Hog Heaven by Elvin Bishop (Vinyl record album review)

Album name: Hog Heaven

Artist name: Elvin Bishop

Year: 1978

Number of discs: one

Label: Capricorn Records

Collection: Essex

Distinguishing characteristics: price sticker on the back ($3.99)

Buy it on Amazon: $5.01

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I’m not familiar with this record, but I am familiar with Elvin Bishop, who has come up three times in the past year and a half:

The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw by the Butterfield Blues Band (1967): 4/5

The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper (1969): 5/5

Let It Flow (1974): 5/5

What I expected

Electric blues, rock.

What it was actually like

I was pretty excited for another Elvin Bishop record and honestly thought that I was going to love it. I didn’t.

It didn’t have a single song that I would genuinely consider to have been rock, and even its blues was limited to just one track, Midnight Creeper, which distinguished itself by being about, inter alia – heroin, cocaine, weed and quaaludes. If I had to guess which of those contributed the most to this record, it would be quaaludes[1].

Almost every song included a totally gratuitous horns section, filling my saxophone allotment for 2024 and 2025.

Could it get any worse than that? Oh, yes. Because it was 1978, there was an obligatory reggae song, True Love (with Maria Muldaur vocals that sounded like Blondie in a good way, though in 1978 Blondie was still in her disco phase and The Tide is High didn’t happen until two years later) that was pretty cringey, and the steel drums got explored even further on Waterfalls.

Oh Babe and Right Now is the Hour both had more of a jazzy big-band dance sound.

Southern Dreams was an extremely boring easy listening song with a terrible echo voice effect.

The record’s worst lyrics were on Arkansas, which led with: “Well, Mississippi’s on the east, Oklahoma’s on the west…” It was hopelessly dumb as a song, but I did think the guitar in it was good, and I will never forget Bishop’s uncanny ability to rhyme “Arkansas” with “Arkansas”[2].

Grade

2/5: bad, but I was able to listen to the whole thing

References[+]

References

↑1 | I’ve never tried quaaludes and I don’t think I’m missing out on anything, but I can assure you that if you’re using quaaludes to make music, then your music is going to be crap.
↑2 | Just kidding – I’ll forget it as soon as I hit the Publish button.