CBS 1969 / Think Like A Key 2025
Sophomore effort from future stars, an album by a team who had no future, a record that still stays strong a few decades later.
Ride A Hustler’s Dream
It seemed quite an understandable desire to expand the stylistic palette that drove this ensemble from modest success of "Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera" to potential disaster of their vocalist leaving the band, which bore his nom de plum, before their second offering was devised. However, the presence in the ranks of new guitar-slinger Paul Brett, whom the singer had brought in, rendered “Ride A Hustler’s Dream” ageless, because the axeman’s blistering technique and love of folk superseded the foursome’s former psychedelia by more traditional – and, thus, rather time-tested and time-resisting – tropes. With freshly recruited warbler Johnny Joyce, a mean twelve-string master to boot, the quartet could organically intersperse original pieces with a vigorous cover of “Statesboro Blues” and sculpt an exquisitely fuzzy, riff-propelled instrumental take on “Eleanor Rigby” as the album’s finale, and come up trumps.
The change in the group’s method is apparent from the very start, the intricate acoustic lace drenching the pseudo-Dylanesque titular piece, the whole minute of it, in deceptively unassuming merriment that will also permeate “Anna Dance Square” which gets high on communal chorus, and, in a reserved manner, the elegant “Raga And Lime” in which Richard Hudson’s sitar licks and wooden-drum groove reign supreme and make words redundant. Yet if “Money By” marries rural simplicity to electric charge and homespun romanticism to sly smile, all punctuated with John Ford’s bass, and the organ-oiled, soulful “Raise The Light” strives for spiritual solemnity and baroque grandeur, the harmonica-helped “Black Jack Davy” delves much deeper into rustic sentiments. And while there’s patinated pop-drama at the core of “Depression” and bucolic beauty in “Warm Day In July” which child-recited verses preface so alluringly, “Don’t You Realise” insistently rocks one’s socks off and wins the day – although not for long.
VELVET OPERA could have carried on and explored their niche rather thoroughly if not for the rhythm section jumping ship to join STRAWBS, but that, curiously, didn’t signal the end of the collective: in 1970, the ensemble’s first guitarist Colin Forster enlisted three other musicians, including his teenage namesake Bass, and cut a single which is added to this reissue next to a couple of mono variants of the album’s tracks. The reconfigured tean’s songs, the tenderly anthemic “She Keeps Giving Me These Feelings” and “There’s A Hole In My Pocket” where arresting histrionics rule the game, may feel just as robust as what the previous line-ups recorded and point the way to the ’70s, yet for reasons unknown, the players disbanded soon after, with their meager output becoming an integral part of the underrated group’s legacy. A hustlers’ dream, indeed.
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