Vanilla Fudge RENAISSANCE lp Mystery Rock and Roll The Beat Goes On

 

 

  AllMusic Review by Joe Viglione  [-]   https://www.allmusic.com/album/renaissance-mw0000675393
What made Vanilla Fudge so intriguing was how they and producer Shadow Morton mutated hit songs by stretching the tempo to slow motion so exquisite that even an overexposed song by the Supremes sounded new on the radio. The formula worked fine on covers, but despite their collective talent, the material they composed on Renaissance feels more like psychedelic meeting progressive and has less of that commercial magic. Renaissance is a concept album, produced and directed by Shadow Morton, the man who brought you the Shangri-Las and who produced the second album for the New York Dolls. With a long poem by Carl DeAngelis on the back cover and an amazing construction of a Mount Rushmore-type set of statues of the band members on the front, sculpted in the stars away from Earth, the band moved into an arena yearned for by Iron Butterfly and Rare Earth: respectability. Carmine Appice’s “Faceless People” is the band’s standard sound on an unfamiliar tune. While it is highly listenable, not the tedious chore lesser music in lesser hands becomes, Top 40 could hardly respond to an epic like that or “The Sky Cried When I Was a Boy.” This is the punk version of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and there should have been a bigger market for it on FM radio. Singer Mark Stein and Tim Bogert compose a prototype that bands like Uriah Heep should have embraced. Calvin Schenkel’s “The Spell That Comes After” offers more than the band’s originals, though Vince Martell’s fuzz guitar on “The Sky Cried” meeting the superb vocals suspended somewhere above it all makes for a nice musical sandwich; their name far more appropriate than the trendy-for-the-time vibe Vanilla Fudge suggests. Martell’s “Thoughts” is eerily cosmic and spaced — his creativity seemed kept in check by the band, which is a pity; his early 1980 demos without the group evidence that his contributions were essential, despite the fame Bogert and Appice would find. Renaissance is a solid, albeit typical, release from this innovative group. Sundazed has re-released Renaissance with three additional tracks. The cover of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” does more with those two famous chords than most. It is a highlight and proves that covers should have been evenly matched with the originals on these early discs. That’s what got them the audience in the first place, and reinvention is what they did best.

https://www.allmusic.com/album/renaissance-mw0000675393

 https://www.allmusic.com/album/renaissance-mw0000675393

 

 

 

ROCK AND ROLL

AllMusic Review by Joe Viglione  [-]

Vanilla Fudge took a more basic stance with Rock 'n' Roll, bringing in Aerosmith's first and the Velvet Underground's last producer, Adrian Barber, to replace Shadow Morton. Guitarist Vinnie Martell sings lead on "Need Love," and it is a quagmire of rock sounds, offset by Mark Stein's "Lord in the Country." The band then goes after a good but non-hit Carole King/Gerry Goffin number, "I Can't Make It Alone." It has that vibe that made "Take Me for a Little While" so important and so timeless, but there's just something missing. This is Vanilla Fudge's trademark sound looking for a new personality. The band started in 1967 by releasing an album of seven cover tunes done Vanilla Fudge-style. Along with Cream, Jimi Hendrix, and a handful of other bands, their sound helped shape Top 40 radio in the '60s while heavily influencing Deep Purple and what that group would do for the '70s. "Street Walking Woman" is OK, and that's the problem with Rock 'n' Roll, the album is a picture of a band trying to grow and emerge from the shadow of what initially launched them -- a familiar problem in rock & roll. The Sundazed CD contains original mixes of "Sweet Talking Woman" and "The Windmills of Your Mind," the latter adapted from Dusty Springfield's hit theme to the film The Thomas Crown Affair. Covers like "The Windmills of Your Mind" are what the band was all about, and this version is grunge, hard rock, that style you know Ritchie Blackmore and company copped for their ride into fame. A 19-minute-and-57-second unreleased studio track, "Break Song" is attached to what was already a 39-minute-and-44-second vinyl LP. That is one full hour of Vanilla Fudge, and Sundazed must be commended for helping put history in order. Still, Rock & Roll bares the strengths and weaknesses of this great ensemble, the weaknesses fully exposed on the 1984 "reunion" LP which pushes Vinny Martell into the background and redesigned the band's sound. The strengths are found in their ability to pour passions into other people's already established songs. Just listen to the drums pound away six and a half minutes into "The Windmills of Your Mind," while the keyboard slashes like a guitar. It's the Young Rascals meet Moe Tucker of the Velvet Underground, a sublime blend. It's just too bad sampling wasn't in vogue back then; Dusty Springfield's voice would have been the frosting on the cake. The point of "If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody," keyboardist Mark Stein dueting with drummer Carmine Appice, cannot be discerned. It's OK, but sounds bare, and cries out for Shadow Morton's direction. They certainly push the band into a harder direction, but that twinkle in the eye that is the first Vanilla Fudge album seems to have evaporated except for the Carole King and Dusty Springfield covers. The cleancut young men who covered Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready" in 1967 were not the brash musicians who tracked Mayfield's "I'm So Proud" in 1973 with Jeff Beck. Rock & Roll captures the band as it was disintegrating, and the long bonus track, "Break Song," is noteworthy, not for musical value, but to show the self-indulgence which would overtake what was an earth-shaking concept. It's a delicious slice of nostalgia for hardcore fans and musicologists, but the general public might want to stick with a greatest hits package.    https://www.allmusic.com/album/rock-roll-mw0000279774

