Juicy Lucy

Album review

If only one song can be said to encapsulate all that Juicy Lucy portended as their career got underway in the new decade of the '70s, it was "Who Do You Love?" The band's first single, spinning off their debut album, was as fast, mean, and dirty as any record could have been, a breakneck tour through the Bayou swamps and dirt-track roads of the American South powered by a razor-sharp guitar that would make your fingers bleed. And it gave the band a U.K. hit that still sounds fresh today. But Juicy Lucy were no one-trick pony. True, their debut album is remembered as much for its artwork (a mostly naked, fruit-draped lady) as for its content, but step inside and the group were locked firmly, and gleefully, into the free-freak movement of the age -- while Chuck Berry's "Nadine" was fed through a Hell's Angels nightclub jukebox, "Are You Satisfied" emerged as a festival chant spread out over six-and-a-half minutes, as mantra-like as (almost) anything the Edgar Broughton Band was doing at the time. The band's American roots are seldom far from the surface, of course: "Mississippi Woman" dripped oozing, cracked, croaky blues, and "Chicago North-Western" essentially offers up a history of the Midwestern railroads, while Glen Ross Campbell's steel guitar breathed Americana over everything it touched. But no matter how powerful Juicy Lucy may have been, it could not paper over the cracks that were already forming in the band themselves, and by the time they recorded their next album, the group that cut this one was already long gone. One can only dream of what they might have achieved had they stuck together.
© Dave Thompson /TiVo