Jimi Hendrix Experience Are You Experienced? 2 страница

What she ended up with was an album of pure pain and suffering, and drum-tight soul. Just don’t expect Etta to love it in the same way. ‘They rant and rave about Tell Mama,’ says James, ‘how I sang the shit out of it. I wish I could agree. I don’t like being cast in the role of the Great Earth Mother, the gal you come to for comfort and easy sex. Nothing was easy then. My career was building up but my life was falling apart.’

The Thirteenth Floor Elevators Easter Everywhere

Alleged to get you high even when you’re straight.Record label: International ArtistsProduced: Lelan RodgersRecorded: Walt Andrus Studios, Houston; late spring 1967Released: September 1967Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)Personnel: Roky Erickson (v, g); Tommy Hall (jug, v); Dan Galindo (b); Stacy Sutherland (g); Danny Thomas (d)Track listing: Slip Inside This House (S/US); Slide Machine; She Lives (In A Time Of Her Own) (S/US); Nobody To Love; Baby Blue (S/US); Earthquake; Dust; Levitation (S/US); I Had To Tell You; Postures (Leave Your Body Behind)Running time: 41.29Current CD: Charly SNAP132CD adds: Splash 1; Kingdom Of Heaven; You’re Gonna Miss Me; Reverberation (Doubt); You Don’t Know; Fire Engine; Monkey Island; Rollercoaster; Levitation (Instrumental) I Don’t Ever Wanna Come Down (Previously Unreleased)Further listening: The Psychedelic Sounds Of (1966), their first albumFurther reading: There are several good Thirteenth Floor Elevators websites; try ex-Elevator Danny Thomas’ www.geocities.com/ucdnlo/ or http://elevators. blinkenlights.orgDownload: HMV Digital; iTunes

The Thirteenth Floor Elevators were the first band to describe or advertise their music as psychedelic, beating The Grateful Dead by two weeks. ‘I come out of Buddy Holly and then ran straight into Bob Dylan who then ran outta me,’ Roky Erickson said in 1996, ‘I was as Texas as I ever was, like a full dead creature could be.’ Which is about as articulate and succinct a statement about the Elevators as one could hope for today.

Producer Lelan Rodgers was a record business veteran – like famous brother Kenny – when he discovered the band playing in Houston. Signed to his optimistically named International Artists label, they hit Number 55 in the US with Roky’s You’re Gonna Miss Me. Rodgers was convinced he had hit makers on his hands but jug player/chief lyricist/resident Owsley-type Tommy Hall kept the band pioneering psychedelia and they never troubled the charts again, becoming Lone Star state legends instead.

Hall, his wife Clementine, virtuoso guitarist Stacy Sutherland (more responsible for the style of those Fillmore West acid guitar solos than Jorma Kaukonen or Jerry Garcia) and Erickson wrote songs whose lyrics were laced with a stoned mysticism. Coupled with their hypnotic music, the lyrics were supposedly enough to give the listener the answer they were searching for, as well as provide him or her with a real high. Ya dig? Rodgers deliberately underpromoted the band because, he claimed, he wanted their growing mystique (they caused the authorities in Texas as much worry as the Sex Pistols would in the UK) to snowball. Which meant outside Texas relatively few heard the West Coast/Gulf Coast power of Slip Inside This House or Nobody To Love, the sweet folkish balladry of I Had To Tell You or Sutherland’s stunning guitar leads or Erickson’s manic vocals (he had one of the most earnest singing styles in pop).

By the end of these sessions they were already too far gone (Erickson would take acid over 300 times) and the authorities were waiting to pounce. The band began a slow dissolution. Yet ask any Texas musician over 40 about them and they’ll tell you: the Elevators weren’t mere prophets, they were kings.

