[.ca] Are You Ready/Pacific Gas and Electric

electricify yur soul album.:
my dad has this in his lp collection, it's a great blues rock album with soul & passion makes you want to dance , sing & cry maybe. but it a great recording no nonsense jammin that empowers your soul with a charge of excitement that comes off the recording. feel the electric vibe. highly recommended for people who like cream , joplin etc. dig it man!

classic blues-rock:
Collectables Records has done blues-rock fans a great service by releasing this 2-on-1 Golden Classics Edition. Pacific Gas and Electric best known for their top-20 hit "Are You Ready," a gospel-tinged sing-along from 1970, were in reality a wonderful blues-based rock and roll outfit, led by vocalist Charlie Allen and fueled by original James Gang (and Joe Walsh mentor) Glenn Schwartz. These two albums, their second and third with Columbia, placed in reverse order on the disc for some odd reason (wanting to place the familiar "Are You Ready" first?), are wonderful reminders of the blues-rock revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s and is filled with beautiful tunes, notably "Screamin" and "Bluesbuster" among others. I highly recommend this disc for all fans of blues-rock.

are your ready?:
This is a rerelease of PGE's early Columbia discs. hawg for you is a badassed blues take . The guitarist Glenn Schwarz is one of my favorites but I have never tracked down his later work. The second 8-12 cuts are from their 1st Columbia release, notable for Frank Cook, who drummed with Canned Heat at Monterrey and on the the early Liberty lps. Charlie Allen was the vocalist on these cuts and later did some solo lps into oblivion. These tracks rep the heavy blues trend of Johnny Winter with soul of Otis Redding. Buy it used.

Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon!:
Call it nostalgia if you'd like, but when I saw this CD it brought me back to that psychedelic era of bra burning, draft card burning, raw rock and roll and free love and, good or bad, I just had to purchase it. Pacific Gas and Electric was initially known as Bluesberry Jam and, at that time, included drummer Fito De La Parra. In 1968, De La Parra left the Bluesberry and joined Canned Heat. Canned Heat's drummer, Frank Cook left Canned Heat and joined what would soon be known as Pacific Gas and Electric. (De La Para obviously fared better in the trade.) About the same time Cook and De La Para swapped places, guitar extraordinaire Glenn Schwartz left the James Gang and his home town in Ohio to come to California. Schwartz was so good that the rock and roll world predicted the end of the James Gang. Interestingly, Schwartz was soon replaced in the James Gang by none other than Joe Walsh and the band continued on. With the addition of Schwartz, PG & E was complete. The full band now consisted of Charlie Allen--vocals, Frank Cook-drums, Brent Black-bass and Glenn Schwartz-guitar and it was off to the recording studio. The bands first release, Get It On, immediately spurred controversy when it's album cover featured sexual innuendos in the form of a train and a bullet aimed at a pretty girl, the cover was censored and the album was re-released and performed dismally. Over the next two years, 1969 and 1970 respectively, the band changed labels moving from the little known Bright Orange label to Columbia Records and released the self-titled "Pacific Gas and Electric" and "Are You Ready", which have been put together on this CD. The self-titled debut on Columbia Records was essentially hitless but, nonetheless, sold enough records to convince Columbia that a third album was in order. "Are You Ready" soon followed and it's title track, with backup vocals by the gospel tinged "Blackberries" became a hit. But trouble continued to plague the band when Canadian officials banned the band from Canada due to an admission by one of the members that he took drugs (What a shock!). Glenn Schwartz, shortly there after, announced at a concert that he had found God and he soon departed the band moving back to Ohio to join other Christian musicians to form "The All Saved Freak Band". Schwartz was replaced in the band by guitarist Ken Utterback and, despite the release of a pretty good fourth CD "PG & E", the band began to fade away. There is a lot of history here, and the truth of the matter is that the band was not half bad. Schwartz was an excellent guitarist whose riffs sound as good today as when they first rang from his guitar 30 years ago and Charlie Allen's soulful and powerful vocals were ahead of the times. One last bit of trivia, the band was so good that they played on the soundtrack to Otto Preminger's movie "Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon".

All Good but we need "Get It On" !!:
There is nothing bad to say about PG & E but here we go again with this reissue thing. It seems as though some record companies will only put out the radio play music and not what the fans like most from these bands. Get It On was and still is the best Pacific Gas & Electric album, seems as though the small Orange label owners should try to pull thier heads out of thier a-- and put the master tape on disc. But this review is about these two albums right? Buy this Cd, it kicks and this band was one of the best at that time, Charlie was a great vocalist and God rest his soul..

• Are You Ready?
• Hawg for You
• Staggolee
• Blackberry
• Love, Love, Love, Love, Love
• Mother, Why Don't You Cry?
• Elvira
• Screamin'
• When a Man Loves a Woman
• Bluesbuster
• Death Row #172
• Miss Lucy
• My Women
• She's Long and She's Tall
• Pacific Gas & Electric Suite Medley: The Young Rabbits/Constitutional S
• Redneck