The James Gang - Biography
By Jeff Hunt
I’ve groused elsewhere on this website: Thanks to the disproportionate influence of indierock, there is a wildly revisionistic, groupthink version of 1970s music history that everyone seems to have swallowed like Kool-Ade. Namely, that the decade begins with some breathtakingly ill-considered employee hirings at Altamont; contains as its highlight reel The Stooges, Kraftwerk, and Funkadelic; and ends when Sid ODs and the White Winged Dove flies up Stevie Nicks’ nose and pecks out her septum. Man oh man, does that foolishness skip over some genuinely raucous, exuberant, fantastic sounds. And if you want to drop the needle on some of the greatest, rowdiest, and downright funkiest music to gallop through the 70s, you have just gotta saddle up and take a ride with The James Gang. And they’re from Cleveland, which truly does rock.
And don’t even bother with the obvious rejoinder: “Joe Walsh was in The James Gang and after that he was in The Eagles, and The Flying Burrito Brothers invented country rock, and it was Biblically Good, and The Eagles copped country rock directly from The Flying Burrito Brothers and immediately sanitized and diluted it and irrevocably ruined it, and for that, The Eagles Suck, and, accordingly, so does Joe Walsh, and by guilty association, so does The James Gang.”
Wrong.
How wrong, my hopelessly jaded, Fennesz-listenin’, McSweeney’s-totin’, mojito-gargling, Williamsburg-livin’, indie-snob reader? So wrong, that if I didn’t have to meet a loosely prescribed word count in order to get paid for this entry, it would consist of nothing more than six words, five punctuation marks, two numerals, and one typographic glyph:
The James Gang: “Funk #49.” The End.
“Funk #48” rocks, too. We’ll get to both in a bit.
Okay. The basics. The James Gang formed as a cover band in 1966 with Jim Fox on drums, Tom Kriss on bass, and Glenn Schwartz on guitar and vocals. Schwartz was replaced by Joe Walsh before the group recorded its first album in 1969. Kriss was replaced by Dale Peters in 1970. It took two guys to replace Walsh when he split in 1971: Roy Keener on vocals and Dominic Troiano on guitar. We don’t really need to discuss the crap, post-Walsh LPs other than to note that when Troiano left in 1972, he was replaced by Tommy Bolin. Bolin then left to join Deep Purple, before passing along at the age of 25. (Wikipedia opines that “his death followed a night of hard partying that had involved beer, champagne, barbiturates, cocaine and finally morphine; this combination caused his throat muscles to constrict severely, and he literally suffocated throughout the course of the night.” Yikes. The 70s.)
So, we’ll stick to their first three albums. Also, to be honest, The James Gang does suck most of the time, but that’s part of the fun of rock ‘n’ roll – blind pigs and truffles and silk purses and sows’ ears and so forth.
Here’s my beef with the revisionist bit regarding Kraftwerk, The Stooges, and Funkadelic. All of those bands were avant at the time, and the reason we hold them in such high regard today is because they developed unique performance idioms that stand the test of time. They trafficked in formalism. It doesn’t reflect on their accomplishments – of course I have (or had) all their records; but this is what mostly demarks pop and the avant garde. Of course, it’s not a hard and fast rule, but more often than not, it’s applicable.
For example: The Beach Boys mostly do have a performance idiom; The Rolling Stones – at least from Beggars Banquet on, after they start ripping off all sorts of music, not just R&B – mostly don’t. They just try to write a catchy song that can make it for three and a half minutes, based on memorable riffs, and personal style. Point being: The beautiful thing about pop is that every song is self-contained, a three-and-a-half-minute shot at greatness.
The James Gang? It doesn’t matter that few of their records are memorable; or that their line-up reads like a telephone directory; or that they’re still grinding it out on the RV-and-boat-show circuit (“Live: The Original Steppenwolf Rhythm Section!”); or that their material, even on the first three records, is all over the place, a total, conceptually incoherent mess; or that Walsh has since played with everyone including your grandmother (in a David Foster Wallace moment, I’m feeling the urge to include the documentation in footnotes, but I don’t know how to make Word do the little numbers thing). What matters is this: For three and a half minutes in 1969 and 1970, The James Gang flipping nailed it. Period. You will not find two more energetic, rocking, funky, foot-tapping, head-bobbing, white-boy-lip-biting pieces of rock ‘n’ roll manna than “Funk #48” and “Funk #49.”
I’m having a “Dancing about Architecture” moment. This is pointless. Just go buy The James Gang: Greatest Hits (2000 MCA). It also has “Walk Away,” which also kicks ass. You don’t need the original LPs.
