The Crawdaddys - Oh Baby Doll THE CRAWDADDYS – Crawdaddy Express (Voxx)
Published on May 17, 2013 by reverendolys
Flashback. 1978. California.
San Diego, like the rest of the Sun Belt and all of America, is torn apart by the punk plague. In fact, having quickly burned through that devastating season, the protagonists of that flaming vessel seek new escape routes from the blaze that has consumed its bridge.
Thus begin the electronic and dada experiments of Ralph in San Francisco and the conquest of Silicon Valley, while on the other side, the violent centrifuge of hardcore severs all the ties that bind punk to the roots rock ‘n’ roll, imprisoning it in the political-social ideologies that will result in oi! and straight-edge orthodoxy.
This is the desolate landscape that unfolds before the eyes of Ron Silva and Steve Potterf in the aftermath of the crash of the meteor Hitmakers, prompting the two to form a band capable of taking back the reins of the past, reclaiming the black language of Jimmy Reed and Slim Harpo already chewed over by Yardbirds, Pretty Things and Downliners Sect in Sixties England. And the name chosen by the quartet, which paid homage to the famous venue managed by Giorgio Gomelski in Richmond and a true fitness center for Anglo-white R ‘n’ B artisans, was more than a programmatic manifesto.
The importance of the Crawdaddys for the preservation of roots music is comparable to that of only a few of their contemporaries: Fleshtones, Gun Club, DMZ, Hypstrz, Cramps, and really very few others.
A workshop where the old sound of lost bands like Phantom Bros. and Beat Merchants is reassembled on the conveyor belts of the assembly line. Using the same bolts, the same gears as the original models. A forged masterpiece. A grand forged masterpiece.
To notice what was happening inside those workshops was first and foremost Greg Shaw, then editor of the fanzine Bomp! and patron of the homonymous label, which would inaugurate the catalog of his new label precisely with them.
Born as a spinoff of Bomp! Records, Voxx would become, in the following decade, the quintessential label of the garage renaissance with stars and stripes.
The new American flag for all garage sound maniacs.
Crawdaddy Express, a document that sanctioned and celebrated that artistic marriage, is the train on which the music of the Sixties boards to descend at the station of the Eighties, the convoy that preserves and safeguards the primal urgency of beat and urban blues to deliver it safe and sound into the hands of the new rock ‘n’ roll revisionists, an express that sends blues harmonica whispers flying as it travels while pounding on the oak ties of the old U.S. railway.
Fifteen songs, almost all covers of old blues and rock ‘n’ roll classics, return to don dazzling outfits thanks to the grit of the four Californians.
