HOLLYWOOD FATS BAND - CLASSIC CHICAGO BLUES FLAVOURED WITH ROCK'N'ROLL

 

Right back in the beginning when I first started up Lost Treasures Review, I wrote a blog about one of my very favourite blues albums, obscure as they come, and strangely very uninfluential in terms of other blues acts replicating the offbeat rock'n'roll fueled Chicago blues style which this brilliant recording evokes. 

We're talking about HOLLYWOOD FATS BAND and the one and only album which the band recorded around 1979, called ROCK THIS HOUSE. 

I love to showcase You Tube videos which have only been viewed 1500 times, and the clip for my absolute favourite song off the album, SHE'S DYNAMITE, has gotten around that many. 

A complete and total insult, I was thinking about writing something about a live Roy Buchanan performance from 1976, but the You Tube video views for him consistently number in the tens of thousands. 

Thought I should run with HOLLYFOOD FATS instead, and give a genuine lost treasure a plug for the world to see. 

The whole album is stoked full of harmonica charged blistering bluesy rock'n'roll, the title track is the most rock'n'roll of the tracks, a song that belonged on HAPPY DAYS, a classic successor to ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK. 

I am going to write a few blogs about this one album, each with a different clip of a different song, so I wont elaborate too much on any more of the other tracks, just so I don't double up too much, but just to shed some light on the make up of this forgotten groundbreaking blues band, Hollywood Fat's real name was Michael Mann, a brilliant and dazzling guitarist who was heavily influenced by his blues peers like Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy and Albert King, but took his incendiary guitar playing to a near Led Zeppelin stadium sounding level. 

For this one and only Hollywood Fats album, he was joined by Al Blake on vocals and harmonica, pianist Frank Kaplin whose boogie woogie performance is outstanding, Richard Innes on drums and Canned Heat bassist Larry Taylor, who makes his four string literally talk. Wait for my next installment of HOLLYWOOD FATS BAND.