums were called things like 'Too Stuffed To Jump', 'Toucan Do It Too' & 'How The Hell Do You Spell Rythum'
The Amazing Rhythm Aces were pretty much a 70s band - the last 'proper' album came out in about 1981 - though various original members re-formed in the 90s, but never really recaptured the magic or mojo of their initial tenure. They toured Australia in about 1979, but I was both too young & also completely unaware of them back then. When the rejigged combo came to Sydney in the late 90s, I was incredibly excited & took a fellow guitarist along to the gig, promising great songs, incredible musicianship & lots of fun...
It was, frankly, a shit gig. The older members seemed tired & unenthusiastic, refusing to play many of the songs from their heyday & concentrating instead on lacklustre newer material, while their younger, new guitarist was kept on a tight leash, never allowed to really take off, the way that original guitarists Barry 'Byrd' Burton, or Duncan Cameron had. My friend & I apparently became quite vocal about this travesty, as an older couple in front of us said we'd ruined the show for them. My response was that the band had done a good enough job of that without any help from us...
It was hard to listen to Aces albums for a while after that. but as their back catalogue eventually found its way onto CD in the early 00s, I began to fall back in love with them & dim the memory of that gig
THIS is how I remember them now...
