Bob Weir-Heaven Help the fool

Heaven Help the fool

This has been my favorite Bob Wier solo album for the year. Yeah, you could say Ace, but that's pretty much a Dead album, and most of those tunes did in fact become show staples. , none of the tunes on Heaven Help the Fool ever really made it into the Dead's rotation, although they flirted with the title track several times as an acoustic instrumental in 1980, tried out This Time Forever once in 78 acoustically, and did Salt Lake City in SLC some time in the late 80s/early 90s.

This is a very "polished" album, not surprising since Keith Olsen, the producer for the Dead's Terrapin Station, did the chores for this album as well. I think the results are far more successful in Bobby's case because the polish, southern LA studio sound really suits this set of songs. And BTW, he gets some great LA session musicians to back him and the results are pretty impressive. BTW--Billy Cobham just doesn't do "mediocre."

Sure it's a lot of cheesy 70s singer-songwriter "angst." Some of us geezers who were around for the 70s actually like that. Like every Van Morrison album from that era, Blood on the Tracks, early (good) Springsteen--those are all 70s "singer-songwriter" albums. It definitely won't appeal to certain heads who have a pretty set idea of what Bob should sound like, but it's not nearly as bad as the negative reviewer below believes it.