Recording Review

Have Rock Will Travel

David La Duke's Sinbad

Format: cassette

By Jim Powell

David La Duke's extended play recording, Have Rock Will Travel, is as refreshing an experience as any that captures the youthful spirit we all attempt to conceal.

Within the format of the recording, four songs and three guitar outtakes, La Duke is able to rekindle the fires of rock music that maintained rock through the Seventies and Eighties and will propel it into the Nineties. La Duke plays rock without apology, without pretense, without any effort to fuse other musical influences into his style of music.

When I first heard of David La Duke through the grapevine, it was his skill as a guitarist that people told me about. La Duke's style of playing the guitar has been derived from styles that were the staples of rock music – Clapton, Krieger, Nugent, Page, Beck, Collins, Rossington, Santana and Schon, to name a few. But La Duke's style is more than just imitation; the style contains assimilation and experimentation and the outtakes demonstrate La Duke's creativeness while retaining the basic form of power rock that La Duke plays.

The four songs on Have Rock Will Travel are not the result of the pseudo-intellectual pursuit of contemplating one's navel, but the close practice of the "keep it simple stupid" method. There is no hidden meaning in the lyrics or fascinating metaphysical symbolism that will spark coffee-shoppe discussions. The songs are straightforward in meaning with a thundering beat and lightning guitar licks.

This recording will certainly bring a smile to the face of anyone who can remember being raised on the radio.