These two mid-career records, Savoy Brown’s ninth and tenth, came at a time when the US market was just opening up to them. As such, this is not the hard-edged Savoy Brown of their early UK blues boom records, but a good-time boogie band out to please the crowd. Fair enough, good covers of Howlin Wolf’s Howling For My Darling and Jimmy Reid’s, Baby, What You Want Me To Do? augment the weaker material on Lion’s Share, but by this point, they’d seen better days.
Kim Simmonds’ guitar playing is as good as it ever was, but the revolving-door line-up situation was, at this point, affecting the group’s cohesion. Jack The Toad saw little change in direction and it’s not just in titles such as Ride On Babe and Coming Down Your Way, that a blues-by-numbers feeling resides.
There’s little to recommend these records to anyone not familiar with their work already. For those that are, it’s hard to imagine this pack, with no extras, being anything other than a disappointment.
