Turner’s The Last Wombat In Mecca doesn’t have any obvious links to Australia or Islam, but does feature some tasty acoustic guitar. Beyond that I haven’t got a clue what it’s about.
The album starts to build up to a memorable end with Miller’s Feel So Glad, pushed along by Hopkins’ stately piano runs behind Miller’s heartfelt vocal. Deceptively straightforward. Finally there’s the title track, written by Davis, where a swirling organ and strummed acoustic introduction switches to a spooky echoing spoken passage, which in turn turns into an uplifting extended play-out bringing a classy album to a classy conclusion.
After four quality albums I had high hopes for Number Five. Unlike the current situation where news of forthcoming releases is flashed around the internet, followed by a wave of discussion, speculation, analysis of leaked copies and so on, there was nobody around to sound the warning bell when it transpired that Glyn Johns had been eased out of the producer’s chair and Miller had eased himself into it. Apart from that, on the surface the only obvious differences between Number Five and its predecessor was the sharing of bass duties between Lonnie Turner and Bobby Winkelman and a bit of harmonica from Charlie McCoy. The writing credits looked much as before with a track from Winkelman and a Miller/Scaggs collaboration, but the album was, in a number of ways, a major disappointment.
Since there wasn’t much variation in the other elements one wonders whether the departure of Johns was the major factor. The fact that it was the fifth album they’d released between April 1968 and June 1970 may also have something to do with the matter. While I haven’t listened to the album in years, even at $10.99 I’m not in a hurry to buy a copy from the iTunes store and lack of an operational turntable means that the vinyl copy isn’t going to get a workout any time soon. Basically, after a couple of listens I filed the vinyl away and waited to see what came next. I wasn’t quite ready to write Miller off, but at the same time I was starting to have some serious reservations.
I think I heard the following album once. In fact I may well have failed too get all the way through the first listen to Rock Love. A mixture of live and studio recordings, the album was almost universally condemned. if I went as far as buying a copy it was long ago consigned to a second-hand store. It’s certainly conspicuous by its absence from the vinyl collection, and if I’m disinclined to pay $10.99 for Number Five, there’s no way I’m shelling out $17.99 for Rock Love.