The (Young) Rascals - Freedom Suite and Groovin'
Let's go down the basic wikipedia checklist. Rock band? No. Hit songs? I don't know any of them by title. People involved? Nope, don't know any of them either. Lester Bangs called it excessive. No, sounds normal to me. Someone else called it psychedelic. No. It's not "trippy" or "outside the box" or experimental at all. Again, what the hell am i listening to?
This is R&B/Soul. Not "blue eyed soul," straight Soul (doesn't matter that they're white or that there are moments of Baroque Pop). The songs are vague, but they are real songs.
But, this is a double album, and the whole second record is instrumental. The instrumental half is quite fun with a happy birthday jam, a huge jazz inspired drum solo (a good one at that). A 15 minute jazz-funk monstrosity called "Cute" that easily rivals the other full side jams we've listened to from rock heavyweights Iron Butterfly, Vanilla Fudge, etc. All this means they were objectively hot somewhere. Time to dig deeper.
... singles band turned concept album band, big stars covered their songs, had to change their name to The Young Rascals for a while, silly stage costumes and an album called Groovin'. Wait wait wait. I've seen that album in one of these crates. Ha! Found it. Let's call this To Be Continued....
WHAT IN THE NAME OF WAYNE GRETZKE ARE ANY OF YOU PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT?!? (That's a joke about how popular they were in Canada). The songs on Groovin' are way more psychedelically motivated than anything on Freedom Suite. It's THAT "Groovin'." You know, "... on a Sunday afternoon." They're a "rock band" the same way The Royal Guardsmen are a rock band, meaning a couple of their songs are rock because they play everything: pop, jazz, soul, push the producer out of his chair and turn all the knobs to see what they do.
I understand them completely now. They suffered the same fate as Iron Butterfly. Everyone said "you win." You did the thing that we all like, now please take our money and retire. And, just like Iron Butterfly they replied "no, we take this serious. We want to make more music that we find artistically fulfilling."
All the nonsensical critical blather makes sense now. The people who were happy with their singles had to search for anything negative they could say about their turn toward art over mere entertainment, and the others had to hyperbolize a middle of the road east-coast 1969 album because they did as good a job as they could do. Freedom Suite isn't the greatest record ever, but not liking it is definitely your own fault. I'm the only person in the universe preaching that gospel, so no wonder it made no sense to me at all.
The biggest problem with newspaper style music criticism is that it isn't about the music. Everybody confuses what they like for being good. Everybody forgets that musicians only get to do what they really want to do 1) AFTER they make a shit-ton of money for the executive who took a chance on them, and forced them to write/play stuff that would sell, or 2) with the understanding that they won't make much money. Either way, you have to know the difference and approach the music accordingly. That's not what newspaper criticism is about. It's about canonizing or dismissing the upper stratum of consumable media. A payroll critic raves about an album they want to compare other albums to in the future, and pans one they want to dismiss into obscurity; it makes no difference who made it or why so long as it plays into the larger story they want to tell about that artist. I want to find a reason to appreciate it by understanding why it exists at all. Who am i to judge your art without at least trying to understand why you made it in the first place?
Kudos to you, Rascals. You're not exactly a flavor i want in my morning coffee, but you certainly don't suck and i'll still drink it if there's nothing else available at the moment.
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