Album Review: Babe Ruth - Darker Than Blue: The Harvest Years 1972-75

Babe Ruth
Darker Than Blue: The Harvest Years 1972-75
(Cherry Red)
8/10
By Paul Davies

Similar to an exotic perfume wafting through a room to heighten the senses, the fragrant Janita ‘Jenny’ Haan’s stage presence electrified audiences with her skimpy stage costumes, magnetic performances, and whisper to a wail vocals. It’s no wonder this band could pull in the punters even more so with their excellent musical skills that created an interesting body of work. Cherry Red has reaped the produce of this band’s first three album’s recorded on EMI’s progressive Harvest label presenting them newly remastered with the non-hit singles released from this trilogy of work. To their credit, First Base, Amar Caballero, and the eponymous Babe Ruth albums overcome the close scrutiny of being presented in this clamshell box with an informative booklet of photographs, illustrations and liner notes telling the tale from their first base to last Harvest years. The standout covers of Zappa’s King Kong, the theme tune to A Fistful Of Dollars, and Curtis Mayfield’s We People Darker Than Blue unfairly overshadow a strong body of musical works crammed into the allotted vinyl time restrictions of the day. Wells Fargo, Black Dog (not that one), Lady, Amar Caballero‘s triptych of musical movements, Dancer and Jack O’Lantern vindicate the sonic scope of this band. Things changed with the departure of talented guitarist Alan Shacklock, to be replaced by Bernie Marsden, and a move to a new label. It wouldn’t be long until Ms. Haan left this theatre of music and Babe Ruth morphed into an altogether different entity. This lovingly compiled box set delivers a heady flavour of what this band was originally all about. Their musical scent traverses the decades finding Jenny Haan in her post Babe Ruth guise as a highly respected natural perfumier of note!