Country Joe And The Fish Electric Music For The Mind And Body

Pioneers of psychedelic-protest mix acid and satire. Record label: VanguardProduced: Samuel ChartersRecorded: Sierra Sound Laboratories, California; January–February 1967Released: October 1967 (UK) May 1967 (US)Chart peaks: None (UK) 39 (US)Personnel: Joe McDonald (v, g, hm, tambourine); Barry Melton (v, g); David Cohen (g, o); Bruce Barthol (b, hm); Gary ‘Chicken’ Hirsch (d); Bob DeSousa (e)Track listing: Flying High; Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine; Death Sound Blues; Happiness Is A Porpoise Mouth; Section 43; Superbird; Sad And Lonely Times; Love; Bass Strings; The Masked Marauder; GraceRunning time: 43.30Current CD: Vanguard VMD79244Further listening: Try I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die (1967) for more of the same, albeit with a little more bad-trip darknessFurther reading: www.countryjoe.com (official); www.well.com/~cjfish/ (fan site)Download: Not currently legally availableElectric Music For The Mind And Body certainly sounds like an 11-song panegyric for LSD but, unusually for 1967, it also acknowledged the real world of Vietnam-era politics. That was largely due to activist/frontman Country Joe McDonald, who’d formed the group in 1965 to play jugband protest songs to Berkeley University beatniks. One, I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die-Rag, later became the counter-culture’s key anti-war anthem, eclipsing the band’s psychedelic reputation in the process.

A druggy mid-1966 EP, Rag Baby, enjoyed considerable success in and around San Francisco and later that year the Fish were signed to Vanguard.

‘In many ways, Electric Music is fairly unrepresentative of what the band actually sounded like in concert,’ says Barry Melton. ‘When we played live, the amps had a typical overdriven sound that was much more rock’n’roll-ish. But (engineer) Bob DeSousa insisted we turn the amps down very low so that he could maintain separation between the instruments and balance them.’ The result was far more polished and rehearsed than the Fish had intended, but in spring 1967, Electric Music – dressed in one of the era’s more evocative sleeves – was still way ahead of the competition. Taut, psychedelicised R&B (Flying High, Love) and waltz-time craziness (Porpoise Mouth, The Masked Marauder), were complemented by some extraordinary acid-rock excursions (Bass Strings, Section 43 and Grace), where Melton’s highly-strung guitar, Cohen’s asthmatic Farfisa and Joe’s stoner vocals detonated over dreamlike, mock-Eastern rhythms. There was satire here too (Superbird, Flying High), but essentially Electric Music was about the politics of mind-altering drugs.

‘It’s hard to say who was right in the end,’ says the guitarist. ‘Bob may have come up with a more artistic recording, and cleaned us up enough to be commercial. But maybe we were cleaned up so much that we never had the smash success with our records that we had on stage.’ That said, Electric Music was a consistent seller throughout the Summer Of Love, and remains one of the few truly successful US psychedelic albums.

Tim Buckley Goodbye And Hello

Landmark in the shift from folk to singer-songwriting music. Record label: AsylumProduced: Jerry YesterRecorded: TTG Studios, and mixed by Bruce Botnick at Sunset Sound, Los Angeles; June 1967Released: November 1967Chart peaks: None (UK) 171 (US)Personnel: Tim Buckley (v, g, sg, kalimba, vibes); Lee Underwood (g); Brian Hartzler (g); John Forsha (g); Jimmy Bond (b); Jim Fielder (b); Eddie Hoh (d); Carter CC Collins (pc, congas); Dave Guard (kalimba, tambourine); Don Randi (p, harmonium, harpsichord); Jerry Yester (o, p, harmonium); Henry Diltz (hm)Track listing: No Man Can Find The War; Carnival Song; Pleasant Street; Hallucinations; I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain; Once I Was (S/UK); Phantasmagoria In Two; Knight-Errant; Goodbye And Hello; Morning Glory (S)Running time: 42.53Current CD: Warner Brothers 8122735692 adds Tim Buckley albumFurther listening: Happy Sad (1969) – jazz/folk lullabies; Blue Afternoon (1970) – his most focused songwriting; Starsailor (1972) – wild avant-jazz and Song To The Siren; Greetings From LA – soul-inspired and drenched in sweat; Dream Letter – Live In London 1968 (1990)Further reading: Blue Melody: Tim Buckley Remembered (Lee Underwood, 2001); Dream Brother: The Music Of Jeff And Tim Buckley (David Browne, 2000); www.timbuckley.comDownload: Not currently legally available

Recorded in June 1967, the month the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper, Tim Buckley’s second album is drenched in the musical freedom of that mythologised time. ‘We saw ourselves sailing along in the direction that Bob Dylan was taking lyrics and that The Beatles were taking instrumentation,’ says poet Larry Beckett, Buckley’s old school friend, then creative collaborator and co-writer of half the songs on Goodbye And Hello. ‘That is, toward making rock’n’roll into art songs, where they’re so beautifully made that they’re meant to last in the culture.’

