Tobacco Road

You know, when the Zoo Crew drops the needle on Spooky Tooth’s take of “Tobacco Road,” it still hits like a freight train rolling through the night. That version off the album they called Tobacco Road in the States—really the 1968 debut It’s All About, just repackaged for America a few years later—carries this heavy blues-rock weight that feels both ancient and right on the edge. The song itself goes way back to John D. Loudermilk, the Durham, North Carolina songwriter who first cut it around the turn of the sixties. Loudermilk once explained that the idea came from a rough stretch in his hometown where they used to roll those big hogsheads of tobacco down to the river to load onto barges. Along that road lived some tough, seedy folks, the kind your people would have fretted over if they thought you were hanging around there. He told interviewers he got a close look as a teenager delivering telegrams and money orders on his bicycle down what locals called Marvin’s Alley—rundown clapboard houses, muddy track, lights of different colors glowing behind the shades. Those colors, he later learned, marked whatever vice was going on inside. The lyrics paint a stark picture of a kid left to die or grow in the middle of it all, loathing the place yet knowing it’s the only home he’s ever known, dreaming of getting out, making money, and coming back with dynamite and a crane to blow it up and start over. Loudermilk was clear it wasn’t pure autobiography; his own folks weren’t the drinkers or the ones who abandoned him, and his dad was a quiet man who never cursed. Still, the song captured that working-class grit around the tobacco plants so vividly that it became a standard.

The Nashville Teens, a British Invasion bunch who borrowed an American-sounding name, turned it into a hit in 1964, climbing the charts on both sides of the Atlantic with a piano-driven, garage-edged blast that Mickie Most produced. From there it got covered by just about everybody—Lou Rawls giving it soul, Jefferson Airplane stretching it psychedelic on their first album, Edgar Winter stretching it into long jams, and plenty more. Spooky Tooth’s version sits right in that lineage but with their own stamp: dual lead voices trading off, Gary Wright’s higher, soaring tone cutting against Mike Harrison’s rawer, grittier delivery, backed by that twin-keyboard setup and Luther Grosvenor’s guitar biting in. Produced by Jimmy Miller, the same man who helped shape Traffic and later the Stones, it has those breaks where the voice answers the band, that 12/8 blues feel, and a crescendo that lifts the whole thing. Robert Christgau later called the album’s American reissue hilariously melosoulful, noting how it caught the band before the heavier sounds fully took over. On the US Tobacco Road package they swapped in The Band’s “The Weight” for one of the earlier tracks, which is how the record got its stateside title—right there on the cover, named after this very cut.

The way Spooky Tooth came together is pure late-sixties rock story. Four of the founding members—Harrison on vocals and keyboards, Grosvenor on guitar, Greg Ridley on bass, Mike Kellie on drums—had been playing as the V.I.P.’s out of Carlisle up north in England. That outfit was a beat-era R&B combo that scored some European success, including a number one in France, even if they were mostly unknown at home. They morphed into Art for a short stretch, cutting the psychedelic Supernatural Fairy Tales album that got strong reviews but didn’t move many copies. Island Records man Chris Blackwell had his eye on them, and he brought in American keyboardist and singer Gary Wright, who had been touring Europe with a band called the New York Times that opened for Traffic. Wright was the only Yank in the group, a contrast that some of the English lads initially resisted—Luther Grosvenor later recalled them saying they didn’t want any Yanks in what was an English setup—but Blackwell pushed because Art was running out of road. Once they rehearsed, it clicked hard. Wright has said it was a totally different experience for him, yet he wrote most of the early material, they practiced every day, and the dual-vocal thing with Harrison became their signature. Kellie noted how Wright’s creamy New Jersey presence balanced the Carlisle boys, done in a loving way even if there was some ribbing about Americans at the time. That twin-keyboard approach—Harrison often on harpsichord or piano alongside Wright’s organ—plus the two voices giving it that muscular, almost Righteous Brothers edge but heavier, set them apart right from the start.

They went into the studio with Miller and came out with It’s All About, mixing originals Wright had a hand in with covers like Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child” and that Loudermilk tune. The underground scene in England and Europe picked up on it, progressive radio played tracks including “Tobacco Road,” and they built a cult following even if big chart success stayed just out of reach. Harrison has talked about how they were always an album band, out on the road constantly in America and Europe, yet never quite cracking the singles game the way some of their contemporaries did. There are wild early stories too—the V.I.P.’s days when they jammed with a young Jimi Hendrix on his first night up in England, or the time they pushed their van into a fancy after-show party in Paris looking scruffy as anything. Wright brought a songwriting drive that filled out the records, and the chemistry carried them through Spooky Two and beyond, even with the breakups and reunions that followed. Ridley later went to Humble Pie, Grosvenor to Mott the Hoople as Ariel Bender, Wright into solo work including that big “Dream Weaver” hit, but the foundation was laid right there in those 1967 rehearsals and the 1968 debut.

Spinning this one for the Zoo Freaks always feels like digging into that raw corner of rock history where blues, soul, and the heavier edge were still sorting themselves out. The song’s story of wanting to tear it all down and build something better lands different when you hear it through Spooky Tooth’s arrangement—those voices locked in, the band pushing hard, the whole thing sounding like it could have come from some roadside bar where the lights never quite go out. It’s the kind of deep cut that reminds you why bands like this mattered, the ones who took a country-tinged tale and turned it into something that still holds up when the volume is up and the night is long. You can catch more of that freeform rock spirit anytime over at THE ZOO, where the Zoo Crew keeps the records turning for the Freaks who dig the real stuff.