of Bourbon Street", the site was a centre for the city's uplifting second line funk music. According to Lionel Batiste Sr. of Treme Brass Band: "Cabbage Alley was around Perdido Street. They had a lot of musicians down there—it was almost like a [red light] district—fast women. Near the battlefield." Designed by John Echevarrieta, the album cover is based on a variation of René Magritte's 1952 painting The Listening Room, which itself had been reproduced on the sleeve of the Jeff Beck Group's Beck-Ola (1969). According to authors Angie Errigo and Steve Leaning, "Both pictures are Surrealist in the incongruous, claustrophobic propinquity of two equally convincing, yet texturally antithetical realities." Cabbage Alley received wide acclaimed by music critics, with many describing as the band's best album yet. Writing favourably in Rolling Stone, Bob Palmer praised Modeliste's drumming for imparting "more rhythmic variety to every bar than any American soul group has yet employed", and the rest of the group for "often [doubling] on auxiliary percussion, resulting in a percussive complexity that is both a new and natural direction." He added that even the album's weaker songs contain some of "the rhythmic vitality and emerging roots-consciousness that looks like the most important new development in the black popular music of the Seventies." The Windsor Star writer John Laycock described the album as "nice enough and interesting in a record-scholar's way" and highlighted its similarity to reggae. Juan Rodriguez of The Montreal Star deemed it "a good dancing record, if you play it real loud and, as James Brown says, con-cen-trate." They wrote that the sound is thick and funky and the group can be forgiven for "[overdoing] it sometimes", while praising the combination of the band and Toussaint's production for resulting in "some unique product". Commercial response Despite the album's strong reviews, smoother sound, and the move to a major label, Cabbage Alley and its two singles were commercial disappointments. The album reached number 48 on the Billboard Top Soul LPs chart, but unlike the group's first two albums, it missed the Billboard Top LPs and Tape chart. Arthur Neville told an interviewer for Blues & Soul that he believed the album should have had stronger exposure, "because everyone agrees that the material is the strongest we have ever done." While the group blamed the poor sales on lack of promotion, St. Pierre believed they were also because "it was somewhat