According to producer Jerry Yester, ‘When Buckley and Beckett came to me, the only idea they had was that the album would be free of restraint or commercial consideration. There was to be no compromising on the songs or how they were presented. Working with Tim was a stretch. When someone says you can do anything you want, it’s a little intimidating at first, and then it’s totally exciting.’

Though Goodbye And Hello feels like an orchestrated album, in fact only the ambitious title track was orchestrally sweetened. The album’s broad spectrum of sound is suggested through the flexibility of relatively few instruments and Buckley’s most diverse collection of songs: the topical folk-rock of No Man Can Find The War; a blistering dialogue with drug dependency in Pleasant Street; and the cathartic I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain (addressed in part to his ex-wife Mary and son Jeffrey Scott). The tender, lamenting Once I Was (‘Soon there’ll come another/to tell you I was just a lie’) is a cousin of Fred Neil’s The Dolphins (which Tim performed regularly); Morning Glory (‘write me a song about a hobo’ was the singer’s entire instruction to his lyricist) became Buckley’s most covered song, and closes the album with a brief, exquisite wave of choral harmony.

What holds Goodbye And Hello together, and animates its occasionally bombastic conceits, is a string of vocal performances of staggering authority for a young man not yet twenty-one. The musical freedom trumpeted so clearly here was something Tim would insist on for the rest of his career, to the dismay of those who hoped he’d linger a little longer at some of the stops along the way.

Buffalo Springfield Buffalo Springfield Again

Landmark album recorded in the brief space between inventing West Coast rock and falling apart.Record label: AtcoProduced: Buffalo SpringfieldRecorded: Sunset Sound, Gold Star, Los Angeles; March–June and August–Ocotober 1967Released: November 1967Chart peaks: None (UK) 44 (US)Personnel: Neil Young (v, g); Stephen Stills (v, g); Richie Furay (v, g); Bruce Palmer, Jim Fielder and Bobby West (b); Dewey Martin (d); Don Randi (p); Jack Nitzsche (electric piano, ar); James Burton (dobro, g); David Crosby (v); Charlie Chin (banjo); Norris Badeaux (bs); Jim Messina, Ross Meyering, Bruce Botnick, William Brittan, Bill Lazarus (e)Track listing: Mr Soul; A Child’s Claim To Fame; Everydays; Expecting To Fly; Bluebird; Hung Upside Down; Sad Memory; Good Time Boy; Rock And Roll Woman; Broken ArrowRunning time: 33.56Current CD: WEA ATL332262Further listening: Buffalo Springfield (1967)Further reading: The Story Of Buffalo Springfield: For What It’s Worth (John Einarson and Richie Furay, 1997); www.thebuffalospringfield.comDownload: Not currently legally available

‘A great group,’ said Neil Young. ‘Everybody was a fucking genius at what they did – but we just didn’t get it on record.’ For such a short-lived outfit, Buffalo Springfield would have a huge influence: much of the ’70s West Coast rock movement, from The Eagles on down, could trace its ancestry back to the stormy combo founded when Young, his folk-singing career in Canada going nowhere, jumped the border in a hearse with his friend Bruce Palmer and headed for Los Angeles in search of old acquaintance Stephen Stills.

Buffalo Springfield – named after the steamroller tearing up the road outside their house – found themselves in quick succession endorsed by The Byrds, made house band at the Whisky A Go Go and given a major label deal. Just as quickly, its members were busy falling out. Even during the recording of their eponymous debut there were arguments over whose songs would be included. It gave them their first hit single – the Stills-penned Sunset Strip protest song For What It’s Worth – and was critically acclaimed.

