Paul Clark - Good To Be Home (1975)

This album has "hippie" written all over it, not literally unless the used-record pile yields a copy that has been defaced. Unless the listener is a hippie-lover, the idea of this crowd "Holding On to You," as promised in the opening track, because "you satisfy my needs in every way" might be downright frightening. Compelling evidence of this can be gathered from either the artistic or photographic rendering of the band featured on front and back of this 1975 release, respectively. The band, naturally identified as Paul Clark and Friends, hailed from somewhere in Kansas, the last three words demanding a kind of drawled, stretched-out cadence. Despite the presence of acoustic guitar and piano in the drawing of the band in action, this is really more electric music, ranging from hard rock to more lyrical songwriting strongly influenced by the Beatles. The guitar lines also draw from a similar source, and there are a lot of them. Electric guitar dominates most of the arrangements and at times assumes the prominence it would in a group that had only one mission, to rock out and jam. Clark and his friends are on a mission of good vibes, though, the exact opposite of a heavy jam in which alienating the audience is part of the fun. This is a group of players who have all brushed their hair for the back porch photo portrait. They have even created a second side of song titles that might pass for a gospel effort, if it wasn't for all the damn hippies. Regional rock scholars will find this of interest, of course. It is all quite sincere and well played, indicating that behind the relaxed ambience was lurking at least one perfectionist genius -- perhaps the weird guy in the glasses. Good to Be Home is surely real, the house in the picture was probably even really someone in the band's house, maybe one with a leaky roof that would explain why it all sounds a bit drippy, rhyming with hippie.