Joy of Cooking – Back to Your Heart 2 CD Set (2006)

A double CD of previously unreleased songs and a live performance. Many of these songs were rehashed and rehearsed in Toni’s living room in Berkeley. We remember the gigs, the jams, the ecstatic moments of impromptu music that fell around us as friends came by to sit in–Richard Greene, Bruce Conner, Jeffrey Cain, Michael Rossman, Pete Berg, Carl Dukatz, Larry Wilson. Here we pass on to you a flavor of our nostalgia in hopes you’ll remember those good times in the same joyful spirit we do.

Some of these songs were club regulars that never made the albums;   others rarely saw the lights of night.   Some of these recordings are taken from cassette,   made listenable by our engineer, Steve Maki. A few of these versions are wabi sabi–flawed, but with heart and spirit. All went into the pot that created the flavor of the band.

The Joy of Cooking was a Berkeley-based band of eclectic musicians who made infectious music in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The sound is rooted in the voices, the songs, the music of its two women members and driven by a propelling, innovative three-man rhythm section. The SF Chronicle’s Jon Carroll described the band as “a remarkable rock and roll band, half ballads and half boogie, with a driving rhythm section fronted by two swell women, Toni Brown (a smart, crafty songwriter who could evoke sentiment without sentimentality) and Terry Garthwaite, who sings like an angel with dirty wings.”

Track Listing:
Disc One

1. Love is just a 4-letter word
2. Midnight blues
3. Don’t forget me, love
4. Sometime
5. He’s comin’ home tomorrow
6. Look back
7. Good king
8. Trippet
9. Dream blues
10. Song for silent wings
11. This old life
12. How deep the dark
13. Summer fire
14. I’ve made up my mind
15. Flying saucer blues
16. Yatata (going away song)
17. Song in blue

    Disc Two

18. Bad luck
19. Humpty dumpty
20. Castles
21. If some god
22. Dancing couple
23. Brownsville/Mockingbird
24. Laugh, don’t laugh