Collector's Choice
1975
This Side Of The Big River
About This Album
After writing three standards of the '60s -- the garage rock classic "Wild Thing," made famous by the Troggs; the soft pop ballad "Angel of the Morning," originally cut by Merrilee Rush; and "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)," made famous by Big Brother & the Holding Company -- Chip Taylor began a solo recording career in the '70s, signing to Warner Bros. after releasing one rock-oriented album, Gasoline, on Buddah in 1971. His first album, rather ironically (and quite funnily) named Chip Taylor's Last Chance, appeared in 1973 but it wasn't a rock or a pop album: it was a country album, which signaled a return to his roots in a way, since he sang country music at the beginning of his career. Neither Last Chance nor the following year's Some of Us were hits, but the label stuck with him through one more record, 1975's This Side of the Big River. This is also a country album -- indeed, it was the only one of his records to sell well enough to appear on the country charts -- but it's not a conventional country record by any means. It's an appealingly sleepy, meandering record, drifting from languid ballads to laid-back country-rockers, but its sonic palette is broader than that suggests -- the Gram Parsons-styled "I've Been Tied" is punctuated with horns; the slow, slow "Holding Me Together" is built upon electric pianos and mournful steel guitar -- and the album recalls California singer/songwriters as often as it does Nashville.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,6,7 and 8)

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