The various curators of the New Riders of the Purple Sage vault have certainly done right by the band in recent years. Besides tendering packages including recordings of performances in the group’s formative days–with Jerry Garcia on pedal steel–archivists have also issued vintage content of NRPS in its later heyday.
Herewith Hempstead, a 1976 show that supplies something of a missing link in the band’s history. Having migrated from their original label home of Columbia Records, these true cosmic cowboys now worked under the aegis of MCA Records, where they had released New Riders, produced by none other than Bob Johnston, supervisor of so many recordings of Bob Dylan.
Commencing to tour in support of what was the ensemble’s seventh studio effort–all of which tracks appear in this setlist except for its sole original tune, co-founder John Dawson’s “Can’t Get Over You”–personnel was somewhat in flux as well. Given due acclaim for his impressive pedigree in front of the audience, the bassist and skilled harmony singer at this time was one Steven Love; in a circuitous but serendipitous set of circumstances, he had enlisted with NRPS after membership in the prescient country-rock hybrid Rick Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band, but only after he was part of an ensemble led by Roger McGuinn, titular leader of the Byrds (thereby replacing the inscrutable Skip Battin who had joined the Riders after a stint with one of the latter-day lineups of those iconic American folk-rockers).
Circa America’s centennial, this NRPS fivesome remained tightly knit as a performing unit. As such, they were well able to proffer a broad range of material over these eighty-some minutes, which is Hempsteader. Songs of Chuck Berry’s (“You Never Can Tell”) reside ever so comfortably in close proximity with one of the Rolling Stones’ (“Dead Flowers” off Sticky Fingers). And the band pays rightful homage to their parent group with “Hard to Handle:” the late Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan sang the Otis Redding tune with the New Riders’ peers.
NRPS thus exhibited an array of virtues by which they elicited rightful acclamation from a rowdy crowd. Lead guitarist David Nelson, for instance, takes over as lead vocalist on Delbert McClinton’s “Honky Tonkin’ (I Guess I Done Me Some)” as well as “Fifteen Days Under The Hood,” a composition by none other than Jack Tempchin ( who wrote “Peaceful Easy Feeling” for the Eagles).
Nelson’s weathered voice (not wholly unlike Gram Parsons’ on “Don’t Put Her Down”) makes for good contrast with Dawson’s ingratiating phrasing, especially when the latter is yodeling (!) on “Little Old Lady.” But ‘Marmaduke” isn’t much less distinctive in the insinuating way he delivers originals of his own such as “Henry” or “Portland Woman.”
Former Jefferson Airplane drummer Spencer Dryden pushes insistently for the latter cut’s twelve minutes plus, furthering the New Riders’ instrumental strengths: spirited back and forth between Nelson and steel guitarist Buddy Cage is rife with purpose. Meanwhile, even as the latter can certainly play it straight on his custom-made double-neck instrument–hear his strictly conventional decoration on this cover of Loudon Wainwright III’s “The Swimming Song”–he also loves to shred with distortion aplenty as on “Annie May.”
While the New Riders of the Purple Sage long played on its counter-cultural cachet (ahem!) with the likes of “Panama Red” (written by Peter Rowan, Garcia’s comrade from Old & In the Way’), thanks to a wry collective tongue-in-cheek, they never overdid it. And they still refrain from doing so on June 25, 1976, despite cover art sporting cannabis leaves positioned so prominently in the graphics (and the caricatured image of the band on the CD itself). In that respect, too, essayist/producer Rob Bleetstein might be accused of sounding overly coy on his relatively short-liner notes, but like the band itself, he’s just too good-natured to offend.
Likewise, even as some of the more conventional C&W material from Live At The Calderone Concert Hall is a bit heavy-handed–especially “I Heard You’ve Been Layin’ My Old Lady”–such borderline lampoons pale next to the otherwise unadulterated romp that constitutes Hempsteader.
