James Gang Rides Again (James Gang, 1970)

The second and arguably best album by the James Gang is an interesting case study. After an extensive prehistory, the band released their debut Yer Album as a power trio. That album features a lot of cover material and generally struts a very heavy sound. For about half of this album it seems to pick up when its predecessor left off, literally in the case of "Funk #49", their first major hit, a reworking of the far less known "Funk #48". They don't seem to have lost a step in spite of a change of bass player, with the more melodic Dale Peters stepping in for hard-hitting Tom Kriss. Everything goes along just fine until the completion of "The Bomber" (the collective name of a fairly wacked-out medley), and then the B side changes the script for the band permanently. Most of side B is composed entirely by Joe Walsh, whereas the first side was all band compositions except for the snippets of "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" and "Bolero" that were slipped into "The Bomber". Side B is also much more folk and country influenced than the hard/funk rock of side A. I'm not sure if this was by design or it just turned out that way, but it seemed to work out well enough that this sound would dominate on their next album, Thirds, which is almost entirely solo compositions, most by Joe Walsh. With the success of "Walk Away" on that album, Walsh's future as a solo artist was all but confirmed and he left the band to form Barnstorm, which fed directly into his 1970's solo career.

I tend to favor the A-side. Even though I will scream if a movie preview uses "Funk #49", it actually is a really good song. In fact that's the reason I got this album in the first place, with the very faint connection to Deep Purple being very secondary. I'm not sure what took me so long to get the first album, which is a must-get for anyone who likes the A side of Rides Again better. Thirds still confounds me. It's a little too country-fried for my tastes, I suppose. If you dig the Eagles, then you can probably relate better, and I will acknowledge that from this point onward it didn't seem that weird that Walsh would hook up with the Eagles a few years later.

I had no idea until not all that long ago that the James Gang managed to release nine albums in their lifetime. Following Walsh's departure, Fox and Peters drafted in two members of the defunct Bush (not the British band), extending the lifespan of the band a little more. The Tommy Bolin era followed with two more albums, then two final albums were eeked out after that. Fox and Peters generally stayed out of the songwriting, resulting in rapid style changes from album to album as those passing through handled most of the writing duties. Outside of YouTube videos, I have not heard any of these albums, all doomed to live in the shadows of the three Walsh-era albums.