1975-03-10-The_Buffalo_News
Century Theater
Strawbs Overcome Gremlins, Carry Show
It's kind of reminiscent of old UB concerts at the Century Theater — kids lined up in the cold at the side entrance before the show and gremlins at work on British bands onstage.
The Strawbs, winding up a roundly satisfying tour of the States, according to leader Dave Cousins, are plagued by sloppy lighting and minor mistakes that fuzz the edges of their crisply blended set.
Headliner John Entwistle, quiet, enigmatic bass player for the Who, loses 20 points in general esteem with sour harmonies and sound problems that ultimately force him and his sideline quartet, Ox, off-stage while guys with flashlights probe the amps.
Entwistle's doomed from the start. As he opens with a song from "Who's Next," the straws from a drinking canteen taped to his mike jab him in the face.
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HE ALMOST overcomes it on energy and black humor — a dense Who-like sound grafted to 1959 rock like Eddie Cochran's (he does Cochran's "Somethin' Else") in songs about spiders and prison cells and suicide.
An aging schoolyard punk is he, sporting a black Spanish tuxedo and playing his head off. Here's a bass player carrying an entire band, including a guitarist straight out of Roger Ramjet. But Ox is too heavy a burden. There's no encore.
The Strawbs (once the Strawberry Hill Boys) avoid Entwistle's fate with the refinement that's come from two years of stability after the sharp changes that followed the departures of Rick Wakeman and the duo Hudson-Ford.
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THEIR PARADES of modal riffs are tight and true. The impressionist poetry of their lyrics is delivered by courtly Dave Cousins in a buzzing medieval tenor. He gestures and bows. It's positively elegant.
They manage to shake off the wrong notes. But the gremlins get to even the most proficient of them, namely guitarist Dave Lambert.
At a key cue in their encore of "Carry Me Down," he fluffs a chord and his guitar goes dead. But the band keeps the beat and carries on. Entwistle's luck isn't nearly that good.
