Customer Reviews

Gospel Truth

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To the Bloomfield fanatic searching to expand his collection, this album may seem perfect-besides,anything is better than nothing-right? WRONG! The master tape or something in the CD transfer went wrong and the songs have been speeded up! The CD is not defective, it plays perfectly! The songs have been inadvertantly speeded up and this album is unlistenable! Stay away!The company trying to pass off this CD should be responsible and delete it from the catalog until such time as they can fix it. But what do they care-it's only money (your's!)

To be fair, I should mention that I haven't heard this CD, though I'm familiar with all of the material on it. It all comes from Bloomfield's Takoma albums: all of Crusin for a Brusing, 4 songs out of 7 from Between A Hard Place and The Ground, and one from Michael Bloomfield. All four of the Takoma albums are fantastic and if there were any justice, they'd be issued on CD instead of all the shoddy cash-ins that we have now.

That said, the previous reviews seem to be right about the recordings being speeded up. The songs on Crusin ARE short, and that's one of the reason I like them, they show a different side of Bloomfield, but there is no uncredited female singer on the album. The vocals on Linda Lu are Bloomfield, and the singer on Mathilda is one of the male sax players.

Skip this and go for Knocking Myself Out or the best of compilation on Fantasy. The first one has three unreleased tracks, the second has one track where Bloomfield plays with The Woody Herman Orchestra, possibly the best recording he ever did.

Considering that more than half the songs come in at under or around 3 minutes I would tend to agree with the previous reviewer about things being speeded up. It also means there's no room for Bloomfield to stretch out on those tracks. Additionally there is an uncredited female singing lead on some tracks ("Linda Lu", "Mathilda"). Perhaps the most telling thing though is that you can CLEARLY hear LP hiss at the beginning of Your Friend (which should be plural). The exact same version of "Papa Mama Rompha Stompin'" and "Your Friends" (with the s) are on the "Best Of" collection put out by Takoma, you can get a higher quality (albeit a different performance) "Your Friends" on Columbia's "Live At The Old Waldof" disc too. Additionally there are other versions of "Knockin' Myself Out" ("RX For The Blues") and "Linda Lu" ("Between A Hard Place & The Ground") by Bloomfield available so about half the tracks here are on this release alone, and like other Magum releases the liner notes give no clue to the performances, who else was on them, or anything at all helpful.

From the Takoma "Best Of" it seems that "Your Friend" comes from the 1981 "Between A Hard Place And The Ground" release (which is NOT the same as Magnum's release of the same name!). "Papa Mama..." is apparently from the album "Cruisin' For A Bruisin'". One can assume the track of the same name on "Gospel Truth" was the title track of tha release.

The point is it's a mess. Half the material in one way or another is at least available somewhere else. Even for completists I'd suggest staying away from the Magnum releases. I don't think they add anything to Bloomfield's legacy in any significant way. The 2 Laserlight releases give a much better picture of the artist later in his career, and while their liner notes aren't the greatest, there's more there worthy of your attention, and you can have them both for the price of this one disk.

Now I'll try and unload my copy of this on ebay or something... It's just taking up space.