Rabbit Holes

Five decades later, even dedicated fans of former Procol Harum guitarist Robin Trower have had to admit that they appreciate his solo albums for more than just his guitar gluttony. To be sure, For Earth Below's title track and his other blues-rock jams, obviously influenced by both the tone and approach of Jimi Hendrix, are foundational for today's stoner-rock subgenre. But while Trower wrote the tunes and is the headliner on all his solo albums, including a new 50th anniversary reissue of For Earth Below on Chrysalis Records, time has shown that the most resonant reason to listen to this power trio is James Dewar.

A vocalist and bassist from Scotland who was once part of Stone the Crows, Dewar's soulful voice is one of the most underrated in all rock music, with an uncanny resemblance to that of Free/Bad Company's Paul Rodgers. Without Dewar, Trower's solo catalog would often tread perilously close to indulgent dross. Equally talented at ballads and more uptempo numbers, on For Earth Below Dewar succeeds best in "Confessin' Midnight," where he uses his best soul growl to dig into lines like "Midnight and the jailer's watching/Thin dime can buy a soul/Midnight come and get me/In time you will start to know."

Paced by a shaking tambourine and propelled by drummer Bill Lordan's cymbal work, "Alethea" and "Fine Day" are examples of how appealing this trio could be when the rhythms are uptempo, though neither are out-and-out rockers. In fact, when Trower, the originator of one of the most memorably rapt, opened-mouthed guitar-player faces in all of rock, upped the tempos&Mdash;as in his solo successes "Too Rolling Stoned" and "Day of the Eagle," both from 1974's Bridge of Sighs&Mdash;his career gained momentum. But for the glory years of his solo career (during which "Funky" Paul Olsen supplied the distinctive cover art), it was usually left to Dewar to put the slower material over. While "A Tale Untold" on For Earth Below starts out snappy, with a spacious, appealing arrangement, it eventually succumbs to a slower, Troweresque tempo.

Former Procol Harum keyboardist Matthew Fisher, who produced Trower's first two solo albums, Twice Removed from Yesterday and Bridge of Sighs, was again hired as producer of For Earth Below, which was finished by December 1974 at The Record Plant in Los Angeles. But Gary Ladinsky was brought in as engineer, replacing Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick. For Earth Below would become Trower's highest-peaking album, reaching #5 and spending 17 weeks on the Billboard charts.

The big difference between Bridge of Sighs and For Earth Below, according to the liner notes of this new reissue, was that change in engineer. "The absence of engineer Geoff was keenly felt, by Trower in particular," wrote David Sinclair in the liner notes. "And although he was working with the same rig he had used for Bridge of Sighs&Mdash;a black 1973 Stratocaster through two 100W Marshall heads and two 4 × 12 cabinets&Mdash;the huge, spacey dynamics that Emerick had been so adept at capturing in Air Studios in London proved more difficult to locate." "I wasn't really getting the guitar sound that I wanted," Trower said. "I just generally had to try a bit harder." The second LP in the For Earth Below reissue contains what the liner notes call a "newly unearthed" extended stereo mix, about which there is no information in the liner notes, which however provide a thorough overview of Trower's career. To find out more, I reached out to James Batsford, the project's executive producer and owner of the New Land record label, who now also works full-time for Chrysalis Records.

"The album as originally released was basically edited down from longer recordings, which have never been heard publicly, and not even by Robin since he recorded them," Batsford wrote to me in an email. "They were heard by the album's producer, Matthew Fisher. Some of these longer, unedited versions of the songs feature quite a bit of additional material. Our reissue engineer, Richard Whittaker, created new stereo mixes from these recordings, which have a new level of sonic detail."

The four-CD edition, which comes in the form of a book, has a disc of Outtakes and Rarities, the bulk of which were taken from a pair of January 1975 appearances on the BBC's Live in Concert and Top of the Pops shows. The set's fourth disc contains a previously unreleased live show from Los Angeles in March 1975 that sounds like it was professionally recorded on multitrack tape, though Batsford says he was unable to track down who engineered it. The new LPs were mastered and cut at half-speed by Phil Kinrade at AIR Mastering.

Batsford says that Chrysalis has a raft of reissue projects in the pipeline, including a new reissue of Ten Years After's album Ssssh, for which a new stereo mix has been created. That package will also include a previously unreleased 1969 Ten Years After live show from Finland that was uncovered in the Finnish radio archives. There will also be a new reissue series called the Chrysalis Red Series, which will feature deep catalog reissues of albums by Brian Protheroe and The Clouds. Coming in September on his New Land label is a five-LP box focusing on the five albums trumpeter/singer Chet Baker recorded in one week in summer 1965.