Ten Years After – Ten Years After Undead

Don’t ask me where my head was at in the summer of 1968, as when I saw this album for the first time, I was sure that it had to be psychedelic, or that it was a sly comment on the Grateful Dead.

Regardless, it’s a mighty good record, capturing the feel of an early live show, recorded at the Klooks Kleek Club in London and the Railway Hotel in West Hampstead (which had no stage) on the 14th of May 1968. All of this back when Ten Years After were still having fun, back when I saw them at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, with Alvin and his white clogs taking the stage to deliver some superfine British Blues laced with a bit of jazz meanderings to spice things up. If someone had taken the time to ask me, I’d have advised them not to drop in the drum solo, which is simply a distraction as far as I’m concerned.

The 2002 compact disc reissue offers up an additional nine songs that will rock you back. The album showcases some interesting boogie blues, traditional rock n’ roll, along with a helping of jump blues, all framed around Alvin’s mixture of the pentatonic scale. Though what caught my eye, was seeing Woody Herman’s 1948 “Woodchopper’s Ball” on the track listings, where Lee stammers and stutters the intro before shouting out “Woodchopper’s Ball” and slaying the audience with a number drawn completely from left field, showing how vast the musical knowledge of Ten Years After was.

The biggest criticism that swirled against Lee in his lifetime was that he was all flash, speeding his way through blues scales, all while offering little or no soul. When I was eighteen I would have disagreed, though perhaps not so much these days. Yes, the man was ionate about being the fastest gun; and it was said that he used to just practice at playing exceptionally fast. Of course he was sometimes sloppy, yet I didn’t care, it was electrified freedom. Alvin threw himself into the mix, and I would dance right along with him, to which Lee said, “I was a young guy with young energy, and that’s just the way I played,” he once told Guitar Player magazine. “I decided to use my fast licks like a machine gun, with the effect of devastation. I kind of enjoyed that, and it seemed to get the audiences up.”

Undead is more than simply a live album, it’s a valuable and historic document tethered to the British Blues of the mid 60’s, where so little of this sort of material still exists.

*** This was a mono album, and should certainly be heard as such.

Review by Jenell Kesler