Jimi Hendrix Experience Are You Experienced? 3 страница

The Incredible String Band The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter

Celtic minstrels record their psychedelic masterpiece and copyright the concept of ‘getting it together in the country’.Record label: ElektraProduced: Joe BoydRecorded: Sound Techniques Studios, London; December 1967Released: March 1968Chart peaks: 5 (UK) 161 (US)Personnel: Robin Williamson (v, g, gimbri, whistle, pc, pan pipe, p, oud, mandolin, Jews’ harp, chahanai, water harp, hm); Mike Heron (v, s, Hammond organ, g, dulcimer, harpsichord); Dolly Collins (flute, organ, harpsichord); Davis Snell (harp); Licorice McKechnie (v, finger cymbals)Track listing: Koeeoaddi There; The Minotaur’s Song; Witches Hat; A Very Cellular Song; Mercy I Cry City; Waltz Of The New Moon; The Water Song; There Is A Green Crown; Swift As The Wind; NightfallRunning time: 49.55Current CD: Collectors Choice CCM02892 adds The 5,000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The OnionFurther listening: Wee Tam And The Big Huge (1968); The 5,000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion (1967); Liquid Acrobat As Regards The Air (1970)Further reading: Be Glad: An Incredible String Band Compendium (Adrian Whittaker, 2003); www. incrediblestringband.com (official); www.makingtime.co.uk/beglad/ (fan site)Download: HMV Digital

Fired by the success of their second album The 5,000 Spirits, Heron and Williamson repaired to a Chelsea studio to construct the album that would seal their reputation forever. With them they brought exotic instruments from a road trip to Morocco and a collection of incandescent tunes requiring, for the most part, a single roll of tape and a touch of embroidery.

‘This was the first time multi-tracking was possible,’ Williamson remembers, ‘though it was still done in a pretty slapdash, anarchic, have-a-go kind of way. The whole album was recorded in a few days. We didn’t even stay for the mixes. The basic tracks were mostly one take, live vocal and guitar, and then the other instruments were put on top. Mercy I Cry City was pretty much live, with me playing two whistles and drums all at the same time. Waltz Of The New Moon had a harp player on it, and we had Dolly Simpson’s flute organ on Water Song, but otherwise it was just us overdubbing the other parts.’ Williamson’s contributions were written in a disused railway carriage in the garden of his friend Mary Stewart’s house near Glasgow. It’s Stewart’s children who appear in the Hangman’s hugely influential cover picture, an image (taken on Christmas Day ’67) that so perfectly captured the album’s mystic appeal and sent kindred spirits scurrying for the hills in search of a rural retreat. There was instant critical acclaim, along with loud endorsements from Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.

‘A very pleasant surprise,’ says Williamson, ‘but I felt it was something special even while we were making it. The whole of London had this fantastic atmosphere at the time, particularly Chelsea. A wonderful feeling of optimism after the 1950s, a tremendous flowering of the notion that the war was actually over and that life and love could be obtained. Hence the name of the album – The Hangman being the death in the war and The Beautiful Daughter being the coming age. Look at that misty gleam in our eyes on the cover: we were standing back and looking in amazement at what was going on!’

Tom Rush The Circle Game

Pivotal bedsit folk album that – though largely built around covers – helped herald the arrival of the singer-songwriter. Record label: ElektraProduced: Arthur GorsonRecorded: Century Sound, New York and Sunset Sound, Los Angeles; autumn 1967Released: March 1968Chart peaks: None (UK) 68 (US)Personnel: Tom Rush (v, ag); Bruce Langhorne, Hugh McCracken, Don Thomas, Eric Gale (g); Jonathan Raskin (classcial guitar, b); Joe Mack, Bob Brushnell (b); Paul Harris (k, a); Herbie Lovelle, Bernard Purdie, Richie Ritz (d); Joe Grimm (s); Buddy Lucas (s); Brooks Arthur, Bruce Botnick (e)Track listing: Tim Angel; Something In The Way She Moves; Urge For Going (S/US); Sunshine Sunshine; The Glory Of Love; Shadow Dream Song; The Circle Game; So Long; Rockport Sunday; No Regrets (S/UK)Running time: 38.36Current CD: WEA EA740182Further listening: The Very Best Of Tom Rush: No Regrets 1962–1999 (1999)Further reading: www.tomrush.comDownload: Not currently legally available

