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This is another hot 30-song anthology from Buffalo Bop, consisting of mostly hot rocking numbers with a country bent. David Dunn's "Rock Me" manages some impressive guitar pyrotechnics and solo sax acrobatics, and it pretty well sets the standard for this set. "Gonna Be Nice Tonight," a primitive piece of rock & roll that might almost qualify as "retarded" in its reliance on repeated words, may not have belonged here, but most of the rest is professional and more than a little inspired. Terry Dunavan's "Rockin' at School" is a nicely paced piece of teen fantasy, and Billy Adkinson's "Sugar Lump" is a surprisingly hard-edged number, considering its title. An outfit called the Shadows, having nothing to do with Hank B. Marvin and company, provides a free-wheeling, smoothly professional "Redwood Fence," sparked by a Chuck Berry-inspired guitar break. "Katy D" by Billy and the Jokers is a cheerful delineation of teenaged rural lust, and Chance Halladay's "Home Run" (which never had a prayer of airplay) has a lot of fun with baseball terminology and romance set to a decent rocking beat. There's only one ringer here amid these generally wild and lusty rockers -- Jimmy Work's beautiful, relatively languid "Tennessee Border" is stuck in here, and it's a little too country although it does fit in with the social ambience of some of the rest of the music, if not the genre. It definitely pales beside Glenn Mooney's loud, wild, roaring "Come Over Rover" and Leroy Bowman's "Uh Huh," with its intimate inventory of the object of his affections ("she's five-foot-two, every little inch is fine"). A lot of those present looked like singularly unlikely rock & rollers, but the sound on 27 of these 30 tracks shows that almost any of them might have made it (why the producers closed with a sappy country-style ballad like "Love Gone" by Ramon Maupin is anyone's guess). ~ Bruce Eder
