Slow to 20 — Jim Post (Festival)

Reviewed by G. Mazengarb.

Jim Post grew up in Colorado in a small town, learned how to boogie, drink, applejack and play pretty keen guitar. After dropping out of High School through a fast-developing social conscience he joined the mainstream of earnest young folkies playing usually for free in coffee bars, booze bars and madhouses. "But the truth remains that no-one wants to know", and so Jim Post unlike most of these frustrated pickers strummed his way into a recording studio and started singing strange little ballads like Mr Acres who lived with his daughter and their son and when the daughter was lured away by a handsome hunter poor Mr Acres lived alt alone in his mountain shack; filling out the gaps meanwhile with subtley disguised protests and comments on society and people, and doing it cleverly enough not to antagonise. [Sounds like another gutless hippie wanker — Ed.] His album called Colorado Exile, was something of a neglected masterpiece. Disillusioned by the lack of interest he had created, Post started writing songs like Sing.

"I've been making music ever since I was a / young child I'd go back to the forest, stand up / on a stump sing to the 20,000 trees. And I'm / gonna go on singing, 'cos it makes life so easy / I sing because I'm happy, sing because I'm free".

Altogether the album sounds like a slightly heavier James Taylor, with the same introspective songs and good but not outstanding music.