Rock & Roll Resurrection

Album review

Recorded a couple of years after the premature end of his contract with Atlantic Records, and three years after he parted company with Roulette (where he'd spent the late 1950s and all of the '60s), Ronnie Hawkins' Rock & Roll Resurrection was the result of a chance meeting between Hawkins and Kris Kristofferson, who was signed to Fred Foster's Monument Records at the time, and was persuaded that the oldies boom made it the right time to record Hawkins anew. Cut in Nashville in August of 1972, with a band that included Grady Martin, Pete Drake, Charlie McCoy, Stan Szelest, and Boots Randolph, Rock & Roll Resurrection captures captures Hawkins in amazingly good form, not quite a decade past his prime hit-making years. Though the first day's sessions reportedly degenerated into a drunken party -- or perhaps because they did, and Foster was forced to seize the reins of what was going on -- the ten songs that were issued are stripped down, highly energetic, and well-performed classics of the rock & roll genre, by Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Larry Williams, Bo Diddley, et al, augmented by one great Hawkins original, "Cora Mae," plus a Kristofferson original composed for the occasion, "The Same Old Song"." The latter, released as a single, was, alas, the one miscalculation in the body of music cut for the album, a slow-tempo, much too serious and over-produced number that utterly failed to capture what the rest of the sessions had been about, the spirit of the album, or the imagination of either the country or the oldies audiences -- it isn't bad listening,, and to be fair, it is a good compositional effort by Kristofferson, but in the context of this album it stands outside of the rest of what's here. The rest of Rock & Roll Resurrection has held up well, and certainly was to the credit of all involved, most especially Hawkins, who delivered his requisite energy and a good, raw performance.

© Bruce Eder /TiVo