| Billboard (October 9, 1971) |
Talent In Action:
Joy of Cooking/Leo Kottke/Joyous Noise
Santa Monica Civic TheaterCapitol Records' Joy Wagon concert promotion tour drew a full and unusually enthusiastic crowd to the Santa Monica Civic. The stars of the bill, Berkeley's Joy of Cooking, turned in an impressive set that shows the group lives up to all those rave reveiws they've been getting lately. The most impressive things about Joy of Cooking are Toni Brown's keyboard work and the harmonizing of Miss Brown and Terry Garthwaite. Toni is a Joan Baez type in both looks and singing style while guitarist Garthwaite looks and sounds out of the Janis Jopin [sic] mold. The girls' singing combines into one excellent voice.
Leo Kottke is a super-spectacular solo guitarist after the manner of Sandy Bull. He's handsome and has a pleasantly eccentric stage manner. One of the Kottke specialities is bottleneck style on 12-string guitar and it was impossible to see how he got the bottleneck on and off his pinky without missing a note when he changed to a chorus of fancy picking.
Joyous Noise was not of the same high quality of the other two Joy Wagon acts. The quintet features two effective acoustic guitarists, a lot of mediocre singing and too much tuning up. Admittedly the crowd, which loved everything at the concert, loved them. But I found it the kind of group that you only enjoy for the first three numbers, and Joyous Noise stayed on long past their welcome. -- Nat Feedland.
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