Dreamboat Annie Live Huntington WV

Dreamboat Annie Live

Heart

Shout Factory, 2007

http://http://www.heart-music.com/

REVIEW BY: Jason Warburg

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 11/13/2007

Dreamboat Annie was one of the earlier purchases in my record-buying career – surely among the first 20 albums I picked up.  It was both completely unique and significantly derivative: a full-on rock band fronted by sisters who had taken Led Zeppelin’s heavy-blues-rock / light-pastoral-harmonies dichotomy and dragged it through the gender looking-glass. 

The

Wilson sisters would go through distinct phases in their career as they found their way and forged an identity of their own.  But there was always something special about their debut, something raw and untouched by the hand of an A&R man or a lyric doctor or anyone, really, other than Ann & Nancy and their supporting cast.

Circling back around 30 years later and replaying a classic album live in its entirety is not a new idea – certainly Pink Floyd and Roger Waters have made a small industry of it over the past decade – but it’s often a good one, and definitely so here.

The show and the album kick off with the band’s first single, the throbbing, intense “Magic

Man.”  It’s an engrossing track that really gives Ann a chance to wail and she does so here, though she’s almost drowned out in places by guitarist Craig Bartock.  Hired hand Bartock is a skilled player who hits all the notes, but for some reason he’s up too loud in the mix and his tone is significantly more rough-edged than the original tracks, a strange state of affairs considering everyone else seems to be doing their best to replicate the clean, sharp original studio recordings.