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“Recorded live and on the cheap, Bring Back the Real Don Steele is an ambivalent valentine to Los Angeles in all its slippery seismic serenity. Yet it’s a Southern California album that doesn’t sound like a typical regional album. This is less the rockin’ Los Angeles of the Doors, X and Red Hot Chili Peppers than the city of understated intimacies and fractured realities heard between the grooves of Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle, Tom Waits’ Nighthawks at the Diner, Randy Newman’s non–“I Love L.A.” L.A. material, and in the Negro Problem albums helmed by Smolin’s longtime mono-monikered friend and sometime producer, Stew.”
