It has been said that the modern age offers no more pleasurable rewards than this: driving east, across New Mexico, in the early morning light, the desert sunrise even--while listening to the New Riders of the Purple Sage. It's strong seventies imagery, all cowboy songs, loping and drifting beneath a painted sky, past cactus and rocky badlands. My brother didn't take off his high boots and NRPS tee shirt for two years.

This would be easily explicable if one were talking about the original Riders, the child of the Grateful Dead set up when Garcia wanted a chance to play a lot of steel guitars. Deserts are psychedelic. But Garcia soon left the band, and after a stint touring with the Dead, the Riders began to work up a following of their own. But by this time, sans Garcia, they'd lost their spatial the dimension--their music became more linear and descriptive, more ridin-my-pony-to-San-Antone, with that Buddy Gage steel soaring nimbly overhead.

So the appeal lies elsewhere, in the New Mexico air, which I suppose people respond to for the same reasons people respond to all rambling songs, under-the-canopled-sky songs, exotic marijuana music. In a lazy Mexican town people just smoke up all day, and it sure is as different from the suburbs as any place on the continent.

When the New Riders lost Garcia they inherited an amazing steel player, but they also lost their ability to pull off slow numbers, to be very eclectic, and to write good material. They must be the worst songwriters of any good band around, and it's a shame. Still they're a good outdoor band, and though western Massachusetts isn't exactly the Mojave, this is Lanox's biggest gig of the summer. August 30th.