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.
