HeadEast1

This is a prime exam­ple of a group that trudged along in semi-obscurity for many years but man­aged to rack up one gen­uine clas­sic of an album.  Head East was a jour­ney­man arena-rock out­fit that criss-crossed the coun­try as a pop­u­lar tour­ing act dur­ing the lat­ter half of the 1970’s.  Their sound is best described as a southern-accented vari­a­tion of the AOR style that groups like Foreigner and Journey were pop­u­lar­iz­ing around the same time.  They released a slew of albums dur­ing their major-label days but the one that fans of this stuff remem­ber is their amaz­ing debut, Flat As A Pancake.

The song you may know from this album is “Never Been Any Reason,” a song that Richard Linklater used in Dazed And Confused.  This clas­sic rock radio sta­ple that lays out the group’s strengths in full force  – full-blooded vocal har­monies, solid Southern-rock rif­fery & ensem­ble play­ing and a pen­chant for prog-style fanci­ness in the arrange­ments & key­board licks.  In this song and on the rest of the album, the band pinches lit­tle bits of inspi­ra­tion from every­where – Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin, the Moody Blues, even a bit of Grand Funk – but they syn­the­size these dis­parate influ­ences in a per­son­al­ized way (a defin­ing ele­ment of qual­ity schlock-rock).

Other notable tracks on here include “City Of Gold,” a synth-fortified rocker that works in a stun­ning and unex­pected bridge of vocal har­monies against a mel­lotron back­drop, and “Jefftown Creek,” a moody Southern rocker whose uni­son singing shows off the group’s vocal chops to impres­sive effect.  Not every track is a stand­out like these afore­men­tioned gems but each one harbors at least one nifty sur­prise in its arrange­ment – check out the way the key­board player teaches his synth to sing the blues at the end of “Lovin’ Me Along” – and the album hangs together beautifully.

As a result of the group’s focus on carefully-crafted arrange­ments, Flat As A Pancake flows effort­lessly from track to track and feels more like a best-of album than a debut.  It’s per­fect car radio rock, espe­cially if you are dri­ving through the South… and take a close look at the album’s back cover – its ‘chomp­ing on pan­cakes in a diner’ visual motif pre­dates the sim­i­lar, more famous shot from Supertramp’s Breakfast In America by four years (they were even put out by same record label!).