George Golla – Easy Feelings
Every so often you come across an album that, but for one track, is just another addition to the endless heap of profoundly mediocre music. This baffles me; I don’t understand how a band recording an otherwise crappy LP manages to create the one fantastic track. Maybe, after a long session and a lot of drugs, the band finally let loose and played like they wanted to? Was it the band’s sole, grudging concession to a commercially minded producer? Or perhaps for one brief moment the stars aligned and the fates smiled and the musicians made something inspired.
Case in point: “The Dancer”. “Easy Feelings” is a bad Australian album of guitar-driven proto-smooth jazz. It’s almost offensively banal, but can’t even manage that. And yet “The Dancer”, the second track on side two, is an amazing gritty uptempo jazz-funk composition that properly belongs on a good library LP. I’m told that it’s one of the great funky Australian cuts, but all I want to know is what made George Golla get funky for those short minutes. Incidentally, I wager “The Dancer” was the funkiest thing ever played in the Sydney Opera House, where the LP was recorded.
1 Comment
Your review isn’t too bad, neither is the Easy Feelings album. I bought the album on cassette in the seventies, and it seems to fit that time. I think musos were coming out of their 60’s drug induced state. But it was a reasonably enjoyable album. Yes “The Dancer” was a great track. George Golla could mix it with any so called o/seas muso and then do 100% better, we Aussies should be very proud of him. Don Burrows isn’t complaining, they are a good combination. As Peter the gardener would say, “that’s your bloomin’ lot” from me!!