Tracks were recorded in New York and Los Angeles – several under the supervision of label boss Ahmet Ertegun – for an album to be called Stampede. But the record was abandoned amid squabbles over songs, arrangements and band leadership (the latter role increasingly nabbed by Stills, who had been to military school as a kid). Outside pressures didn’t help: Bruce Palmer had been arrested on a dope charge and deported to Canada. Ken Koblun, Young’s old friend from The Squires, came down to help out but went back to Canada when the tense atmosphere became too much. A summer single was released – two new songs, Steve’s Bluebird backed with Neil’s Mr Soul. Stills on one side, Young on the other, just as they were in reality – they were rarely in the studio at the same time, and Young was torn between quitting the band (which he did twice, over their decisions to appear on Johnny Carson’s mainstream Tonight Show and at the Monterey Pop Festival) and asking to rejoin. Differences aside, the music they were coming up with in the rescheduled sessions (some of it reworked Stampede material) was often superb.

‘We were just really discovering a lot of new things and experimenting,’ said Young, but in May 1968 – barely four months after the second album’s release – the band broke up. A third album appeared posthumously.

Country Joe And The Fish I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die

San Francisco scenesters’ second, an essential acid rock milestone.Record label: VanguardProduced: Samuel ChartersRecorded: Vanguard Records’ 23rd Street Studio, New York City; June–September 1967Released: November 1967Chart peaks: None (UK) 67 (US)Personnel: Joe McDonald (v, g, o); Barry Melton (g, v, kazoo); David Cohen (o, calliope, harpsichord, g, v); Bruce Barthol (bs, hm, v); Gary ‘Chicken’ Hirsh (d); Ed Friedner (e)Track listing: The Fish Cheer And I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die-Rag; Who Am I (S/US); Pat’s Song; Rock Coast Blues; Magoo; Janis (S/US); Thought Dream; Thursday; Eastern Jam; Colors For SusanRunning time: 45.03Current CD: VMD 79266-2Further listening: Electric Music For The Mind And Body (1967), the band’s debut, which McDonald has proudly described as ‘the best psychedelic rock record ever made by anybody in the world’.Further reading: www.countryjoe.com. Apart from being excellently informative, McDonald’s website gives you the chance to be the first on your block to buy a Gimme An F … condom!Download: Not currently legally available

‘Gimme an F … Gimme an I … Gimme an S … Gimme an H … What’s that spell? FISH! What’s that spell? FISH!’ Country Joe’s second album begins, bizarrely, in a stoned, subversive, demented parody of high school cheerleaders. But they actually had their roots in the traditional US jugband and folk scenes, before developing their sound to become the Bay Area’s foremost psychedelic adventurers, dizzyingly blending acid rock, satire, revolutionary politics and mischief.

The rollicking title song, a satirical, anti-war masterpiece, was written as America’s involvement in Vietnam deepened disastrously. ‘Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box’ is typical of the lyrics, sung to a disconcertingly jaunty tune while the band cheerily chant, ‘Psychedelic, psychedelic!’ in the background. The song remains McDonald’s personal favourite.

‘It’s affected so many people’s lives and it’s affected history. I don’t know if I can claim writing it because it just popped out of my head one day, but I’m most proud of facilitating that.’

Janis is a tender love song for McDonald’s former girlfriend Janis Joplin, while unlisted between Thought Dream and Thursday is The Acid Commercial, a jolly jingle advertising lysergic pursuits: ‘If you’re tired or a bit rundown/Can’t seem to get your feet off the ground/Maybe you ought to try a little bit of LSD!’

The outrageousness of The Acid Commercial still startles. ‘The Establishment weren’t paying attention to what we were doing so we were able to do anything we wanted,’ reasons McDonald. ‘We were the best ever psychedelic band.’

They certainly took their role as acid pioneers seriously. ‘I’ve taken LSD 300 times,’ boasted guitarist Barry Melton in 1968. In a truly hallucinatory twist the same Melton, in another life, was in 1985 named by the San Francisco Bar Association as Outstanding Lawyer In Public Service.

