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KVMR FM Nevada City CA RECORD REVIEWS
Nevada City CA
LISTENERS’ GUIDE – Feb/Mar ‘10 - RECORD REVIEWS

Rick Tobey
Chicken Road
http://www.chickenheadblues.com

This seriously entertaining set from the southern backroads defies the “roots” label with the broad range of styles it encompasses, but it’s sure to satisfy listeners partial to that brand of music and then some. Tobey (based somewhere in the Carolinas) produced, engineered, plays guitar and drums, sings with a gravelly voice of the Waits variety and wrote all but three of thirteen tracks on this under-the-radar masterpiece.

Don’t let the rousing opener “Charlene” or the slow
“Deep Enough Blues” impress you that the album is purely blues. The moody, jazz-flavored “Preacher Man” and the bittersweet acoustic love paean “What To Do About You,” with ethereal vocals by Cynthia Tobey, will have you rethinking. The simple and humorous acoustic ditty “Sumptin’ To Eat” will further confound
before blues returns with the deep-grooved acoustic/electric “Hole In the Soul of My Blues.”

Tobey wanders into country and rock territory before the final notes. At that point most listeners will be plenty well satisfied.

- Steve Cagle
 

New Orleans' OFFBEAT MAGAZINE REVIEW
“Chickenhead Blues” CD- January, 2005

Witness a harmonica rack strapped, fedora-outfitted dude playing a National Resophonic axe and chances are he’s a pedantic purist playing only the obscurest Delta material. Yet, given Rick Tobey’s unusual take, all preconceived notions derail right there. His repeated North Carolina migrations have left this New Jersey refugee-Louisiana transplant with an unmistakable Piedmont stamp that’s melded with a Mississippi Delta identity.

That’s enough to turn things upside down which he adroitly does with Willie Dixons’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You” and Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues”.

Tobey’s not anybody’s Blind Mississippi wannabe, which explains the African percussion dancing around his nimble fretwork, steel shaving slide and banshee-shaving harmonica wailing. Sometimes it feels as if it’s eerie blues for werewolves (“Mr. Bad Luck”, “If You Got the Time”) while others (“Honeybun”) are laid back enough, they’re guaranteed not to harsh your mellow.

Occasionally he straps on a ’57 Gibson Les Paul Jr. and rocks out (“I’m in Trouble”). “You My Baby” is even better- a John Lee Hooker-meets Duane Allman type of encounter backed by bass and keys.

Good stuff from a guy who devours the whole chicken, including the head.

-by Dan Willging