Earl Slick

Here's a guy with as artsy a pedigree as you could imagine (David Bowie, Ian Hunter, John Lennon, Robert Smith, etc.); but he also had his own hard rock band in the 70's. Unfortunately (by their own admission) their two albums were ruined by drug abuse in the studio. They sounded like they were playing by numbers, and were rightfully ignored for the most part. However buried beneath their studio failures there exists a CD called "Live 1976" which is documents a performance before an audience at a Rochester NY radio station. They seemed relatively sober for this performance, and showed they could tear it up pretty good when they had a mind to. Anybody hurting for some fairly fresh gritty midwestern hard rock might check out this live CD. It's a huge improvement over their studio albums.

I liked the Phantom Rocker and Slick project. I heard the song "Men Without Shame" and went out and bought the vinyl.

Now that I think about it, I need to see if that was ever released on CD.

& John Waite He did a nice job of playing the Mick Ronson guitar parts with Bowie.

I have one of the Earl Slick Band lp's & I have to admit I was never impressed very much by it. Earl did not write the songs, I would guess they used his name for the band to help sell records.

Earl will always be the hired gun, Good gig if you can get it.

Yeah, Jimmy Mack wrote the songs. On the live album the songs hold up pretty well IMO. I think it was the stiff stoned playing that made them sound bad in the studio.