The Soundsations / The Ramrods - Shout Including The Ramrods Complete Recordings (1961-66) [2001]

As opposed to many of the Gear Fab releases, Shout is a mere curiosity, and really not even a very enjoyable one at that. In essence, it reissues the output of a third- or fourth-rate rec-room rock band, which tends to have a severely limited fan base even among devotees of 1960s pop. The most interesting material on the collection comes courtesy of the Ramrods, the barely teenaged combo led by Tom Carter and Johnny Boggs that operated from 1961 until the rest of the band broke from Carter in 1966 to form the Soundsations. It's most interesting not because the songs are necessarily strong (they aren't especially) but because it consists of mostly self-penned tunes, some of them quite nervy and joyous, and a couple ("Talk, Talk, Talk," "These Are the Things That You Do to Me") that actually betray a melodic flair wholly absent in the later tunes. By the time the Soundsations got around to recording, they had turned into strictly a party band and fallen back on predictable cover material, most of which they had little affinity for. The performances are so tame, in fact, that it's even hard to imagine this stuff entertaining the 13-year-olds down at the youth center on Friday evening, surely the band's core audience. The thin, white-bread cover of "When a Man Loves a Woman" is a more amateurish example of the type of bloodless mangling Pat Boone became infamous for, draining the song of every ounce of its soul. "Midnight Hour" and "I Can't Help Myself" fare marginally better, but you would never have imagined, if this happened to be the first version of "Unchained Melody" you had ever heard, that the song was good, let alone a classic. Oddly enough, the only cut that the band manages to turn into a quasi-amusing romp is the sole original tune, Boggs' slow, heated blues, "Moody Love," although it's nothing special either. As a package, it's up to Gear Fab's usual standards. Whether the terribly dated sounds contained inside deserved to survive into the CD era is another topic altogether, a case where being definitive isn't necessarily a good thing. Only the most ardent, fetishistic, and nostalgic fanatics of early-'60s garage and frat rock need apply.