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first solo LP, “Rock and Real.” It’s an honest effort, based on the life he lives. It’s the music he’s been playing since founding the locally renowned Iron City Houserockers.Grushecky includes several passages of Pittsburgh imagery, which help his message hit home locally. Perhaps the best cut, the slow-flowing mover “The Biddle Mine” speaks of “the hills of Pennsylvania,” where his ancestors moved to from Italy. “Memphis Queen ” mentions the “port of Pittsburgh’’ and “Freedom’s Hall” hails the homeless sleeping “’neath the tracks under Smithfield Street.” Those images mean a lot to a Pittsburgher. They probably won’t mean as much to those outside the Pittsburgh area, though. And the old-fashioned barroom rock ’n’ roll music it uses as its canvas probably isn’t “catchy” enough to make it sell much beyond the local level. But after listening to his words and melody throughout “Rock and Real,” one gets the notion that having it sell in Pittsburgh is all that Joe Grushecky cares about.M.E.der).M.E.n -___ i_____ _»_• n__-__■______The Motown Songbook; RubyTurnerRCA RecordsSinging a collection of 10 Motown classics and featuring some of the ioriginal artists who popularized the lt;songs as background singers, Ruby iTurner would have been hard-pressed to make anything but a fine i LP. And “The Motown Songbook” is lt;certainly fine. «The best renditions — perhaps ibecause of the backing vocals of the lt;original artists — are the Four 'l ops' “Baby I Need Your Lovin’,” 'Hie iTemptations’ “Just My Imagination c(Running Away With Me),” and Jimmy Ruffin’s “What Becomes of (the Broken-hearted.” Other top vnotch remakes include “The Tracks \Of My Tears” (The Miracles), s“Nowhere To Run (Nowhere To |lt;Hide)” (Martha Reeves and the cVandellas) and “Signed. Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours (Stevie Won-
Newspaper Details
Altoona Mirror
Altoona, Pennsylvania, US
Sun, May 07, 1989
Page 60
Full Page
Clipped by
Critic A.
NA, 16 Dec 2024
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