I’m going to go out on a limb and say The Lost Southlake Sessions was supposed to become the Rads’ third album for Epic Records, an unprovable premise because there’s no date on these tracks. All you can go on is that percussionist Glen Sears was still with the band, which places it somewhere in the mid- 1990s. Rads keyboardist Ed Volker came across this recording during his research of the band’s archives for the Wild and Free project.
Six of these songs did eventually appear on the band’s third Epic album, Total Evaporation, a dental surgery of a session in which both the band and producer, the late Jim Dickinson, wrestled with Epic’s demand for what a radio-friendly record was supposed to sound like at the beginning of the ’90s. The band members were all looking forward to a planned studio reunion with Dickinson without record industry interference when they learned about the great producer’s passing in August.
At any rate, The Lost Southlake Sessions is an accurate representation of what the Radiators sounded like at this point in the band’s history, without any of the sheen corporate radio demanded. Tempos shift like gears and guitars buzz like they do in person. The mix is crisp and gimmickless, just getting it right and getting out of the way. It’s the kind of album indie bands were defiantly trying to make around the same time, with a raw, uncompromising feel and a visceral energy that matches the intensity of real-time Rads performances.
In fact, it still does. The opening track, “Have a Little Mercy,” is a great table setter, and the band has been playing it a lot lately (it was a highlight of a red hot set at the Maple Leaf in July). This did not appear on Total Evaporation nor did two other perennial crowd pleasers, “Devil’s Dream” and “River Run.” The songs that did show up on Total Evaporation include two muscular Dave Malone showpieces, “Honey From the Bee” and “Everything Gets in the Way.” The Total Evaporation opener, “Soul Deep,” which is dropped to ninth place in the running order here, shares its title with a hit by the Box Tops. The story goes that the band was asked to cover the tune, but instead of doing that Volker wrote his own song called “Soul Deep.” Volker says that’s not what happened, but it’s a good story and an interesting song.
The other songs that became part of Total Evaporation are the straightforward love song “Solid Ground,” built around a beautiful melody; “Good as Gone,” an esoteric rocker that could work either as a treatise on epistemology or social engineering; and the otherworldly “I Want to Go Where the Green Arrow Goes,” one of those Volker songs that sounds like poetry. The simple, evocative words linger in the memory, wrapped in the garlands of a melody that unfolds like a Bach fugue: “Have you seen that green arrow fly? / I want to go there.” Both Southlake and Total Evaporation close on that tune. That’s one thing everyone could agree on.