Kaleidoscope Tangerine Dream

One of the very few genuine British psychedelic albums. Record label: FontanaProduced: Dick Leahy and Jack BaverstockRecorded: Stanhope Place Studios, London; mid-1967Released: November 1967Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)Personnel: Peter Daltrey (v, k); Eddie Pumer (g); Steve Clark (b); Danny Bridgman (d); John Cameron (ar); John Paul Jones (b); Clem Cattini (d); Dave Voyde (e)Track listing: Kaleidoscope; Please Excuse My Face; Dive Into Yesterday; Mr Small The Watch Repairer Man; Flight From Ashiya; The Murder Of Lewis Tollani; (Further Reflections) In The Room Of Percussion; Dear Nellie Goodrich; Holidaymaker; A Lesson Perhaps; The Sky ChildrenRunning time: 36.20Current CD: Repertoire REPUK1077 adds: Flight From Ashiya; Holiday Maker; A Dream For Julie; Please Excuse My Face; Jenny Articoke; Just How Much You AreFurther listening: As Fairfield Parlour – From Home To Home (1970)Further reading: http://hem.passagen.se/chla10-14/Download: Not currently legally available. Dive Into Yesterday can be found on iTunes

The clever money in early ’67 was on a pioneering bunch of groups whose trade was neither R&B nor hit-parade pop, but something altogether odder, more visual, quite new. Pink Floyd, The Soft Machine and Kaleidoscope hogged the column inches but the latter – the ones with the nimblest melodies – were destined for a long run of near-misses.

Originally The Sidekicks, a beat group from Harrow, they became The Key in 1965 and, on signing to Fontana in late 1966, Kaleidoscope. As their line-up had remained constant, their debut 45 (Flight From Ashiya c/w Holidaymaker) sounded supertight. Replete with Pumer’s nerve-jangling guitar line and exquisite vocal interplay, Flight was played to death by the pirates and, though not a hit, encouraged Fontana enough to proceed with the album.

Opening with plucked harp and ferocious drums, the self-titled signature tune sets the scene for Tangerine Dream. Like The Bee Gees or The Kinks, Peter Daltrey’s songs are vignettes; pilots on their final flights, elderly watch repairers (prescient of Mark Wirtz’s Teenage Opera), Dickensian murder scenes. Everywhere there are beautiful drones courtesy of Pumer, fine high harmonies. All is crisp. Ultimately there is Dive Into Yesterday – five minutes of ebbing and flowing, atonal scraped guitar and a dive-bombing Duane Eddy hookline – and The Sky Children, which maintains beautiful fairytale imagery with an astonishingly simple and hypnotic arrangement for a full nine minutes.

‘Their songs are the best since The Beatles,’ said that pop oracle The Daily Sketch. Radio One offered them session after session. Kenny Everett called them ‘incredible’. Tangerine Dream exuded summertime optimism, but it was sadly misplaced. Three more albums followed (two as Fairfield Parlour, the last not obtaining a release until the ’90s) but a place deep in the heart of psych fanatics is all Kaleidoscope earned after such a promising start.

The Appletree Theatre Playback

Saturday Night Live meets Sgt. Pepper in an innovative – and irreverent – theatrical concept album.Record label: MGM/Verve ForecastProduced: John and Terence BoylanRecorded: Mirasound Studios, NYC; 1967Released: January 1968Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)Personnel: J Boylan (v, g, p); T Boylan (v, g, b); C Israels (b); L Coryell (g); M Equine (d); P Griffin (p, o); C Rainey (b); H Lovelle (d); E Gale (g); B Saltzman (d); Z Yanovsky (g); M Brown (cello); The NY Philharmonic Orchestra; Pete Spargo (executive producer)Track listing: The Altogether Overture: In The Beginning; Hightower Square (S); Act 1: Lullaby; Saturday Morning; Nevertheless It Was Italy; Act 2: I Wonder If Louise Is Home; Chez Louise; E-Train; Meanwhile; Brother Speed; You’re The Biggest Thing In My Life; Act 3: Don’t Blame It On Your Wife; The Sorry State Of Staying Awake; Epilogue: Barefoot Boy; Lotus Flower (S); What A Way To Go (S)Running time: 33.28Current CD: Not currently availableFurther listening: Terence Boylan – Alias Boona (1969)Further reading: www.geocities.com/badcatrecords/APPLETREEtheatre.htm; www.terenceboylan.com/biography.html (both fan sites)Download: Not currently legally available

