Free Your Mind

C'mon, you know that a band with a moniker like this one isn't gonna be yer average run of the mill group, don'cha? And you're right. Too Slim and the Taildraggers take the down-and-gritty hard blues path, greasy and funky, a power trio centered in Tim "Too Slim" Langford's blazing axe. With all the great finessy discs I've been covering lately, I really found myself needing something for setting my size 10s down on the floor with a rhythmic stomp and a bit of headbangery. This fills the bill nicely.

Langford puts the smoke sauce in his playing and singing, with a guitar as raspy as his voice, both crying out in lamentive wails while traveling back to the days when the whole dirty white blues thang was cranking up mucho heavy. You'll hear bits of T.S. McPhee, Alvin Lee, Adrian Gurvitz, Billy Gibbons, Paul Kossoff, and some of the later Southern crunch boys (Outlaws, Lynyrd Skynrd, Rossington-Collins, etc.), especially when Langford double tracks himself, smokin' with 60s and 70s pysch, funk, and distortion.

And the guy did damn near everything on the tech side here, too: recording, engineering, mixing, then co-producing the entire shebang with his wife Nancy—and he wrote all the songs. The CD has raggedy edges but they're perfectly appropriate, part and parcel of the woof and warp of the entire package. Free Your Mind isn't a prettified heavy disc but a glorified garage job designed to stay in the gutter and cook. That Ted Nugent, Steppenwolf, Blue Oyster Cult, Johnny & Edgar Winter, and a whole raft of others have chosen the band to tour with them speaks to that aspect. I suspect this cat was punkin' big time before he arrived at this point—could be wrong, but there's a feel to it like that—but he sure as hell figured out what's what here.

Track List:

Edited by: David N. Pyles
(dnpyles@acousticmusic.com)