blickstein@babel.DEC (Dave Blickstein) (10/02/85)
Attention fellow Dregs fans! The new Steve Morse Band album is out. It is called "Stand Up" and is on the Elektra label (like "The Introduction"). The front cover has a picture of the trio, the back cover has a picture of just Morse. I've only listened to the album twice so far. I wasn't that impressed on the first listen, but that ALWAYS happens to me with Morse albums. I liked it much better on the second listen. Part of what I don't like is that on this album 4 of the 9 tunes have vocals, although a couple of the vocal tunes sound good even o the first listen. The instrumentals are all standard Morse (excellent). There are also a LOT of guest artists on this artists (including some that have appeared on earlier Morse efforts). The guest artists include: T Lavitz whom we all of course know was the last keyboardists with the dregs. Mark O'Connor on violin. Also a one-time member of the dregs. Albert Lee who played on "General Lee" on "The Introduction". Alex Ligertwood who sang on "Crank It Up" on "Industry Standard". He is also the vocalist with the Santana band. Peter Frampton (surprise!) contributes guitar on one track (no vocals surprisingly). You remember him... "Do you Feel like I do?" from "Frampton Comes Alive". Rumor has it that T Lavitz is helping him with his comeback. Eric Johnson, guitar and vocals. Johnson is one of Steve Morses very favorite guitarists and was asked many times to join the dregs. Johnson is every bit deserving of Morses praises but so far has failed to land a recording contract. He has made various guest appearences with other artists including Christopher Cross and Carole King, but I think his cut on this album is his best recorded effort so far. I have a live videotape of him that has some real good music on it. I hope he gets a record deal soon. The album is NOT available on CD yet, but Elektra had a note in the album liner that came with "The Introduction" saying that "We will continue to make most of our new releases available in the Compact Disc format in the future", so there's hope. I'll probably post a review once I've heard it a few times more, but I'd be interested (as always) to hear opinions and dregs-related stuff from any of you. If you like, I can forward to the rest of the list. Hey maybe we should start a DREGS_OF_THE_NET digest.... Stay tuned, Dave Blickstein