Moloch

about this album

Guitarist Lee Baker (the late great) is a legend among musicians with any knowledge of Memphis' rich and varied history. Those lucky enough to play with him will attest to that fact. Rockers, Delta bluesmen, country pickers, and other knowledgeable players passing through sought him out. Produced and mostly written by Don Nix, Moloch is Baker's first major presence on vinyl. It's an amalgamation of rock, hard blues, psychedelia, and white boy soul -- the Jimi Hendrix Experience meets the Box Tops with a bit of Furry Lewis influence thrown in for good measure. The record is a snapshot of some of the wildly eclectic stuff coming out of Stax, Ardent, Sam Phillips', and American studios in Memphis in the late sixties and early seventies. Although the album is now known for being the first time the song "Goin' Down" appeared (also famously covered in Memphis by Jeff Beck), there were two major hinderences that prevented it from gaining any real popularity: first and foremost the album was released on a Stax subsidiary which made distribution a disaster. Secondly, Rolling Stone magazine slammed it. As luck would have it, the review, appearing alongside a favorable Grand Funk review, was reprinted on a poster in Grand Funk's Live Album! Grand Funk were not exactly critic's darlings either-- but at least they had Terry Knight running their show brilliantly in those first crucial years, while Moloch was basically an oddity on a subsidiary of a soul label, Stax. As to the negative

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