Terry Adams Rocks His Imaginary Radio

Terry Adams Returns with his Rock n' Roll Quartet

crazy 8′s

The Terry Adams Rock & Roll Quartet

Clang! (CL-507, 2009)

crazy 8’s is the name of the first music released under The Terry Adams Rock & Roll Quartet moniker and the world is better place for it. The band has been together for a year and a half under former NRBQ keyboardist Adams’ leadership.  Scott Ligon plays guitar and sings (“There Should be a Book,” “Get Rhythm,” “Honey Hush”), Pete Donnelly plays bass and drummer Conrad Choucron rounds out the quartet.

Everybody’s in sync on crazy 8’s, dishing out that rarest of musical delectations__ straight ahead rock & roll. Yapping, howling vocals, dirty guitars, slap happy rhythms, percussive magic on Terry’s clavinet, you know, all the stuff kids used to like and all the stuff that still generally constitutes a good time. The songs on crazy 8’s were recorded live recently at two different upstate New York venues, and all but the combustive “Get Down, Grandpa,” will be familiar to Adams diehards. Shaking wishes there were more tunes from Adams’ post NRBQ solo outings, Holy Tweet and Rhythm Spell, the latter released in 2007, the former earlier this year (see below), but there’s little else to complain about on crazy 8′s.

It’s good to hear songs that the “Q” covered reclaimed, remade and remodeled by this oh-so-tight outfit. Ligon’s guitar is lean, tough and nasty on Johnny Cash’s “Get Rhythm,” and Terry’s background vocals and keyboard inventions are at their loopy best on Joe Turner’s “Honey Hush.”

It’s also good to hear some of Terry’s “Q” tunes make their way into the new repertoire.  “crazy 8’s” is a cool ride, funny, a soundtrack for a lost Jay Ward and Bill Scott cartoon,  but “Imaginary Radio,” with its vision of radio utopia, a place where Sun Ra holds court, a new song by the Beatles spins and enlightened record label execs always play fair, is the bigger winner, sounding for three or so minutes more charming and confessional than we ever thought a night of rock & roll could.

(Reviews of Holy Tweet and Rhythm Spell can be found by clicking on the following links: http://shakinglikeamountain.com/shaking/2009/06/05/holy-tweet/ and http://shakinglikeamountain.com/shaking/2009/06/26/rhythm-spell/)