Buried Alive: Live in Maryland
Addled, staggering, bleary-eyed, wired: that's howBuried Alive: New Barbariand Live in Marylansounds. It's the band's charm, the reason this recoding has been long sought in bootleg form. And the irony of the New Barbarians' 1979 tour should be lost on no one. Keith Richards's sentence for his 1977 heroin and cocaine bust in Toronto was two days of charity work. What'd he do? He got his guitar-slinging partner from the Rolling Stones, Ronnie Wood, to bring this ad hoc band--boasting himself and Richards on guitars, Ziggy Modeliste on drums, Ian McLagan on keys, and Stanley Clarke on bass--to play two dates for the Canadian Institute for the Blind. Describing how the band warmed up for the tour, the unnamed liner notician for this long-sought set writes that "[m]ost days rehearsals went on until the drugs ran out." So penance for the drug bust came in the form of a gig by a band who rehearsed until they couldn't get high anymore. As for the New Barbarians' tunes, they're ramshackle and shouted and bellowed and brilliant. The sound on these discs is remarkable, blurry only to the point you'd expect, given the sodden nature of the band members.--Andrew Bartlett