The Powder Blues - Uncut

The Powder Blues were a strange anomaly who seemed to come out of nowhere, and for a couple of years their boppin' rhythm & blues was right there alongside the skinny ties and rockers. Uncut was an album that was self-financed and initially released late in 1979 on the band's own indie label, Blue Wave, because everyone they shopped the record to would say the same thing: "No one wants to hear the blues, this won't sell." They had released the album and sent copies to radio stations. Some sources claim they sold upwards of 30,000 copies before the same labels who had passed on the band were vying to get their hands on them. The album would be picked up by RCA and would reissue the album, minus one track ... it was a cover, and I suppose it makes the original more valuable.

Uncut was (is) a really solid album. Songs like "Doin' It Right" and "Hear That Guitar Ring" were huge songs here, and the album would go on to sell a couple hundred thousand copies. A year later the band would drop their follow-up, Thirsty Ears, an album that would sell a hundred thousand copies, and then a year after that the band would release their third album, Party Line, and no one seemed to notice. Musical tastes can be fickle. Back in the day I really liked the songs I heard on the radio, but it wouldn't be until the mid-'80s when I picked up something by the band, and oddly it wasn't the debut, it was Thirsty Ears. While I enjoyed it, the songs just didn't seem to stick.

Anyways, I'm jumping around a bit, which is sort of how it is around here. I'll probably also screw around with tense as well. There'll be a few sentences in the past and a few in the present. I should try harder to be consistent, but that seems like work. If nothing else, it helps keep me on my toes, and you can at least be certain it's me writing this and not some auto-generated AI blog.

It's not like I really have an audience anyway. Oh, I know I get a lot of hits, but I often wonder if they're just bots ... still, if you're reading this, you are persistent, and I should at least try and reward the effort you're putting in.

Tom Lavin was a name I knew from Prism. Tom was on their first album, and although he'd leave, it was his name that I saw on the back cover, and I never forgot it. "Doin' It Right" was a goofy song from the first time I heard it, but dang, that guitar solo just ripped. The horns were gravy. Suddenly it was cool to like the blues, and right alongside April Wine and Gary Numan, The Powder Blues were on the radio.

Many years later, when me and a couple of buddies were playing in a bar band and trying to build our set lists, we were focused on finding unstoppable dance songs. It was our singer, who had been around longer than we had, who suggested we cover "What've I've Been Drinking" because it never failed to light up a dance floor. We played it, and played it ... we kept it in our sets for a long time. It never lit up the dance floor. I suspect that was due to the clientele more than our delivery of the song, or the song itself. That song rocks.

Regardless, finding a copy of Uncut was a real treat. Other than the radio songs from my youth, I had actually never had a chance to sit and listen to the record. Having the familiar and the new mixed together was a lot of fun, and I can hear why this felt so fresh and new at the time despite being firmly rooted in an earlier time. Tom Lavin's guitar playing was true to the genre, but he made the songs rock.

I suppose the novelty of hearing this kind of music on the radio was bound to be short-lived, and although the band would seem to drop off the radar, they really never went away.