THE REGGIE KNIGHTON BAND — S/T: A One-Off That Is Truly One Of A Kind

One of the great joys in col­lect­ing retro music is dis­cov­er­ing a good “one-off” album.  This expres­sion refers to a sit­u­a­tion where the recorded out­put of a group or per­former is lim­ited to a sin­gle album.  This can hap­pen for any num­ber of rea­sons: bad chem­istry within a band, an inat­ten­tive record com­pany, a group split­ting up over the loss of a key mem­ber, etc.  Rock his­tory is lit­tered with tales of such casu­al­ties and the orphaned albums left in their wake tend to be of vari­able qual­ity (in other words, a lot of performers/groups end up only putting out one album for a good reason).

That said, the “one-off” genre does con­tain gems within worth hunt­ing down and the lone epony­mous album by the Reggie Knighton Band is one of them.  Imagine quirk­ily imag­i­na­tive song­writ­ing  along the lines of Sparks’ glam-era clas­sics mar­ried to a thump­ing, guitar-and-harmonies-fueled sound rem­i­nis­cent of vin­tage Queen, com­plete with a Cinemascope-size 1970’s arena-rock pro­duc­tion from Queen’s orig­i­nal pro­duc­tion mae­stro, Roy Thomas Baker.  That’s exactly what you get on The Reggie Knighton Band — and the result is pure ear candy for 1970’s rock obsessives.

But first, a bit of back­ground: Knighton was a musi­cian and song­writer who spent the first half of the 1970’s eking out an exis­tence on the edge of the pop music scene, includ­ing a stint in the Grass Roots dur­ing their last days.  However, he even­tu­ally dis­tin­guished him­self with writ­ing catchy pop-rock tunes with an eccen­tric and witty lyri­cal slant and landed a con­tract as a solo artist.  After a well-liked but poor-selling solo debut effort, Knighton was encour­aged by his man­age­ment to assem­ble a band to give more musi­cal heft to his work.  They also lucked out by land­ing Baker to han­dle the pro­duc­tion for the new group’s debut.

The result was The Reggie Knighton Band. It’s the kind of album that sneaks up on you: open­ing track “Breaking Up Inside” creeps into focus, start­ing with a moody rhythm-guitar line that flow­ers into a pump­ing, stac­cato rocker with a daz­zling falsetto-harmony hook on its cho­rus.  The lyrics have only a touch of quirk­i­ness.  Once this song sells you on the group’s chops and sound, Knighton really starts to play with the genre on the next track, “Rock ‘N Roll Alien.”  The band rocks the song out with thud­ding drums and reggae-inflected gui­tar hooks while Knighton deliv­ers a suit­ably impas­sioned arena-rock vocal but the lyrics off­set the song’s rock mus­cle with a tongue-in-cheek nar­ra­tive of an alien invader who yearns to play rock music and seduce earth chicks.

After that, you’re aware that you are in for an unpre­dictable expe­ri­ence where catchy tunes and attention-grabbing riffs lock you in for bizarre lyri­cal flights of fancy.  Subsequent song sub­jects include an Elvis obses­sive who feels kin­ship with his idol because of said idol’s worst, most eccen­tric habits (“The King And I”) and an unfor­tu­nate soul who finds job secu­rity and steady money as a high­way cop, only to lose all his friends over his five-oh sta­tus (“Highway Patrol”).  The lyrics never descend into novelty-song inanity because Knighton is pos­sessed of gen­uine wit and a knack for clever word­play (sam­ple from “U.F.O.”: “U.F.O., you and I/We just don’t see eye to eye”).

Best of all, Knighton mar­ries his odd­ball nar­ra­tives to strong, well-constructed melodies with plenty of musi­cal sub­stance.  The best exam­ple of his fusion of quirk and songcraft is “Clone In Love,” which takes a tongue-in-cheek nar­ra­tive about a clone’s real­iza­tion that any love he receives is coun­ter­feit and makes it play like a gen­uine rock bal­lad thanks to a lovely melody that under­scores the humor with heartache-y melodic hooks.

Finally, it helps that The Reggie Knighton Band sounds great.  Knighton anchors his songs with strong rhythm-guitar riffs and lead gui­tarist Brian Ray dri­ves them all home with flashy solos.  As for the rhythm sec­tion, Kurtis Teel’s bass lines have both power and a nicely melodic under­tow while Glenn Symmonds puts in a pow­er­house per­for­mance behind the drum kit, offer­ing a dis­play of can-bashing that works in lock­step with the gui­tars to give the album a con­vinc­ing hard-rock iden­tity.  Just as impor­tant is Baker’s pro­duc­tion, which lay­ers the songs with great details (boom­ing drum sounds, soar­ing har­monies treated with flang­ing and echo) and applies a com­pressed style of engi­neer­ing to the sound­scape that lends it a coiled intensity.

Simply put, The Reggie Knighton Band is one of the great “one-offs” from this era.  The band behind it drifted apart due to dis­in­ter­est from its label and man­age­ment but the work they left behind is too mem­o­rably odd and melod­i­cally strong to be for­got­ten.  Rock Candy Records has put together a fine CD for it that impres­sively repro­duces its punchy sound on the com­pact disc for­mat and adds a great set of liner-notes that use band inter­views to tell the tale of their sadly trun­cated career.  Any 1970’s rock archae­ol­o­gists will def­i­nitely want to dig this gem out.