It was becoming sort of a common practice during the late '60's and early '70's for the elder Blues statesmen to record LP's with the younger rock stars whom they were in a large part responsible for and who were in awe of them with some expectedly various results. With the exception of "The London Howlin' Wolf Sessions", most were found to be lacking due to fact that so little common ground was actually shared by the unusual pairings. Muddy Waters and Johnny Winter would be the other combination that I can think of that really made the most of the Blues explosion and they gave us 4 amazing LP's before Muddy's death.

Hooker'N'Heat was another rare notable exception to this rule. The team of Hooker and Canned Heat frequently played gigs together live and recorded together during what was a brief yeomanship for the boogie band. We get the best of both worlds on this release as well since the first CD is mostly Hooker playing and stomping out his mean and hypnotic solo style that got this all started in the first place. Canned Heat shines on the second CD and they do an admirable job of hanging in there with the King of Boogie.

This material has been in my collection ever since I began to become interested in more than just the usual music that was doled out on the radio back in the day and has been cememted in some form to whatever format of music playback device I owned since I saw Canned Heat when they played in Trumann, Arkansas in the early '80's. Ok, so I admit that there is a bit of an emotional attachment to this one.