Savoy Brown - BBC Sessions (1968-1971)

One reason I'm enjoying putting together these many BBC albums is that it's giving me a good reason to check out some musical artists I've overlooked. One of those is the British blues rock band Savoy Brown. They didn't do anything earthshaking, but if you like British blues rock similar to early Fleetwood Mac, this is a solid listen.

Here's the band's Wikipedia page, if you want to know more:

Savoy Brown - Wikipedia

None of this material is officially released. But I'm essentially reposting the work of others, with a few songs added. A music collector named DocDondy first compiled a bunch of the band's BBC tracks, and tried to clean them up. Then someone named Knees found more BBC tracks and did more cleaning, removing hiss and pops, fixing drop outs, improving the equalization, and so on. As a result, these songs sound pretty good even though the source material wasn't all that great.

I've made further changes in that they chose to leave in the BBC DJs talking over the music, and I always try to remove that. So I did my usual thing of using the X-Minus audio editing program to wipe out said talking on all the songs with "[Edit]" in their titles.

Savoy Brown is essentially lead guitarist Kim Simmonds plus a frequently changing group of supporting musicians. As I write this in 2022, the band is still going. However, the band hit its popular peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the British blues rock trend was big. It seems there are no BBC sessions after 1971. I think that's because around that time, the band decided to focus almost exclusively on constantly touring in the US, so they probably weren't in Britain much to promote their music there.

This left me with a problem, because a couple of the band's most popular songs from the time period, "Tell Mama" and "Hellbound Train," were not included. So I found a US live radio show from 1972 for "Hellbound Train," and a US TV show from 1973 with "Tell Mama" and one other song. It was hard to find even that much. I guess the band's popularity wasn't enough for them to get on TV or live radio shows that often.

This album is an hour and 12 minutes long. If it were at least ten minutes longer, I would have had enough to split it into two volumes. But I think one long album is better than two rather short ones.

01 Louisiana Blues [Goin' to Louisiana] [Edit] (Savoy Brown)
02 Walking by Myself [Edit] (Savoy Brown)
03 Gnome Sweet Gnome (Savoy Brown)
04 Mr. Downchild [Edit] (Savoy Brown)
05 Train to Nowhere [Edit] (Savoy Brown)
06 She's Got a Ring in His Nose and a Ring on Her Hand (Savoy Brown)
07 Life's One Act Play (Savoy Brown)
08 You'd Better Pray for the Lord to Guide You (Savoy Brown)
09 I'm Tired (Savoy Brown)
10 Money Can't Save Your Soul [Edit] (Savoy Brown)
11 Looking In [Edit] (Savoy Brown)
12 Blues on the Ceiling [Edit] (Savoy Brown)
13 Street Corner Talking [Edit] (Savoy Brown)
14 Hellbound Train [Edit] (Savoy Brown)
15 Tell Mama (Savoy Brown)
16 Just 'Cos You Got the Blues Don't Mean You Gotta Sing (Savoy Brown)

https://www.imagenetz.de/iD887

This is an extremely modest band, because it's very hard to find any good color photos of them. Even virtually none of their album cover feature the band members. This looks to be from the band's early years. If anyone can recognize who is pictured here, that would help date it, since the band's personnel changed fairly often.