Search - Tom Rush :: Take a Little Walk with Me

It's about time!

Steven Mann | Los Angeles, CA USA | 03/06/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

""Take a Little Walk with Me" is probably the best recording Tom Rush ever made... and that's saying something. On vinyl, the album was divided into an electric side and an acoustic side. The electric side featured, among other great studio musicians- Al Kooper on guitar and on piano the mysterious and never heard from again Roosevelt Gook, aka Bob Dylan. The album got its name from Tom's definitive version of "Who Do You Love." George Thorogood could only dream of sounding as downright nasty and demonic... and then Tom turns his voice angelic sweet on the very next cut, the Buddy Holly classic, "Love's Made a Fool of You." But the real beauty of this album is the acoustic side. This was where I learned "Statesboro Blues," before there was an Allman Brothers Band. Tom virtually owns Erik Von Schmidt's "Joshua gone Barbados." It remains one of my all time favorite recordings. Few singers put as much feeling into a song as Tom does on "Galveston Flood." This essential reissue shows why there was, not only the popularity for folk music and folk singers in the late 60's/early 70's, but the timelessness of the genre and the transcendence of roots music. Tom Rush had the uncanny ability to take other people's songs and make them his own. The Chicago Tribune once wrote that Tom is probably the only man alive who should be allowed to sing Joni Mitchell's songs ... and a bunch of other people's as well. In fact Tom recorded Joni's music--as well as Jackson Browne's--before they did. A great voice and a helluva guitar player. My vinyl copy of this is well-worn and needs replacing. It's been a very long wait, but well worth it. Buy it! Then go on to "The Circle Game!""

Electric and eclectic

George H. Soule | Edwardsville, Illinois United States | 11/13/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"After his first acoustic album for Elektra in 1965, Tom Rush followed up with this electric/acoustic album. Like the earlier album, this one is eclectic. It's a blend of rhythm and blues tracks--early rock 'n roll--and traditional blues mixed with some original songs by urban folk singers. This causes a mild musical schizophrenia, a bifurcation of focus. There are some Chess tracks: Willie Dixon, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry each contributed a song. Bo Diddley originally recorded Dixon's "You Can't Tell a Book by the Cover" and wrote "Who Do You Love." Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" is less known than his classics. It's a song for adults rather than the adolescent audience of "Roll Over Beethoven" and "Sweet Little Sixteen", and it demonstrates his ability to telescope long narrative phrases within the structure of rock 'n roll songs. Incidentally, Berry still plays this song in concert (last month, anyway). Rush acquits himself well here, playing acoustic guitar with Al Kooper on lead. He works Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love" within the tradition, imitating Bo's larger than life vocal delivery. There's a nice rendition of Buddy Holly's "Love's Made a Fool of You" and an original version of "Money Honey." In "On the Road Again" the band, featuring Kooper on lead guitar and Harvey Brooks on bass, jells. This is a great traveling song--a trucking song for a rambling man. The Eric Von Schmidt Calypso song "Joshua Gone Barbados" fits its idiom and subject. Folk song has always been a vehicle for protest, and Von Schmidt chose the islands for his subject here. Rush's treatment is effective, but he's even more effective on Blind Willie McTell's "Statesboro Blues" and Von Schmidt's "Turn Your Money Green." The latter contains obvious borrowings from traditional blues, and Rush's delivery, accompanied by fine guitar work, is very convincing. In these songs as in Rush's arrangement of "Sugar Babe" the guitar and vocals mesh without straining. The acoustic tracks are the best of this album, and the highlight is Rush's rendition of "Galveston Flood," a bottleneck classic. This album is uneven, meaning that not all of the tracks are classic. Nevertheless, the acoustic tracks are well worth the purchase price."

More than a Velvet Elvis:Tom Rush's Innovative Blueprint for

Peter Walenta | Long Island, New York USA | 04/11/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"An interesting and fun American tradition can be found at volunteer fire halls, municipal parking lots, in fields on the edge of towns and in old warehouses every Sunday all over the land and that is the great American flea market. Purveyors of anything and everything nostalgic, hucksters hawking Velvet Elvis's, amateur auctioneers with 19th Century furniture, hippie gypsies, fruit farmers, and used record dealers among others, set up shop for an afternoon to engage in pure free market capitalism selling goods to anyone who has some money to spend and who might find such junk necessary and life-enhancing. Occasionally, a treasure can be found amidst the mountains of used and often trashy merchandise on sale, and when I go "flea-marketing" I usually head straight to the vendors who have plastic milk crates full of LPs and compact discs in front of their tables. I've been doing the flea market thing as a serious hobby for the past 25 years and among such trash I have more often than not stumbled across some fine treasures at bargain prices.



Such was how I found the LP "Take A Little Walk With Me" by Tom Rush in October 1982. Having been born on sort of the tail end of the baby boom, I didn't experience first hand the mid-1960s music scene as intensely as folks born four or five years earlier than me, so in 1982 when I saw an album from 1966 by Tom Rush, I pondered over it a bit since I had never heard of Mr. Rush and knew even less about his music. I didn't need to ponder too long, for I haggled my way into acquiring Rush's record for 50 cents at a flea market and when I took it home and played it, I was mightily surprised and delighted that I had found a true 1960's musical "treasure". Rush emerged from of the Cambridge folk scene in the early 1960's where Eric Von Schmidt and Bob Dylan initially honed their skills. Rush, like Dylan started out as a fairly straight ahead folk singer, interpreting traditional folk songs on acoustic guitar. When Dylan skyrocketed into the stratosphere and went electric in 1965, many followed suit including Tom Rush. In 1966 Rush, who had signed with Elektra Records, cut 11 songs which formed the full length album "Take A Little Walk With Me" re-issued by Collector's Choice Records on compact disc in 2001. Rush was clearly less of an innovator than Dylan, but he was an innovator nonetheless, in three key areas. One, he crafted an LP record that featured an "electric" side and an "acoustic" side. This style of song sequencing would serve as a blueprint for Neil Young (see "Rust Never Sleeps" and "Freedom") as well as for many `un-plugged' musicians who originally recorded tunes with electric guitars and who in the early 1990s re-recorded their songs using primarily acoustic instruments. Second, Tom Rush, especially on this album, anticipated the first great rock and roll revival of 1969 when people actively sought out and listened to the original rock songs of the 1950's by rock icons like Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry among others. Included here is the definitive re-make of Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love" with a menacing vocal delivery by Rush that George Thorogood aspired only in vain to recreate. Also check out Rush's "Statesboro Blues" for an acoustic rendition of the song later made famous by the Allman Brothers. Rush does a nice cover of at that time, a little known Buddy Holly song called "Love's Made A Fool of You" later made more famous by the Bobby Fuller Four. The third innovation that Rush is renowned for is that he cleverly anticipated popular music trends by recording songs of hitherto unknown singer songwriters like Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and Jackson Browne. This innovation would be most evident on his 1968 album "The Circle Game" but I'll save that for another review. Until then, enjoy this classic electric-acoustic rock album by an amazingly talented musician and also get out there, do your patriotic duty, help our flagging economy and do some "flea-marketing". And if you can't find "Walk" at your local flea market, I see there are plenty available right here! 4 ½ Stars."