Freda & The Firedogs – Self-Titled

Listening to this long-lost album — produced by Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler, starring Marcia Ball as “Freda” — is like opening a time capsule from Austin, 1972. Sniffing around for the next big scene, Wexler recognized that this college town’s spin on musical tradition had popular potential beyond the Armadillo, that it might have broad appeal among six-pack country fans and stoned rockers alike.

Having previously signed Willie Nelson, rejected by Nashville as a once-hot songwriter who sang funny, and Doug Sahm, whose Top 40 hits with the Sir Douglas Quintet had been consigned to ’60s nostalgia, Wexler turned his attention to a young bar band. He produced a demo with the Firedogs, a group with the same configuration of chick singer (in the parlance of the day) backed by a male longhairs as Big Brother & the Holding Company and Mother Earth. Atlantic was ready to release the sessions as is, but the band balked at the terms of the contract.

Three decades down the road, the results sound more a period piece than a masterpiece, while plainly anticipating plenty of musical developments to come. Bluesy fare such as the traditional “Make Me A Pallet” and “EZ Rider” (the Taj Mahal arrangement) from the sweet-singing Ball suggested the turn that her career would ultimately take. Other highlights include “When You Come Home Again” — a surprisingly country song from Ball’s future bluesmate, Angela Strehli — and “The Only Thing Missing Is You” from Louisiana’s Bobby Charles. Playing with typically tasteful restraint, John X. Reed shows why he would later be acknowledged (by fans including Sahm and Charlie Sexton) as the most underrated guitarist in town.

On the five country standards (“Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad”, “Jambalaya”, “Today I Started Loving You Again” et al.), the band sounds less like honky-tonkers than hippies, while original material from bassist/singer Bobby Earl Smith recalls the days when a woman might speak of her significant other as “my sweet daddy” and men referred to sexual relations as “she did me.” Though the twelve cuts last less than 30 minutes (with seven of them clocking in at under 2:10), fans of Ball and others nostalgic for a more musically innocent Austin might well consider this well worth the 30-year wait.