Water
1971
John Simon's Album
About This Album
Producer John Simon did a pair of albums of his own during the 1970s, starting with John Simon's Album (1970), which was two years in the making and featuring many of the musicians with whom he'd been working over that period, including Cyrus Faryar, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, Delaney Bramlett, Leon Russell, Jim Gordon, Carl Radle, Jim Price, and Rita Coolidge, Bobby Whitlock, and Jean Millington. Perhaps not surprisingly, John Simon's Album mostly resembles the first two Band albums, with a clear, sharp, brittle sound rooted in a multitude of popular music strains. The strangest song here is the first, "Song of the Elves," a surreal, psychedelic song derived from an R&B source and beat (with a strong '50s New Orleans feel) that calls to mind both Randy Newman and Brian Wilson -- the strange chorus with its deliberate distortion evokes the late '60s and the peculiar brand of psychedelia generated by the Beach Boys. And speaking of the latter, the bluesy "Did You See" sounds like some magnificent lost piece of the Wild Honey sessions, Wilson suddenly trying his hand at piano-and-guitar blues. The album also encompasses stripped-down gospel in "Nobody Knows," but the real jumping off point comes early, in the horn-driven "Tannenbaum," which sounds for a moment like the original Blood, Sweat & Tears jamming with the Band, and "Davey's on the Road Again" (co-authored with Robbie Robertson) could be a lost Band track in its playing and texture, though Merry Clayton's soaring backing vocal adds a special wrinkle (and recalls Simon's arrangements on Leonard Cohen's first album).
Track List (try tracks 1,3,4,9 and 11)

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