Marriage On The Rocks / Rock Bottom

Album review

Amboy Dukes' Marriage on the Rocks/Rock Bottom is a very musical record, more experimental than their releases on Mainstream Records, not as soaked in the Pat Travers blues-rock which the follow-up, Survival of the Fittest embraced, and not as rocking as The Call of the Wild, which would be released about four years after this on Warner Brothers' Discreet label. Interesting to note the mutation of the Nugent sound with every label change. This work on Polydor is certainly more in the Ten Years After bag (especially on Survival of the Fittest, Live), with keyboards up there in the mix almost equal to Ted Nugent's guitar. The entire first side is composed by Nugent, and the first song, "Marriage/Part 1: Man/Part 2: Woman/Part 3: Music" sounds more like Jethro Tull than anything else. It's a nine-minute-and-three-second progressive blues number and it is highly listenable. Just looking at the image of the four bandmembers staring up from the darkness on the back cover shows as much of an identity crisis in the presentation as is revealed in the music by the Amboy Dukes on this disc. Featuring Ted Nugent is low-key on the cover; he eventually would get co-billing with the band name and find fame when he abandoned the Dukes moniker altogether. "Breast Fed Gator (Bait)" is one of a couple of songs that could be considered for a single, but that's just the length of the tune. As good as the music is, it is far from commercial Top 40. As Ted Nugent takes riffs and ideas from here and there, contemporary bands as well as his own previous work, Marriage on the Rocks/Rock Bottom has more improvisation, a concept carried over to Call of the Wild, but not to this extreme. Call of the Wild was more contained experimentation. This music, recorded by Edwin H. Kramer -- "Eddy Kramer" -- at Mira Sound in December of 1969 and mixed at The Hit Factory that same month, is beyond bizarre. The seven Ted Nugent tunes may shift conceptually, but H. Andrew Solomon's "The Inexhaustible Quest for Cosmic Cabbage" is ten minutes of unfocused cut-and-paste where the Amboy Dukes take on the Beach Boys, Spirit, and labelmates Ten Wheel Drive. It might've made for interesting three a.m. overnight music for progressive FM radio stations of the time. Where Spirit's "Fresh Garbage" had an ecology slant, "Cosmic Cabbage" here hopes to be the Mothers of Invention. The pop elements of this ten-minute suite are intriguing and a far cry from "Cat Scratch Fever." "Brain Games of Yesteryear" is not a title Ted Nugent became famous for, but it is an unusual document of one phase of the hunter's career, and the eight-minute piano-heavy "Children of the Wood," perhaps the album's highlight, is workable British pop by this Michigan band. Strange stuff.

© Joe Viglione /TiVo