No Free Lunch

about this album

Green on Red were an American rock band, formed in the Tucson, Arizona punk scene, but based for most of its career in Los Angeles, California, where it was loosely associated with the Paisley Underground. Earlier records have the wide-screen psychedelic sound of first-wave desert rock, while later releases tended more towards traditional Country rock. The critical hosannas lavished upon the album Gas Food Lodging earned Green on Red a major-label deal, though, with appropriate irony, this very American band found themselves contracted to the British branch of Polygram. The label’s American imprint, Mercury, picked up their option several months after the group’s big-label debut, No Free Lunch, was released in the U.K. An EP running a bit under 24 minutes (a later reissue padded it out to full length with a 13-minute blues workout on “Smokestack Lightning”), No Free Lunch covers territory not dissimilar to that on Gas Food Lodging; nomadic musicians on the road (“Keep on Moving” and the title cut), out-of-work sad sacks (“Honest Man”), families confronted with death and loss (“Jimmy Boy”), and the struggle to believe in something despite it all (“Time Ain’t Nothing”). The band even throws in a pretty good cover of “Funny How Time Slips Away,” and their performances are noticeably tighter and sharper than on their previous albums (the time on the road after Gas Food Lodging seems to have paid off), while the engineering by Steven Street and Simon Humphries is crisper and bett

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more from Green on Red

Gas Food Lodging / Green on Red

Interesting.....Dangerous

Scapegoats

Gravity Talks

Here Come The Snakes

This Time Around