CANNED HEAT

Bought this when it came out as a single over here in the UK and after seeing them at a festival (can't recall which one but it was early late sixties early seventies and recall them waking me up as found myself being subsumed by the mud!) bought several albums afterwards but it wasn't long seemingly that Al Wilson (harp player and vocalist here) and Bob 'The Bear' Hite had died. Wilson had little to no success with the opposite sex despite being in a burgeoningly famous blues band and suffered severe depression all his life and was found at 27 dead from a barbiturate overdose weeks before Janis and Jimi and Jim Morrison. Hite, always struggling with his weight, was found later in 1981 dead from a heroin overdose. Guitarist Henry Levine the stalwart, after Harvey Mandel had come and gone, and after the deaths of his colleagues tried his best to keep the band going and they had a strong loyal following amongst the biker community but died exhausted and cancer ridden in Paris in 1997.

 I did take to heart their earlier overtures to abstinence with 'Speed Kills' as they had lost a few friends to the dread amphetamines but I think the last single I bought was 'Let's Work Together' which is a classic peon to democracy and socialism if you will. A troubled blues band with more chops than most. Yet it was this track that was an unexpected surprise hit worldwide