#white which

Molly Hatchet: Double Trouble Live (1985)

Me and my classic rock geek friends have been trading Molly Hatchet emails for days now, debating the merits and demerits of these Jacksonville, Florida-spawned heirs apparent to Lynyrd Skynyrd.

It’s complicated …

We’ve argued over the band’s sell-out to ‘80s AOR and glossy production, singer Danny Joe Brown vs. singer Jimmy Farrar, and even the misleading “advertising” of their fantasy album covers, which definitely convinced this uninformed young metal-head to buy 1984’s The Deed is Done.

So what of the band’s 1985 in-concert collection, Double Trouble Live?

Well, aside from harking back to the 1970s’ glorious tradition of double live LPs, there’s no better Molly Hatchet “greatest hits” set, if you ask me – even though it covers the group’s disastrous flirtation (see what I did there?) with ‘80s demons on the likes of “Stone in Your Heart,” “Satisfied Man” and the intolerable “Walk On the Side of the Angels” (is that a fucking saxophone?).

That’s because it compensates for those sins with numerous no-fuss rockers (“Whiskey Man,” “Bounty Hunter”), extended boogie jams (“Gator Country,” “Fall of the Peacemakers”), and stone-cold classics (“Flirtin’ With Disaster,” “Beatin’ the Odds”), even as the band owns up to their forefathers’ inescapable influence with reverent interpretations of “Freebird” and the Allmans’ “Dreams I’ll Never See.”

To be sure, Double Trouble Live paints a complicated picture, but that’s about the sum of Molly Hatchet’s career and, to be fair, many other second and third generation southern rock bands.

* One trivia item I just learned while writing this is that Molly’s bassist for these recordings, the perfectly named Riff West, had been a member of Capricorn Records-signed, early ‘70s southern rock/glam/occult weirdos White Witch!