After spending their early teens in England absorbing the influences of the Goon Show and Beyond The Fringe, brothers John and Terence Boylan returned to America to study drama at Bard College, near Woodstock. There they formed a band with fellow students Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, performed comedy skits with Chevy Chase and even got to hang out with their hero Bob Dylan. Vacations were spent playing the coffee house circuit in New York. One evening, confined to their apartment by illness, the brothers composed Hightower Square. If the song’s staccato rhythm owed a conscious debt to The Beatles’ Penny Lane, the bridge, which incorporates a spoken-word skit about smoking banana peel, pointed in a rather more light-hearted direction.

Having persuaded MGM to finance an album, the Boylans enlisted the services of the hottest session musicians they could find, while the presence of innovative engineers like Bill Szymczyk ensured that musical quality was never sacrificed to comic effect. As John recalls: ‘Because we were in the business we knew what these players could do – we felt like painters with an expensive new paint box.’ Structured like a play, the album intersperses musical burlesques with comedy sketches. A series of vignettes of Greenwich Village life send up weekend hippies (E-Train), druggies (Brother Speed) and squares (I Wonder If Louise Is Home) with equal relish. By contrast, side two has a rural focus, its ambitious centrepiece The Sorry State Of Staying Awake, in which a bored truck driver lazily turning his radio dial encounters fragments of hilariously over-blown soul and country music, spoof news bulletins and adverts. What A Way To Go, featuring a woodwind quintet and the late, great Zal Yanovsky on guitar, provides a beautiful, mournful coda to the preceding levity.

In a contemporary interview John Lennon cited Playback as one of his favourite albums, Time magazine lauded the Boylans’ sense of humour and satirical groups like the Firesign Theatre acknowledged them as an influence. Unfortunately, with MGM unsure how to promote the album and the material almost impossible to replicate live, the project remained a critical rather than commercial success. John became a highly-respected producer, notably with Rick Nelson and Boston, while Terence went on to release a number of solo albums, the first of which reworked many of the songs from Playback with the help of the future members of Steely Dan. Yet as The Appletree Theatre the Boylan brothers had struck a balance between music and comedy which has seldom been equalled on record – and proved that rock musicians don’t always have to take themselves too seriously.

Nirvana The Story Of Simon Simonpath

Sumptuous soft-psych classic from the original UK Nirvana.Record label: IslandProduced: Chris BlackwellRecorded: Pye Studios 1 and 2, London; early 1967Released: February 1968Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)Personnel: Patrick Campbell-Lyons (g, v); Alex Spyropoulos (k); Herbie Flowers (b); Frank Riccotti (g); Alan Parker (g); Alan Hawkes (k); Michael Coe (French horn); Sylvia Schuster (c); Barry Morgan (d); Clem Cattini (d); Sue & Sunny, Madeleine Bell, Lesley Duncan (bv); Brian Humphries (e); Syd Dale (ar)Track listing: Wings Of Love; Lonely Boy; We Can Help You; Satellite Jockey; In The Courtyard Of The Stars; You’re Just The One; Pentecost Hotel (S); I Never Found A Love Like This; Take This Hand; 1999Running time: 25.35Current CD: Island IMCD301 contains both stereo and mono mixes of all tracks on the orginal album.Further listening: All Of Us (1968)Further reading: Rainbow Chaser (Patrick Campbell-Lyons: unpublished manuscript extracted in liner notes to Nirvana’s All Of Us)Download: iTunes

The brainchild of songwriters Patrick Campbell-Lyons and Alex Spyropoulos, Nirvana was originally conceived as a group but devolved into a duo by the time they signed to Chris Blackwell’s Island Records.

‘Blackwell said, “You’ll have to have an album” because he wasn’t interested in singles as such,’ Lyons remembers. ‘It just evolved. We went back to a flat in Shepherd’s Bush and used to work long days and long nights completing songs. This character Simon came out of the song Wings Of Love which also inspired the sleeve artwork.’ A lonely kid, living in a six-dimensional city, is obsessed with the idea of sprouting wings and flying. After reaching the stars, he encounters an extra-terrestrial centaur and is taken to Nirvana where he meets and ultimately weds the impossibly beautiful mermaid creature Magdelena.

