![]() So take all that as given and then factor in that, since this album was first released in 1969, there have been relatively few really noteworthy new blues artists to be introduced to the scene (Robert Cray, certainly, and Stevie Ray Vaughan … and I guess you could count Bonnie Raitt, too). And one of his original compositions is good enough to kick off the album, even as the rest keep the mood going between the classics he covers (like “When You Got a Good Friend”, “Be Careful with a Fool”, and that evergreen gem of creepy lust, “Good Morning Little School Girl”). He even has a good, distinctive voice, full of slurred high spirits that accentuate the dirtiness of his playing even as they balance against the technical precision of his fretwork. And give Winter credit for being more than just a virtuoso: he plays with a dirty rock raunch, one that’s both distinctive (he sounds a lot hornier than Clapton, not quite as trippy as Hendrix) and appropriate. ![]() In that regard, it might be worthwhile for someone at Sony/Legacy to do a serious vault search and see if there are surviving tapes of any other numbers recorded from the two shows (and was it just two?) that were recorded for this album.This is a good album in the great white-blues-rock tradition, played, of course, by a virtuoso guitarist. But for all of the musical virtues (and obvious joy) that Winter and company bring to those standards, the most interesting cuts here are "It's My Own Fault" and Winter's own "Mean Town Blues," and one wishes that there were more such tracks here. Except for the opener, "Good Morning Little School Girl," on which Winter and the band try to show how many notes they can hit as quickly as they can, the players generally try for something a little more subtle and interesting, and one wishes that more of what they did had used the slow blues groove they settle into on "It's My Own Fault." Their version of "Great Balls of Fire" has some of that, mostly by default (no one did the song faster than Jerry Lee Lewis anyway), and also enough energy so one doesn't even "miss" the piano one usually expects somewhere in the song "Long Tall Sally," by contrast, kicks in on overdrive and takes off from there. ![]() The highlights are of considerable value, however, including a searing rendition of the Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash" sandwiched between some much older repertory ("Great Balls of Fire," "Long Tall Sally," "Johnny B. Considering that it was recorded along a tour promoting the Johnny Winter And album, one would expect that the band would have done a considerable number of tracks from that record, none of which are represented here. Derived from live performances at the Fillmore East and at Pirate's World in Dania, FL, it is probably, in fairness, the best representation of Johnny Winter's sound from his prime years that one is likely to find - the pity is that it's only about 40 minutes long, and is weighted very heavily toward Winter's covers of well-known rock & roll numbers. In its time, this was an enormously popular live album, especially among high-school kids just starting to discover blues-rock in the early '70s.
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