Rotary Connection - Dinner Music 1968

The only accurate prediction one could have made before going into a Rotary Connection record was that it would be unpredictable, and attempting to list who the group's peers were to the uninitiated only worked on a song-by-song basis. No other record quite fits this bill like Dinner Music. The least-uniform Rotary Connection record -- and that's saying a lot -- it comes off like a series of tangents with little in the way of cohesion. One moment, they could be jumping in piles of hay on the set of Hee Haw ("Country Things"), later on they could be at a packed juke joint ("Stormy Monday Blues"), and then they could be lulling a crowd at the Newport Folk Festival ("Amuse"), or even taking over the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to twiddle with electronics ("Lektricks #2"). The most bizarre song of all is "Merry Prankster," which has all the cracked acoustic pop of late-'60s Arthur Lee until it shifts into an odd tempo and a chorus made from an even odder melody of grunts. The record's best moment is buried in the latter half. "Amuse" is a beautifully folky song sung by Minnie Riperton at her most gentle and arresting. It's nothing but an acoustic guitar and her voice, which effortlessly wraps around your ears despite not taking full advantage of her five-octave range. Altogether, Dinner Music is the only record where Rotary Connection's eclecticism worked to their disadvantage. AMG.

listen here

Buy @ Amazon: USA - FR - UK