New York
singer/songwriter Garland Jeffreys made his disc debut as the leader of the band
Grinder's Switch on
Vanguard Records in 1970. By the evidence of its ten
Jeffreys-composed songs, he and the group had spent a lot of time listening to
the Band's
Music from Big Pink and the batch of songs
Bob Dylan had developed with
the Band in the late '60s, including
"The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo)." Jeffreys,
Ernest Corallo, and
Stan Szelest approximated
the Band's rough vocal trio of
Levon Helm,
Rick Danko, and
Richard Manuel, and the
country-rock musical arrangements, with their prominent organ and piano work by
Szelest, also strongly recalled the sound of
the Band. (
Szelest actually joined a later lineup of
the Band, appearing on their 1993 album,
Jericho.)
Jeffreys had some clever and amusing things to say in his lyrics, marking him as the
singer/songwriter he would develop into later. But upon release,
Garland Jeffreys and Grinder's Switch was so much of a clone of
the Band that it was hard to separate it out as the work of an independent entity. ~ William Ruhlmann