They dubbed their creation ‘a science fiction pantomime’. ‘To describe it as a concept album seems naff to me now,’ Lyons cautions. ‘We saw it as a musical pantomime for grown-ups with a slightly druggy undertone to it. I don’t know if we really knew what psychedelia meant but we had our own feeling about it. Many people were living psychedelic lives in those days.’

The musical backdrop was an oddly eclectic mix emphasising the schizophrenic divide between pop and rock in 1967. As ambitious songwriters, Lyons and Spyropoulos had one foot in Denmark Street’s Tin Pan Alley but were also aspiring towards more adventurous studio experiments.

The album included upbeat singalongs like We Can Help You, the catchy Wings Of Love and even a bizarre trad jazz item, 1999. It says much for the interest in the album that these songs were covered by acts as diverse as Alan Bown, Herman’s Hermits and Kenny Ball, respectively. The key track on the work was undoubtedly Pentecost Hotel, one of the finest pieces of orchestral pop ever released. ‘It really encapsulated the whole concept of the album,’ Lyons notes. ‘It was a journey somewhere out there. There was a lot of poetic licence in the whole concept. Maybe that’s what makes it attractive, its naïveté, which is missing in a lot of things today.’

Bobbie Gentry The Delta Sweete

Her great lost concept album.Record label: CapitolProduced: Kelly GordonRecorded: Winter 1967Release date: March 1968Chart peaks: None (UK) 132 (US)Personnel: Bobbie Gentry (g, v); Jimmie Haskell and Shorty Rogers (ar); other musicians not knownTrack listing: Okolona River Bottom Band (S); Big Boss Man; Reunion; Parchman Farm; Mornin’ Glory; Sermon; Tobacco Road; Penduli Pendulum; Jessye’ Lisabeth; Refractions; Louisiana Man; CourtyardRunning time: 33.44Current CD: Raven RVCD220 adds Local Gentry albumFurther listening: Fancy (1970); Touch Em With Love (1969)Further reading: www.geocities.com/odetobobbiegentry/Download: iTunes

‘A perfect set of ivories, coffee-coloured eyes, a warm sensual face … no-one would ever dream of throwing her off a bridge.’ So surmised Gordon Coxhill in his 1969 NME interview with Bobbie Gentry. In the two years since Ode To Billie Joe she’d had little in the way of a hit and journalists were apt to dismiss her as just another pretty face. Born Roberta Streeter in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, Gentry was, in fact, a self-taught musician who’d graduated from the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, writing by day and spending her evenings as a Las Vegas chorus girl where she was discovered by Capitol A&R man Kelly Gordon.

‘Kelly came into my office one night so choked he could hardly talk.’ remembers fellow A&R man David Axelrod. ‘He said, “We’ve got a demo and I know it’s real good.” It was Ode To Billie Joe. I said, “This is terrific, what’s the problem?” He said, “General manager of A&R turned it down.” The guy who owned the song was Larry Shane, one of the biggest independent publishers. I dialled him and said, “What do you want for this?” He said, “Ten thousand dollars.” I said, “Done.” I hung up. Happy. Went over the general manager’s head. Her stuff was too good not to hear.’

Her second album, however, was roundly ignored. A concept album about white southern life in which all intros and outros are underscored by sad strings, each track flowing into the next, The Delta Sweete was a work of great emotional power. It ranged from the fractured Mississippi funk of Okolona River Bottom Band to Courtyard, the sparsely-arranged tale of an imprisoned woman, and her most beautiful, tragic composition.

‘No one bought it but I didn’t lose sleep over it,’ Gentry told NME, ‘I’ve never tried to pre-judge public taste.’

After The Delta Sweete Gentry appears to have had difficulty deciding on a career path. Following a number of saccharine chart hits with Glen Campbell (Let it Be Me, All I Have To Do Is Dream), she returned with the hard country soul of Fancy, recorded with Rick Hall at Muscle Shoals. An astute businesswoman, by 1970 she also owned considerable property in California and had a large financial interest in the Phoenix Suns basketball team. She dropped out of the public eye altogether in 1976.

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