The Hollies go Americana, again! On a boat!

Warren Zevon might be the original excitable boy, but sometimes I'm a bit of that, too. I have a very vague plan of what I want to post, but then I get excited about a new project or distracted or what have you, and the original plan fades into the background. Case in point: When I posted The Hollies' Romany back in January I announced that it was part one of a two-part project and had planned to post the follow-up, an alternate album that wraps up the Mikael Ricksford era of the band, a week or two after. I even mentioned that this will "show up soon". Whoops. It's now more than two months, so I guess time to be true to my word. Better late than never. 

As I said in my write-up for Romany, I consider that album to be the best Hollies album, because it is the most consistent in tone, and it has a number of really good songs and no bad ones. I also mentioned that one of the problems of the Hollies' other albums was their unfortunate tendency to always have a number of cheesy showbiz tunes on their albums. And the tail end of the short-lived Rickfors tenure didn't excape that, either, even if that era was mostly a well-kept secret. The Hollies did issue another record, Out On The Road, but for some reason, it was only ever released in Germany, making it an instant collector's item for Hollies fans beyond the rhine. And, as said, there were a couple of duffers on that one as well, nothing horrible, but still...

So, what is then The Last Wind? As you might have imagined, an attempt to make a better second Rickford-era album, one that can proudly stand beside Romany as a great double feature. Most of the hallmarks of that album, notably a slight Americana sound no doubt influenced by the presence of Rickfors, are also here, accentuated by the three outtakes/b-sides from Romany I added to replace the weaker Out On The Road numbers. 

There are more guitars than you might imagine, and they are spacier and - dare I say more psychedelic - than you would expect from this edition of The Hollies. There's some harmonica. And when the band wants, they can sound heavy, as on their more than credible cover of the Eagles' "Witchy Woman". Before being let go, Rickfors left on a high note, contributing three very good numbers to proceedings here, including the new title track "The Last Wind". The Tony Hicks/Kenny Lynch duo are no slouches either, contributing the very good new opener "Go Down, Slow Down" and "A Better Place" (which lands just on the right side of the cheese line), while Terry Sylvester contributes the bittersweet "Mr. Heartbreaker" and the slightly psychedelic "Pick Up The Pieces". Unlike Romany, The Last Wind is a real teamwork and authored by the group, with the only outside contributions being another Colin Horton-Jennings track and the Eagles number. 

So, hiss the main sails, seamen, time to go on board with the Hollies. I gurantee you won't feel shanghai'd, so let yourself travel with The Last Wind...

The Hollies Go Americana

Like a lot of people, I always thought of The Hollies as a quintessentially 60s group that launched Graham Nash's career before he went on to bigger and better things with Crosby, Stills and (very occasionally) Young. I didn't think that they were as active as long as they were as a recording unit, rather than a touring band relying on name recognition and past glories, doing the oldies circuit showband thing. So, discovering The Hollies' recordings of the 1970s was a minor revelation, not because the music is overwhelmingly awesome, but because I didn't realize that they did have a series of albums that generally speaking keep a high level of quality control. But, and that's the thing, not quality control all the way. On almost all of The Hollies' albums there are one, two or three tracks that remind me why I thought of them as showbiz hucksters in the first place. Especially with Allen Clarke at the helm, they never could resist a cheesy showtune, so these are generously sprinkled all over their 1970s discography (and their late 70s and 80s output is all cheesy showbiz tunes). 

But there is an exception, the only Hollies album that I recommend as a whole. It is probably the most coherent album The Hollies ever did. And, incidentally, it doesn't involve Clarke at all. Romany was the one (or one and a half, more on that later) album The Hollies released with a new frontman at the helm, Swede Mikael Rickfors. Retrospectively, his colleagues somewhat ungraciously sort of mocked him for not speaking English all that well and not really meshing with them, but hey, at the time they chose him. And he was a good choice, at least in my book, bringing a slightly different aura to the band for the year and a half or so he spent with them. Maybe it's the Swedish connection, but he brought a whiff of Americana to a British band that had already wheeled through a bunch of different genres. 

Granted, the John Fogerty-soundalike "Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress)" already stretched into the genre, as did a couple of other numbers, but they hadn't really made a record that could consistently qualify as such. Now, to temper expectations (or worries, depending on your point of view), they didn't suddenly slather pedal steel all over the place and sing about being lonesome in the desert or whatnot. But Romany is unified in a way that very few Hollies albums are in what can be considered an Americana sound, imagery and feel.  Vignettes like "Lizzy And The Rainmaker" and "Delaware Tagget And The Outlaw Boys" do quite a bit of the lifting for the Americana feel. Rickfors' "Touch", while too weird and arty to be hit material, adds pensive melancholy to the Hollies' portfolio, not something they normally dabbled in. It's also one of only two songs from within the Hollies camp. They strongly leaned on the contributions of writer Colin Horton-Jennings, who is responsible for four selections, plus covers of songs from Judee Sill and David Ackles.

There's nothing added, subtracted or otherwise changed about this record, but it is part of a twofer project, setting up a sequel alternate album that will show up on these pages soon. Stay tuned. In the meantime, though, check out how four Brits and a Swede go west...