Collapse ↑

Mystery  Vanilla Fudge

Mystery Vanilla Fudge AllMusic Review by Joe Viglione [-]

 

 

Quiet Riot's producer gives Vanilla Fudge -- whom producer Shadow Morton discovered in the late '60s -- a "bang your head" onslaught of big hair drums, compressed guitar, and tired homogenization. The fun psychedelic distortion of Vinny Martell is totally stripped away -- he is relegated to rhythm guitar on one song and backing vocals on three. That is a total travesty. It is one thing to have the leader of Beck, Bogert & Appice, one Jeff Beck, funk up "My World Is Empty," even under the disguise of J. Toad (shades of George Harrison in his L'Angelo Mysterioso garb), but this version of the Supremes is so far removed from what made Vanilla Fudge so special that, really, it should be included as a bonus track on a reissue of the 1973 Epic debut Beck, Bogert & Appice. One Ron Mancuso is listed under Martell in the credits, but he is the hip guitarist recruited for this calculated disc to replace Martell. His name might be in small print, but his sound is what is splashed all over this veteran group's comeback attempt. Proffer takes the once angelic voices and puts them through his machinery to come up with something that could be Patty Smyth's Scandal or even 38 Special. Clearly, this wasn't an attempt at former glories, but a stab at reinventing the band instead of putting their trademark arrangements on familiar tunes. This is everything fans of '60s music hate about the '80s. Whether it is the first track, "Golden Age Dreams," or the decent cover of Dionne Warwick's "Walk on By," or the song that took seven writers to compose, "Don't Stop Now," the drumbeat is incessant and is more Quiet Riot than Fudge. The worst track is probably "Hot Blood," which is Scott Sheets, Mark Stein, and Carmine Appice totally ripping off the chorus of Foreigner's 1978 hit "Hot Blooded." You can rest assured they would've been sued if this album sold, but where the covers are amusing, and some of the originals show sparks of ingenuity, "Hot Blood" is so bad that most bar bands would balk before sending it to an A&R man. That this was released on Foreigner's own label is even more appalling. The song that follows, "The Stranger," thankfully does not cop Billy Joel's riffs -- it is interesting because of the use of Vanilla Fudge's slow pace combined with metal of the day. Had the band gone totally heavy metal with this, perhaps taking a Black Sabbath signature tune like "Paranoid" and making it sound like their second Top 40 hit, the eternal "Take Me for a Little While," much of this could be excused. But "The Stranger"'s early promise quickly descends into a parody that makes it sound like a Spinal Tap outtake. For musicians who launched Cactus and who could lure Jeff Beck into this quagmire (maybe the reason he goes incognito here is for artistic rather than contractual reasons), it sure sounds like they took Ahmet Ertegun's money and ran. "Golden Age Dreams" is a clone of Loverboy's 1981 hit sound for "Turn Me Loose." So this new incarnation of Vanilla Fudge turned to imitating what was current rather than putting a refreshing stamp and change on contemporary records. What the original Fudge and Shadow Morton would've have done was take Fabian's 1959 hit, Turn Me Loose, and have it melt into an eight-minute-plus saga that contorts until it has a re-birth as a slowed down version of the Loverboy title. Someone should re-release this on CD with the Vinny Martell demos from this period. His demo tapes have a charm and sparkle that is absent on this disc. "Jealousy" might boast Jeff Beck, but it is flavored with the Jefferson Starship's "Jane" and "Find Your Way Back" riffs. Their success with this venture would have been assured had they given the Starship tune "Jane" that original Vanilla Fudge treatment, performed it at the pace of the title track here, "Mystery," and let Marty Balin sing the lead. Balin was practicing "Jane" before he jumped ship from the Starship -- it would have been a coup, and could have made all the difference in the world. It would have been a relief from the labor that listening to the track "It Gets Stronger" is. Nothing on early Vanilla Fudge is as difficult as this experiment. https://www.allmusic.com/album/mystery-mw0000367495 

