"Love Cry Want" (1972) with Joe Gallivan, full album (digital download)

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Tracks:

1.  Peace (for Dakota and Jason)

2. Tomorrow, Today will be Yesterday

3. The Great Medicine Dance

4. Angel's Wing

5. Ancient Place

6. Love Cry

Review of Love Cry Want by Dave Segal for Jazz Times:

Joe Gallivan (drums, steel guitar, Moog synth, percussion)
• Nicholas (guitar synthesizer, ring modulator)
• Jimmy Molneiri (drums, percussion)
• Larry Young (Hammond B3 organ)

Richard Nixon has heard Love Cry Want; you probably haven't. The story: In June 1972, Nixon ordered aide J.R. Haldeman to cut short a concert in Washington, D.C.s Lafayette Park because the president feared that Love Cry Want's roiling sounds would trigger rioting and possibly levitate the White House. It may have been the disgraced leader's most astute decision ever.

For Love Cry Want's lone recorded artifact harnesses a scary power that rightfully put the fear in corrupt politicians--and in law-abiding citizens, too. It's apt that Love Cry Want is this band's sole recording: A follow-up inevitably would've seemed anticlimactic. The six pupil-dilating tracks here still strike the ear as alien and terrifying wild. Even during that heady era of jazz experimentation, no record company had the guts to release Love Cry Want. It languished in vaults until Newjazz.com issued it on CD in 1997.  [Note: The record label Newjazz.com is now known as Indigo With Stars.  Same people. Us.]

Love Cry Want consisted of Joe Gallivan (drums, steel guitar, Moog synth, percussion), Nicholas (guitar synthesizer, ring modulator), Jimmy Molneiri (drums, percussion), and Larry Young (Hammond B3 organ). After establishing himself as a leader throughout the '60s, Young played on Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, John McLaughlin's and Carlos Santana's Love, Surrender, Devotion, and the first three Tony Williams Lifetime albums. Consequently, he was no stranger to bombast and psychedelic extrapolation. He emerged from those sessions at an exalted level of inspiration and with a formidable fire in his belly, and these traits helped shape Love Cry Want into a sui generis classic—a tone poem expressed with a flamethrower. It may be glib to equate the controlled chaos and rage of this music with the tenor of many American cities of the time, but that doesn't mean it's false.

It must be stressed that Love Cry Want is not strictly the Larry Young show, as Nicholas and Gallivan more than rise to the occasion. Using a self-built guitar synthesizer, Nicholas stuns throughout the disc with brash flashes of Hendrix-ian extravagance. Gallivan displays both inventive exoticness and cyclonic power as he and Molneiri deftly guide the group through its furious paces.

"Peace (for Dakota and Jason)" kicks things off with a sirocco, frenetic percussion rattle and Young's urgent Hammond organ comping. A jaguar-snarl guitar soon enters the fray and a frantic free-for-all ensues, with everyone vibrating with feral, revolutionary energy. "Ancient Place" evokes Sun Ra's spaceways with bizarrely jagged and twisted Moog emissions. "The Great Medicine Dance" is a shamanic eruption of intense frequencies and pressurized chord clusters created to exorcise theh most tenacious demons.

Unsurprisingly, this cacophonous cauldron of out-jazz and psych-rock appeals more to acid heads and extreme-music aficionados than it does to jazz purists. Equally exhausting and exhilarating, Love Cry Want demands the sort of vigilant attention and overamped energy of soldiers poised to enter battle. But you emerge from the other side of its 52 minutes a changed and, I daresay, better person. It's a purifying ordeal of an album, the kind of listening experience that's too rare, no matter what the genre.

~Dave Segal

Here is Dave Segal's 2016 interview with Joe Gallivan in the Seattle Stranger, where Segal was working as editor and music critic:

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/05/26/24124551/an-interview-with-joe-gallivan-the-jazz-drummer-praised-by-stravinsky-and-ignored-by-nearly-everyone-else

Images:

Guitarist (Steven) Nicholas' original winged satyr cover for the CD "Love Cry Want" from 1997.

Review of the Weird Forest LP 2010 release of "Love Cry Want."

Joe Gallivan in 1971 with his infant son, Dakota, for whom the opening track of Love Cry Want was named in the following year.  Dakota grew up to be an amazing singer/songwriter/bass player, and also works as an attorney.