Dirt Road Band
Righteous
(Bandcamp)
What do you do when you are no longer a Special, a Feelgood, or a Badfinger? You play Blues Rock and R&B, that’s what. Because you have to play. It's in your bones and in your blood and it has always been that way no matter whether the band has a famous moniker or not. And that’s precisely what Steve Walwyn (ex Dr Feelgood), Horace Panter (Ex Specials), and Ted Duggan (Badfinger) have done with the Dirt Road Band. Actually, it’s unfair to give the impression that they have ‘gone into’ Blues Rock. Horace certainly always had a side gig playing with local blues bands between Specials jaunts, and Dr Feelgood were always that, with Walwyn their longest serving member until their manager decided that his owning the rights to the name was enough for Dr Feelgood to continue, without Walwyn, as a sort of tribute act masquerading as the real thing. As far as I know, Duggan still performs with a version of Badfinger.
With a collective age of around a couple of centuries, the trio are certainly experienced, and very, very good at what they do, and yet they still have an energy and unequivocal passion for performing that shines through, as is amply proven by ‘Righteous’. You won’t find anything groundbreakingly new here, as it plays homage to the classic Blues Rock sound, even incorporating elements of the Hammond -tinged Lounge sound of More Specials on the track ‘Been So Long’. Walwyns guitar and vocals dominate throughout, with Duggan and Panter providing a solid rhythm section behind him, but if you are looking for the sorts of iconic bass lines you had with The Specials, then you may be disappointed. Recorded at Leamington’s Woodbine Studios, where many of The Specials finest moments were captured, including Ghost Town, it has an immaculately clean production that probably needed to be a bit dirtier to really do their natural sound justice. Dirty Blues Rock will always sound better than clean Blues Rock every time.
I will be straight with you, this isn’t really my sort of thing, and it all sounds so familiar that I swear I have heard some of these songs before, based as they are on standard Blues riffs that have been used a thousand times over, but as bar room blues you can’t fault it and if you still had smokey back rooms in spit n’ sawdust pubs, the Dirt Road Band would be right there knocking it for six on the stage in the corner whilst you sipped your whiskey at the bar. More feel good than Feelgood!
Essential Information
‘Righteous’ is available on CD and download from the DRB Bandcamp site here
