The Frost
The Best of The Frost

(Vanguard)

First Appeared at The Music Box, June 2003, Volume 10, #6

Written by John Metzger

Unless one was a die-hard rock fan, growing up in the Midwest during the late ’60s, it’s highly unlikely that The Frost is a band with a recognizable name. Nevertheless, the group did spawn some impressive offspring: Bass player Mark Farner went on to form Grand Funk Railroad, and guitarist Dick Wagner worked on projects with Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, and Peter Gabriel. Over the course of its three albums, The Frost melded British psychedelia with garage rock and wound up sounding an awful lot like The Who with a touch of the Bay Area experience. Its second album Rock and Roll Music was recorded live and then touched up considerably; in fact, most of its tracks wound up being drawn from the band’s subsequent studio sessions. The recently released The Best of The Frost revisits the album and features a re-mixed recording of The Frost’s original 1969 concert at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom. What’s particularly striking about it is the unyielding ferocity with which the band attacked songs like Baby Once You Got It, the Beatles-Jefferson Airplane-Jimi Hendrix-Who hybrid Fifteen Hundred Miles, and the Barry Mann-Cynthia Weil tune We Got to Get Out of This Place. Even the slow groove of Donny’s Blues packed a punch. True, the band was largely derivative, and its songs weren’t anywhere near as good as those of its peers. Hidden within the mayhem, however, were hints of the guitar-based rock — from Uriah Heep to Alice Cooper — that would sweep America during the ’70s, proving that The Frost were, nonetheless, a key lynchpin in the development of rock ’n‘ roll.

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Ratings

1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!

Copyright © 2003 The Music Box