Terry Reid River (1973)

From bbc.co.uk

Much is made of the failures of Terry Reid’s career. The man who turned down the vocalist slot in Led Zeppelin (and recommended Robert Plant to Jimmy Page); the man who as a teenage prodigy had his early albums irreparably mangled by manager/producer Mickie Most; in short a man who many name-drop as the artist who fate dealt a bad hand. Yet, few people actually mention his triumphs. For, following a seemingly endless search for a sound and working methodology to suit his incredible voice, Reid did strike creative gold by the early 70s and River was to be his masterpiece.

High profile tours in the US throughout the late 60s supporting the likes of Cream and the Rolling Stones (Terry was at Altamont on that fateful night) honed his craft into something almost totally new at the time. On his journey he’d befriended legendary multi-instrumentalist David Lindley of psychedelic world music pioneers, Kaleidoscope (coincidentally one of Jimmy Page’s favourite bands), whose slide work graces River. An incendiary live turn was captured on film during the 1971 Glastonbury festival and it showed how Terry’s funky folk blues was evolving into a similar abstraction that Van Morrison had stumbled over with Astral Weeks.

It’s this jazzy abstraction that makes River such a treasure. With Lindley in tow, Reid made his first attempt to capture his muse in London with Yes’s engineer Eddie Offord, but too much ‘looseness’ made the results somewhat frustrating. Only the freeform acoustic tracks, ”Dream” and ”Milestones”, survive from these sessions and, while the meandering scat style is hard to grasp at first, the whole ambience is insidious, just as the theme of the river and its journey pervades the whole album.

Moving to America and working with Atlantic Recordsüber-producer Tom Dowd, the album became a yin-yang experience, with its first side a bluesy electric trip through just three prolonged jams, and the second featuring the two aforementioned tracks plus two other acoustic beauties (”Live Life” and the sublime ”River”).

Lindley’s guitar work is as fluid as Reid’s way with words. Phrases and lines become mere sounds in Terry’s mouth. To call these tone poems ‘rambling’ is to misunderstand the deeply charged emotion and pioneering spirit that marked the turbulent recording process. The river theme is perfectly mirrored by song structures that flow, ebb and never, for one instant, remain static. Of course, the Reid jinx wasn’t lifted by this wonderful album. One more classic (Seed Of Memory) was to follow in 1976 and then it seemed as if Terry and the world reconciled themselves to never being as huge as he undoubtedly deserved to be. His influence on subsequent artists was, however, significant. Just try listening to Robert Palmer’s Sneaking Sally Through The Alley after this album! Reissued at last, now the world can finally catch up…

From soundblab.com

One of the best known songs American singer/songwriter Tom Rush wrote was “No Regrets”. In retrospect, having in mind the career he went through compared to one he could have had, it seems that Terry Reid is humming this tune quite often. You are considered as one of the greatest voices around in the Sixties and Seventies, are offered a singing job with Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple (turned both down, even recommending Plant to Page), support Cream and The Rolling Stones on their US Tours (including Stones at Altamont), have ten official albums issued in your career, one of them a stone cold masterpiece, and arm the beneficiary of nothing except screaming recommendations from other musicians, a few critics, and even fewer fans. Still, it seems Reid is oblivious to all this, even though there is one classic of his that deserves more than just a footnote in the Led Zeppelin history. That classic Reid recorded is River. Sounds like quite a generic title that can describe anything, but it is actually one of the more precise album titles around. And here’s the brief story.

After quitting Peter Jay & The Jaywalkers, another footnote in the history of the British beat boom, Reid was ushered into a solo career by pop hit chaser Mickie Most, making two albums that were a complete mismatch between Reid’s booming, wavering voice (think Van Morrison, Tim Buckley and John Martyn all rolled into one). Recommended to Atlantic boss Arif Mardin by no other than Aretha Franklin, Reid started the sessions for the River album in London in the late Sixties with Yes producer Eddie Offord. Yet another mismatch. Seeing Reid as one of his pet projects, Mardin sends him to Los Angeles to work with one of the key Atlantic producers of that time, Tom Dowd, and a set of incredible session musicians that included the guitar master David Lindley and jazz percussionist Willie Bobo.

The two sets of sessions actually produced material for more than three albums, but Reid opted mostly for the California stuff and came up with an absolute stunner. When I said that River is a precise title for this album, it has only partly to do with the fact that from the introductory “Dean” to concluding “Milestones,” the album has this flow (no pun) of a continuously rolling music that is so precisely constructed it sounds just like a loose jam session. But even more so, while a lot of albums build up their atmosphere from a looser, gentler material to more crescendo-creating music, on River Reid went in a completely different direction – from funky, countrified first side (“Dean”, “Avenue”, “Things To Try”, “Live Life”), to rolling down, slowly flowing into that sea Bossa Nova and acoustic jazz of the second side (“River”, “Milestones”, “Let’s Go Down”). Most of all, that flow absolutely sounds natural and beautiful. Throughout, Reid’s voice and lyrics sound like complete ramblings with no rhyme, yet ones that have complete logic and reason. The musicianship is exceptional not just because Reid had exceptional session men at hand, but because they themselves seemed to draw pure enjoyment from these sessions, something that is often really hard to extract from hired hands.