THE BEAT GOES ON

https://www.allmusic.com/album/the-beat-goes-on-mw0000047477

AllMusic Review by Joe Viglione  [-]

The expanded CD release of this second Vanilla Fudge album is much more accessible than the original vinyl version because of the inclusion of a number of cover tunes, most notably Beatles songs. The revealing liner notes that Sundazed project manager Tim Livingston adds to the reissues of these Atco albums helps put this influential band in a better light. The Beat Goes On is a difficult record, especially after the explosion that was their debut. The single from their previous album, Vanilla Fudge, originally charted in the Top 100 in the U.S. in 1967. (Britain was more hip to the group.) They finally hit in America in the summer of 1968, but had already begun to influence Deep Purple and the Rotary Connection, among others. The problem with this project is that they failed to influence themselves. Bassist Tim Bogert notes that "The Beat Goes On was the album that killed the band," while guitarist Vinny Martell adds "we had already started our second album when Shadow (Morton) had this other concept idea for The Beat Goes On." Morton had produced the Shangri Las, not the Beatles, and this creative effort was by a group with only two hit singles arriving on the scene around the time of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. Morton set before the boys a daunting task which needed much, much better execution. Renaissance, which they were recording simultaneous with this, at least included a Donovan tune, "Season of the Witch." The exotic wandering would have been better served by a reworking of "Strawberry Fields Forever" across a side of the disc instead of the keyboard notes which reference the tune. Even a killer guitar version of "The Beat Goes On" would have been more exciting than "18th Century Variations on a Theme by Mozart" or noodlings that can't decide if they are "Chatanooga Choo Choo" or "Theme to the Match Game." For a group of impressionable young kids out of high school, as referenced in the liners, this must've been extremely rough. The expanded CD has jam session versions of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" and the Beatles' "I Feel Fine," "She Loves You," "Day Tripper," "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and "You Can't Do That." Any of these extended à la "Eleanor Rigby" from their debut would be more desirable than the interview-type questions about sex; the Beatles' interest in "Indian meditation" (sitar enters here, and how would the VF know?); audio newsclips of John F. Kennedy, Hitler, and others, all a very strong argument against artistic control for some producers. Exploring the initial ideas that brought them fame was what was expected of Vanilla Fudge. What would you rather hear, readings from The Bible or the single from January 1968, "The Look of Love" b/w "Where Is My Mind"? Thankfully, Sundazed has included the Bacharach/David tune and two additional Mark Stein titles, "All in Your Mind" and the aforementioned B side, "Where Is My Mind," on the expanded Renaissance album, the real follow-up to the Vanilla Fudge debut. Historically important, listening to this archive piece is truly a labor of love, with the emphasis on labor.

Collapse ↑