BLUE MOUNTAIN EAGLE – Blue Mountain Eagle
Blue Mountain Eagle have a convoluted past, starting when Buffalo Springfield split and Dewey Martin formed New Buffalo. When Martin then left this band the remaining members recruited Joey Newman and became Blue Mountain Eagle. So really there are no links left to the Springfield and the band can be judged as such. The album is a good mix of hard rock and country influenced (although luckily not too much) tunes, of which opener ‘Love is Here’ is easily the best thing they ever recorded. I had this album many years ago and only ever liked this track, so I copied it and taped over the rest. My friend Jurgen persuaded me to try it again and my tastes seem to have widened so that I now like nearly all of the songs and am glad to have had the chance to re-appraise it. It is very much a guitar led album, and ‘Love Is Here’ is full of fuzzed solos and great riffs. ‘Yellow’s Dream’ is a quieter moment among the guitar rock, but ‘Feel Like A Bandit’ and ‘Loveless Life’ are nearly as good as ‘Love Is Here’, and I can’t think why I didn’t like them first time. ‘No Regrets’ has some lovely harmony vocals on the chorus, and the shadow of the Byrds does loom large over a lot of these songs. Some have a slight country bent, such as ‘Troubles’, and ‘No Regrets’, while others, like ‘Winding Our String’, take the harder route hinted at by their Buffalo Springfield origins, and let rip on the guitar with some very Neil Young style solos. ‘Sweet Mama’ veers off into a jam which brings to minds the Allmans at their best, and ‘Trivial Sum’ has a great guitar duel. ‘Promise Of Love’ is the only track which is not wholly successful. A change of vocalist, and some intriguingly odd harmonics mean that is does sound rather out of place among the generally hard rockers on here. On the whole I was very pleased to get another chance to hear this album, as it seems to have improved mightily since I first heard it. Out on CD and worth hearing if you are into the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, early Poco, or any of those late 60’s country rock bands which were more rock than country.