Hair Metal Veteran Native American Shouter With Rapidly Receding Hairline Starts To Mellow Out, One Buck Guy Helps Him Out In Assembling Really Nice Album...

Ok ok, I admit it, I just wanted to see how many characters would break blogger's limit with my admittedly silly title, but it seems I'll have to try again some time in the future. 

By the early 1990s Blackfoot's glory days were done, and so were Ricky Medlocke's days as a hair metal teen idol, if he ever was one. The irredeemably awful Ricky Medlocke & Blackfoot from 1987 was the absolute nadir, an awful record that saw Medlocke pushed front and center, with a reconfigured Blackfoot relegated to backing band status. By the time Medicine Man came out in 1991, Blackfoot were has-beens, or rather has been Medlocke and a buc nh of hired gun never were's. But sometimes from such a situation some surprisingly good music can spring forth. And it did. The fact is that neither Medicine Man nor After The Reign were good albums per se, though the latter came much closer. But they had makings of good music, and so the idea here was to combine the best of both albums (the best according to me, obviously) into a single album, hence After The Medicine Man's Reign. 

The original Medicine Man is still firmly stuck in AOR/heavy metal mode for the most part and has a number of rather stupid songs that sadly try to recapture Medlocke's mid-80s Blackfoot heydays. Thus, only three songs make it into the new line up: The first-acoustic, then-pedal to the medal "Soldier Blue" as a kick-ass opener, the little instrumental "Navarre" and the lovely "Guitar Slingers Song & Dance".

The last Blackfoot line up - something tells me these guys loved hair, no shirts and posing.

The seven remaining tracks all come from After The Reign. Overall, that album seems to pick up where "Navarre" on its predecessor left off, going more often than not for a mellow, acoustic groove rather than the dumb heavymetal/AOR mix of the albums that came before, with the absolute nadir of those being; Old school One Buck Heads will remember "Rainbow" from my Country Dreamers comp. In the same country rock vein is the band's cover of Van Morrison's "Tupelo Honey", and Medlocke also tries it's hand on the old standard "Sitting On Top Of The World". "After The Reign" is a bit more uptempo and thus a good side two opener, while "Tonight", an song that's admittedly really close to AOR power ballads, seems like a good album closer. 

Another notable point is that the lead guitar slinger on the Medicine Man tracks is One Buck Records favorite Neal Casal, which allows me to post a great picture of Medlock and Casal, the latter as a full-fledged hair metal hard rocker: 

Ricky and Neal - notice rapidly receding hairline on one and beautiful flowing mane on the other...

So, this reconfiguration doesn't reveal a lost classic of any kind, but a nice album of somewhat slowed-down and countryfied grooves from a once mighty Souther Rock band, whose lurch into the twilight generated a couple of underrated gems, right After The Medinice Man's Reign.