HYDRA Doesn't Sound Like the Allmans (Good!)

HYDRA Doesn't Sound Like the Allmans (Good!)

(Left to right) Wayne Bruce, Orville Davis, Spencer Kirkpatrick, Steve Pace.

Hydra is the last of the original wave of Southern club bands, which started filling rock nightclubs in the Southeast as the Allman Brothers Band moved on to huge halls and AM singles. That wave also includes Stonehenge (now known as Mose Jones), Lynyrd Skynyrd, Wet Willie, the Atlanta Rhythm Section, and the Marshall Tucker Band. New groups are taking their places in the beer-andhemp-stained rockytonks along the Southern , circuit, groups like Copper Hill, Warm and Protrudamus. The Original Wave has largely passed the recording point: they have all had a taste of vinyl, and some have found that petroleum products really don’t taste so good. And now it’s Hydra’s turn, their first album having been released by Capricorn in August.

Hydra will suffer from the problem that each of the other bands faced, and that is the tendency to lump all Southern groups into a critical .oatmeal that comes out resembling Gregg Allman and Richard Betts. “The Brothers” have had some very attractive coattails indeed —> both Wet Willie and the Marshall Tucker Band got a great deal of initial live exposure from people who had come to see the Allman Brothers but the difference between the Brothers and Hydra is as obvious as grits vs. corn bread.

There is an urban South, believe it or not, and for every kid who has chucked it all for an R.F.D. address, there are ten others living in cities and being affected by them. Hydra’s music comes from that environment :Mt is positively Southern but still has little to do with agriculture. The band has a number called “Glitter Queen” on their album; the title alone would probably keep the Brothers away from it.

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But Hydra isn’t a glitter band, either. Their staple is power-chorded rock & roll and traditional slow blues — but the blues tunes remind one of streets at night rather than cotton fields by day. Working in Macon, they can’t help but be influenced by what has gone there before, but Hydra is not a prototypical Macon band: the last thing which excited singer Wayne Bruce, guitarist Spencer Kirkpatrick, bassist Orville Davis and drummer Steve Pace to frenzy was their date at Richards’ in Atlanta with Iggy and the Stooges. Hydra spent a great deal of. time with the band during their week’s stay, and Iggy joined them on stage sometimes. It’s a subtle thing, but now Hydra’s warmup jams always tend to metamorphose into “Raw Power.” This may be the first Southern band which has more to do with Iggy (musically, not theatrically) than with the Brothers themselves. It is a strange type of synthesis — the first of its kind.

Hydra was produced — meticulously — by Danny Turbeville of the Record Plant in New York. It took Danny a few days to slow down to the Georgia pace, which, in a nutshell, is Take Your Time, But Get It Right. There is a feeling around Capricorn Sound which is never quite put into words but is hinted and parlayed and aimed at: here we have something a little bit different from the norm. Geographically, it could be put this way: there is a Georgia Sound, which has proven commercially acceptable. Toda, we are working on a Big City Georgia Sound. Hydra comes closest in their live dates to what Atlanta people take that sound to be, but it’s never before been explained on record. Hydra’s first LP may well be a pivotal album for Southern music. Or maybe not.

Tom Dupree