In all, River can easily stand up shoulder to shoulder with masterpieces that are more (Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks), or less (Tim Buckley’s Blue Afternoon) recognised, while Reid still remains in the shadows even though it is obvious that guys like Michael Franks have made million on copying his Tropicalia flavoured links of the title track. The attempts to revive this masterpiece with its reissue in 2002 or surfacing of The Other Side of The River album in 2016, which included previously unpublished songs and alternate versions from the River sessions with equally incredible material, have again made to wider impact. But this stuff is so good, it has to work at some point, it is worth every note of it.

From uncut.co.uk

Terry Reid was the youngest of a post-war generation of often electrifying British vocalists that included Eric Burdon, Van Morrison, Rod Stewart, Steve Marriott, Joe Cocker and Steve Winwood. At 16, he was the charismatic front man of soul stompers Peter Jay & The Jaywalkers who at a spectacular show in November 1966 at the Capitol Theatre in Cardiff headlined by The Small Faces was a raw-voiced livewire, quite the equal of Steve Marriott, then in his raucous mod pomp.

Great things were predicted for Reid when he went solo, although he would always be more popular among fellow musicians than the wider a public, with whom he never really connected. Eric Clapton, for instance, was a fan and Reid supported Cream on a 1968 American tour. The Rolling Stones dug Terry, too, and he opened for them on their 1969 US tour, the one that ended badly at Altamont. Jimmy Page thought highly enough of him to ask Reid in 1968 to join the band that became Led Zeppelin. Reid, however, was committed to a solo career that everyone kept telling him was about to take off and recommended the then-unknown Robert Plant, with whom he shared a talent for high-end shrieking. For the same reason, Reid also turned down a chance to join Deep Purple, the gig going instead to Ian Gillan.

But neither 1968 debut Bang Bang It’s Terry Reid (bizarrely released only in America) or its eponymous 1969 follow-up sold well and Reid was soon in bitter dispute with manager/producer Mickie Most, an old school pop svengali determined to groom him as a suave soul crooner. Reid was looking far beyond the local Locarno and seasons in seaside cabaret, however. He was increasingly drawn by the lure of Los Angeles, where like-minded musical souls were even now gathering in stoned idyll, making the kind of expansive, adventurous music free of commercial orthodoxies he now felt himself compelled to write and record. In early 1970, he quit Britain and moved to California, eventually signing to Atlantic when label head Ahmet Ertegun personally negotiated his release from Most’s restrictive clutch.

The first sessions for the album that was released in May 1973 as River took place in London. A series of long meandering sessions with Yes and ELP engineer Eddie Offord resulted apparently in enough material for three albums, most of which was discarded when at Ertegun’s suggestion Reid resumed work on the record in America with producer Tom Dowd. Even by the unpredictable standards of the time, River, as fashioned by Dowd, defied categorisation, the music a free-associative mix of folk, blues, jazz, bossa nova, soul, rock and samba, Dowd letting the tapes run and allowing Reid therefore to go wherever it was he felt like going, which in most instances was somewhere off the known grid, where only Tim Buckley, Van Morrison and John Martyn were simultaneously venturing.

Album opener, “Dean”, offers immediate evidence of a song-writing style unfettered by conventional obligations to the tyranny of verse and chorus, beginning and end, build up and climax. A skittish guitar lick is followed by Reid’s speculative humming, as if he’s looking for a groove, a moment of lift-off that quickly comes as drums and bass tumble busily in and what turns out to be David Lindley’s slide guitar makes a noise that sounds like bullets whizzing over your head, Reid’s marauding voice a tomcat howl, recalling Tim Buckley’s carnal squawk on Greetings From LA. The cut’s lack of conventional structure is typical of the following three tracks, apparently improvised jams that at times are markedly reminiscent of the funky gumbo that Little Feat served up on Dixie Chicken, released the same year.

The fractured panache of these songs gives way on the album’s second side to a heavy-lidded languor, a kind of stoned euphoria with Reid’s voice at its lithest, slurring phrases, blurring words, oblivious of obvious syntax. The title track, “Dream” and “Milestones”, featuring just Reid’s voice, acoustic guitars and occasional percussion, are nearly all vapour, an evocative mist, a melodic drizzle and spray that primarily brings to mind the aching drift of Buckley’s Blue Afternoon and Lorca, with an echo too on the multi-tracked vocals of “Milestones” the spectacular abstractions of Starsailor and David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name.
Allan Jones