6. GranicusGranicus
Here we go into another one of my favourite American bands trying to sound like Brits in the early seventies. It didn’t work, the British rock thing in the late sixties with Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, it didn’t work in America. People tried, but they couldn’t quite get it. So here’s another band, Granicus from Cleveland, Ohio. This singer Woody Leffel had this amazing falsetto voice. I guess the closest voice you could compare it to would be Geddy Lee, but he’s more soulful, he’s from Cleveland, not from Canada. He’s just singing about getting out of Cleveland. There is actually a song called ‘Cleveland Ohio’ where he’s just saying "I gotta get out", and he’s screaming and hollering. I can’t even begin to describe this record. Where do they get their ideas from? It’s jazzy, like there’s a kind of jazz backbeat to some of the stuff, but it’s rock, obviously inspired by Zeppelin to a certain extent, but very Midwestern too. I don’t want to say I can hear any Stooges, but I can see this vibe coming out of the Midwest the way that The Stooges’ vibe came out of the Midwest as well. My favourite song on that record is one called ‘You’re In America’, where he’s getting up there and screaming, "What’s wrong? I’ll tell you what’s wrong! With everything!" and he’s just screaming. It’s fucking amazing, you’ve got to hear it. It also has one of the coolest album covers I’ve ever seen. You never saw what the band looked like. They were backlit by the sun and they stood there with their guitars and the guy had the mic in the air and you could never see his face because they were silhouettes. Tailor-made for a kid like me to worship forever. Such great shit.
I read this story – and I had to do a lot of digging – that they were going to get their big break, they were going to get signed to a different label and be produced by Krugman and Pearlman, who were the Blue Öyster Cult team. But apparently they were like, "Nah, we got it. It’s cool." And of course it wasn’t cool, and now they’re gone. Well, I heard the reunion. It wasn’t good. Sometimes the information age is too much for me. I didn’t want to know that… But it doesn’t take away from this record.
