Grin: The Very Best Of Grin Featuring Nils Lofgren

Backing Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen, Nils Lofgren established his place as the consummate professional musician, the sort of sideman whose presence nearly guaranteed something compelling. On the other hand, Grin, the band Lofgren began as a D.C. teenager, never got much attention for the four albums it released between 1971 and '73. What most listeners missed, and what's captured on The Very Best Of Grin, is the sound of an excellent country-rock band flexing its well-developed pop muscle. "White Lies," for example, sounds like the work of an Americanized George Harrison, but it's the influence of Young, Lofgren's earliest champion, that stretches furthest over Grin's work, particularly such dreamy mid-tempo numbers as "Hi, Hello Home." Oddly, Grin's most innovative moments may also be the ones that sound shakiest now: You can hear the band anticipating Lynyrd Skynyrd and the like on such growling rockers as "Slippery Fingers," but Lofgren doesn't really have the voice to make them work. He does, however, have the flooring musicianship to make his vocal limitations irrelevant, as well as an expertise on the softer end of the vocal scale to make a ballad like "Soft Fun" sound like the lost classic it is. The selective, self-creating world of classic-rock radio, which tends to pare off interesting twigs that never developed into full-grown branches, has forgotten Grin. Anyone interested in a unique pocket of rock history would do well not to make the same mistake.