Joy of Cooking – two rootsy singing-and-songwriting feminist musicians from Berkeley, California, plus a few male fellow travelers providing rhythmic accompaniment, all of whom apparently took their band name from Irma Rombauer’s eternal Depression-era cookbook classic – might have the distinction of being the most critically acclaimed ‘70s rock band that almost no rock critic who graduated high school in the past 35 years has an opinion about. Their self-titled Capitol debut album finished in sixth place in the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics poll in 1971; Robert Christgau called it “exciting and amazingly durable” and gave it an “A” grade, praising its rolling piano-and-percussion grooves and lyrics about wives victimized at both ends of the economic spectrum.
Decades later -- with singer-guitarist Terry Garthwaite (see recent photo) as activist as she's ever been -- Christgau wrote that, in retrospect, the band “invented a ‘women's music’ that was never so fast, smart, or soulful again.” Take that, Holly Near! Me, I graduated high school in 1978; I had probably never seen a real hippie, though I’d seen jokes about them on Laugh In. And I never listened to Joy of Cooking until last year. That's when I found their 1972 Castles LP (a Christgau A-) for 50 cents at an antique barn in Virginia. Its singing generally hit me as merely tasteful to stodgy (but then I’ve never much gotten into Bonnie Raitt either), but the instrumentation was better – especially the parts that reminded me of Quarterflash a decade or so early. More folk-rock bands should feature congas. And I swore I heard a saxophone on there, and some flutes, though none seemed to be credited anywhere. I would have liked it more if Quarterflash’s Marv and Rindy Ross were singing (and writing, and Rindy playing saxophone). Guess I prefer music for stewardesses to music for getting back to the land. Still, the album was cool. A few months later, my mailman delivered a copy of Back to Your Heart – a self-released 2007 collection of outtakes, pairing studio recordings recorded between 1968 and 1972 on Disc One with a ‘72 live-in-Berkeley concert on Disc Two -- and something clicked. Maybe it’s just that Joy of Cooking's relaxed but energetic Celtic-Latin folk-jazz boogie-woogie breakouts make more sense sinking in casually in the background, as random CD changer play allows. Or maybe the recording studio had just reigned in those variables on Castles. Either way, something in tracks like "Summer Fire" and "Flying Saucer Blues" and "Trippet" and the tunefully avant-jazzed “How Deep the Dark" grabbed me; if they were proto-Quarterflash, the Quarterflash they'd be most “proto” would be the fusion-folk experiment "
Williams Avenue" on Q-flash's great 1981 debut LP, one of the best tracks that underrated band ever did. I hear some Big Brother and the Holding Company in there, too.
On the live disc, Joy of Cooking give more emphasis to their Latin percussion influence -- "Dancing Couple" approaches straight salsa, and the beginning of the nine-minute-long "Laugh Don't Lie" could almost pass (hip-hop beat-diggers take note) for the Incredible Bongo Band, before it eventually evolves into Santana. "Brownsville/Mockingbird," even longer at 11 minutes, is blues-structured piano jazz with a major Bo Diddley element. All over, the folkie harmonies mesh surprisingly well with the rhythms, though there are moments (in "Humpty Dumpty" for one) where the looseness gets a bit too loose, and just about falls apart. And frankly, the gender politics that are supposed to have made this band special fly right past me. But I still bet their fans danced better than Deadheads did.
- Portions of Album Content Provided by All Music Guide © 2008 All Media Guide, LLC.
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