Their 1978 Capitol press release read: "LeRoux takes its name
from the Cajun French term for the thick and hearty gravy base
that's used to make a gumbo." Louisiana's LeRoux (the
first album) was a musical gumbo that blended various instruments
and arrangements for some spicy, mouth-watering pop-rock. Using
blues, R&B, funk, jazz, rock and Cajun as their base, their
southern anthem "New Orleans Ladies," voted Song of The Century
by Gambit Magazine, simmered with the laid-back feel of the
"Big Easy," evoking images of Bourbon Street and the Bayou.
That song, together with their smash hit "Nobody Said It Was
Easy," brings LeRoux daily airplay from D.C. to Baton rouge
and they remain cult heroes to this day.
The act began to gel in 1975 in Baton Rouge,
Louisiana as the Jeff Pollard Band. They came into their own
in '77, touring the United States and Africa with Clarence "Gatemouth"
Brown through an arrangement with the US State Department. The
Group's big break came when Leon Medica, the band's producer,
presented a demo tape to Paul Tannen at Screen Gems-EMI while
doing a session in Nashville and making trips to Colorado to
contribute bass parts to a Dirt Band Album at William McEuen's
Aspen recording Society Studios.
McEuen, Tanney and Attorney John Frankenheimer
helped Medica secure a recording contract with Capitol Records.
Renamed "Louisiana's LeRoux," they recorded two albums, produced
by Medica, of Louisiana-flavored pop-rock (their eponymous debut
and Keep The Fire Burning) and a third, Up, which
saw them shift styles to accommodate Jai Winding's more mainstream
production. It's this period that this recording is from. In
Up, the band had produced one of the finest examples
of melodic rock ever, and tracks like "Let Me Be Your Fantasy,"
"Get It Right The First Time," and "Crying Inside" are rightly
considered classics of the genre. The following albums Last
Safe Place and So Fired Up continued in the AOR vein
that Up had so superbly begun. But this is where it really
began for LeRoux.
