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One song he talks his way thru, didn't impress me at all. His very best tune was "I Lost My Drivin Wheel." It has such a lonesome sound to it, long slide Dobro or National Steel weeping in the background, creates a very haunting song. I like Tom Rush. Come on Tom you got a great voice sing it for Pete's sake. I think that indeed Tom Rush was looking for that sound and he got it. As for the rest of the stuff on the album I didn't really care for it all that much. If you don't know about Tom Rush or are unsure of his style and music I'd pass on this album. If you are like me and want one song on it them bite the bullet and buy it, that's my advice.
("I gave my promise I'd be there with you by Saturday night"). Well, "Drivin' Wheel" had just come out, I believe, and I grabbed her LP of Tom Rush's when she was out one night and played that song loud.
It really is a fabulous collection. As a long time Tom Rush fan, I agree with all the reviewers here of "No Regrets".
When my mother had died suddenly when I was 15, I remember my older sister (who got me interested in Tom Rush) always played his music. His voice has such a soothing effect on me.
I just lay back and close my eyes and for a little while, I am transported to a serene place. I could just picture the guy's car broken down and he's in the middle of a snowstorm, calling his wife/girlfriend on a pay phone, to tell her he loves her and he is trying to get to her.
And at that minute, even at the young age of 15, I realized that with my mother gone, I did "feel like some old engine that lost my driving wheel."
He made ten albums in the first dozen years of his career, but either the stream dried out or he became allergic to recording. I'm of a certain age, and I published a book about my generation in 1968 --- Notes from the New Underground, if you must know --- and, believe me, I too am way over that terrible/wonderful year.Or was, until I started listening to Tom Rush again. know stuff. Well, here's a surprise. "The Circle Game", his first record to get a big label push, was released late in 1968, and it sure fit the mood of my gang.
But if you're looking for a Harvard man who knows how you feel and wouldn't mind singing your feelings for you. But he had a record deal, and she was two years away from one. He has impressive restraint. Tom Rush isn't flashy. In his 60s, he has a young daughter --- "I thought I'd have my own grandchild and cut out the middle man" --- and gives a sane number of concerts a year. No matter.
And the seasons they go round and roundAnd the painted ponies go up and downWe're captive on the carousel of timeWe can't return, we can only lookBehind from where we cameAnd go round and round and roundIn the circle gameWhen Joni Mitchell showed those lyrics to Tom Rush, she was a 23-year-old nobody. If you're of a certain age, that year sparks so many memories. But there was something more. Or decades.Now the decades have passed, and Tom Rush is still at it. But he was a folkie who was only gently electric; this was no Dylan, rocking your world at every turn. Rush was a baritone, his voice reassuring as oatmeal. In addition to Joni Mitchell, he more or less discovered the as yet unrecorded James Taylor and Jackson Browne. He was as unhurried and relaxed as Leonard Cohen.
And so, when it came time for him to go into the studio again, he not only used three of Mitchell's songs, he took "The Circle Game" as the title of that 1968 record.1968. And maybe, given the title song, even looking down the road a few years. New material is unimportant when we're talking about Tom Rush; the old more than suffices.You have only to watch the video of "Remember", the novelty song that is a winner when he performs and is closing in on four million viewers on YouTube, to grasp his appeal. He still has the wry wit that would go so well with a mug of coffee and a thin smoke around a campfire.That Tom Rush still has it has to be reassuring to his aging audience. And Rush had an ear for talent.
For "The Circle Game" was a song cycle. His guitar is still spare and evocative. He was the most famous folk singer ever to graduate from Harvard --- the king of a category of one. His voice holds up. The guy who more or less invented the persona of the laid back singer/songwriter --- the performer who was James Taylor before there was a James Taylor --- is an evergreen. His confident survival sends the clearest possible message: "You're not getting older, you're getting better." But the coin has another face. He never had the hit song everyone can hum. Pepper" but oddly mature, charting the enthusiasms of youth --- love and energy and what Joni Mitchell calls the "urge for going" --- and then moving on to breaking up with a lover and leaving your parents and being okay about being alone.
But if you're younger, just the opposite --- you're almost surely sick of hearing about "The Sixties". So every Rush concert is an irony; his fans are people who first heard his music when they were leaving home and are now the ones being left. Tom Rush was just 27, but he seemed to. Not trippy like "Sgt. We are, as the song says, "captive on the carousel of time." And so, when boomers consider who we were when we first heard certain songs and who we are now, we blink and ask ourselves: Why do I need glasses and wear relaxed-fit pants --- where did the years go. well, here's an overlooked boomer god tipping his hat and inviting you to settle in for a listen.
For all Tom Rush fans of old and new this really IS the very best.
Rush could have found room for it. I can't add much to the other reviews, but I'll have to second another reviewer's comment that the lushly orchestrated version of "No Regrets" that was included in the record was inferior to the stark, spare version Mr. But this CD would be a keeper for the "Lost my Driving Wheel" track alone, largely thanks to the incomparable David Bromberg, whose masterful slide guitar slices right through to the heart of the piece; I simply can't imagine the song without it. Rush originally issued. And I, too, miss Bo Diddly's "Who Do You Love." and wish that Mr. And thanks for "Urge for Going". the definitive version of the song, even though I find Dave van Ronk's take on it equally compelling (although neither version is ever likely to be mistaken for the other).
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