In Here

Love's Out Here doesn't get played much. The most obvious reason for that is the toxic drum solo, ten minutes of ballsaching tedium that perhaps not even another drummer could sit through more than once, and the rest of us not at all. Ever. But there are plenty of other perfectly valid reasons to pass this album by. A shitload of filler, for one. A dreary remake of Signed DC that nobody was asking for, for another. A running order that seemed to have been decided by chickens on cocaine. A general feeling of sloppiness, not knowing when to stop, coupled with a strangely cheap production that leaves some songs sounding like demos. The list goes on.

I've struggled with this damn album for years, and I finally arrived at something worthy of Arthur Lee. I had to be brutal. The sprawling double album (note how doubles are frequently said to "sprawl", something a single album apparently finds difficult) is reduced to a single, with a "soft" side and a "hard" side.

The first step was easy. Cut the drum solo. Yay! Then I cut the filler. You won't notice it's gone, and I'm not going to list it. Then I cut the sub-par songs, the ones that are kinda, hmm, okay, I guess. They went. Then it got a little difficult. Reshuffling the remains didn't work. Some songs outstayed their welcome, or were too short. The freakout guitar freakout freakout - which as these things go is first-rate - was in the wrong place. I dissected everything at granular level in Audacity, and edited it and sequenced it, after long trial and error, into the sumptuous thrill-ride I offer to you here.

What I can't do is give the whole thing the production it needs, the full Record Plant make-over that would have transformed it into the hit album - no, really - that it shoulda coulda. Although it lacks the highs of Four Sail, overall it's a stronger album. If you think that's an unrealistic claim, give it a listen. It's like hearing it for the first time.