Moloch - Moloch (Fallout)

I’ve been eager to hear MOLOCH since reading about leader LEE BAKER in ROBERT GORDON’s wonderful It Came from Memphis. My appetite was whetted all the more by the two pages devoted to Moloch in RON HALL’s invaluable Playing for a Piece of the Door: A History of Garage & Frat Bands in Memphis 1960-75. But this 1970 release (on the Stax subsidiary Enterprise) has never been easy to find until now. It more than lives up to its substantial legend.

There are some psychedelic touches (check out the swirling organ and fuzz bass on “Dance Chaney Dance”), but basically this is heavy, heavily electrified blues-rock. Singer GENE WILKINS is as soulful as any blues-rock band’s frontman, bar none. Guitarist Baker is a monster bluesman who learned from MISSISSIPPI FRED MCDOWELL, played in the MAR-KEYS, and would be a Memphis legend (leading MUD BOY & THE NEUTRONS and working with BIG STAR and ALEX CHILTON, among others) until he was murdered in 1995. Though hardly anyone outside of Memphis has heard this album over the past three decades, there is one familiar song here: Producer DON NIX’s “Going Down” was later covered by JEFF BECK and FREDDIE KING. They had nothing on Baker in the song’s first appearance on record.

Making it even better, the band’s 1972 single on its own Booger label, “Cocaine Katy”/”Terrorization of Miss Nancy” (with Baker on lead vocals), is appended, putting all of Moloch’s recordings on one disc for what I think is the first time.

This is amazing.