Over the last couple of years I've managed to snag a couple albums and they've been good fun, but listening to albums now doesn't have the emotional gut punch I used to get in my youth. If there's anything that kind of sucks about getting old (and there are a lot of things that suck, trust me) it's that making deep connections with anything is harder than it used to be. Hearing the studio cuts of some of the songs I only really knew from their live iterations was fun, really fun ... and more often than not I try to imagine what my teenage brain would make of this stuff. Cat Scratch Fever featured the core band I associate with Ted's best stuff. Derek St. Holmes on vocals and guitar, Rob Grange on bass, and Cliff Davies on drums. Cliff also co-produced the album with Ted and Tom Werman.
The album opens with the killer one two punch of "Cat Scratch Fever" and Wang Dang Sweet Poontang" both of which would appear on Double Live Gonzo! This was awesome stuff, and it didn't stop there. The album kept rocking, and the closing cut on side one, the instrumental "Home Bound" shares the same structural riff as Steve Miller's "Swingtown" which was likely coincidental ... or was it?
The second side opens with "Workin' Hard, Playin' Hard" featuring Ted's galloping guitar and a dual guitar lead that settles into a steady groove. It's a decent song and one I could see going over like a house on fire in a live setting. Another that caught my attention was "A Thousand Knives" it's a bit of a shit show to be honest. When the song started my ears pricked up, but as the vocals came in the song seemed to collapse, and then the riff (a somewhat inverted "Just What the Doctor Ordered" thing) would pick it up again, and Ted's solo was tasty. Too bad, it's a song that'll no doubt get better with repeated plays. This was just how it felt as it played the first time (additional, post script, it is a grower and a hell of a song. It's the vocals, or more to the point how they were records that just seemed out of sync with how the rest of the songs sounded. Maybe that'll soften too with more exposure).
I probably should have just sat and listened first, and then started plopping down my brain nuggets ... this no doubt reads as a disjointed free for all (I'm not above cheap call backs). I don't often sit and write down initial thoughts. Mainly because they tend to be half formed and sometimes the first impressions just aren't enough to reveal what's actually going on under the hood.
Overall though this was vintage killer Ted, and the band was on point. Before punk and new wave changed the landscape there was still a place for guitar driven boogie woogie guitar but that window was starting to close. This was still a time when the classic blues structure was a key ingredient and the new age of hard rock and metal was just starting to emerge. Ted's swagger and bombast allowed him to have one foot in each camp, but the reality is he was a turbo charged blues man, and Cat Scratch Fever was about as good as it got in that regard and represented Ted at his commercial peak.
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