Exactly when folk singers became known as ‘singer-songwriters’ is hard to pinpoint, but this 1968 song cycle is certainly a milestone in that journey. The Circle Game was among folk rock’s first fully orchestrated albums, recorded at roughly the same time as Phil Ochs’s Pleasures Of The Harbor and Love’s Forever Changes (though both beat it to the street by a couple of months). As a true concept album, it bettered the framing devices of Sgt. Pepper and The Who Sell Out; it also just happened to introduce the world to the work of no less than three singer-songwriter icons: James Taylor, Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell.

The seed was planted when Cambridge folk star Rush met the unknown Mitchell in a Detroit coffee house, and she taught him her song Urge For Going. A tape of Rush’s moving six-minute demo of the song was played on Boston Top 40 powerhouse WBZ in the spring of 1967, where it became the radio station’s most requested song for the next six months. Urge For Going would obviously be a centrepiece of his next album, but Mitchell’s contribution didn’t end there. ‘I got a package in the mail from Joni,’ Rush recalls. ‘It was a tape she’d made in her apartment, wonderful songs like Tin Angel and Moon In The Mirror. At the end she did this little spoken disclaimer: “Gee, here’s a song I just finished. I’m not sure if it’s any good, but here it is.” That was The Circle Game.’

Rush had always been an open-minded folkie – his previous album had featured a side of Al Kooper electric arrangements – and he conceived this record as an orchestrated song cycle that would trace the arc of a relationship from hello to goodbye; side one would be the upside, side two the down. Mitchell’s tape had given him a title song (though The Circle Game was originally written for her old Toronto friend Neil Young) and a place to start in Tin Angel (‘In a Bleecker Street café/She found someone to love today’). The narrative was fleshed out with songs from unknowns Taylor (Something In The Way She Moves and Sunshine Sunshine) and Browne (Shadow Dream Song), both still in their teens. And though Tom Rush was known primarily as an interpreter, the two songs that cap The Circle Game were his own: the melancholy instrumental Rockport Sunday running into supreme break-up song No Regrets, which The Walker Brothers would spin into gold six years later.

The United States Of America The United States Of America

The electronic rock revolution starts here.Record label: CBSProduced: Dave RubinsonRecorded: CBS studios, Hollywood; autumn 1967Released: March 1968Chart peaks: None (UK) 181 (US)Personnel: Joseph Byrd (electronic music, electric harpsichord, o, calliope, p); Dorothy Moskowitz (v); Gordon Marron (electric violin, ring modulator); Rand Forbes (bs); Craig Woodson (electric drums, pc)Track listing: The American Metaphysical Circus; Hard Coming Love; Cloud Song; The Garden Of Earthly Delights; I Won’t Leave My Wooden Wife For You, Sugar; Where Is Yesterday; Coming Down; Love Song For The Dead Che; Stranded In Time; The American Way Of LoveRunning time: 37.07Current CD: Sundazed SC11124 adds 10 previously unreleased tracks.Further listening: There’s not much out there that relates to this one-off delight, though Joseph Byrd did cut his own electronic LP of Christmas music, Xmas Yet To Come (1980).Further reading: www.freakemporium.co.ukDownload: Not currently legally available

A short-lived collective of experimental musicians, The United States Of America created one of the first successful marriages of electronic music and pop. Leader Joseph Byrd was a pivotal figure of ‘serious’ modern music in the mid-’60s as a composer, conductor and producer. He moved to Los Angeles in 1967 to study at UCLA, but promptly got together with four other avant-gardiste students, started the band, tuned up and dropped out.

Every instrument they played was in some way treated through distorted amplifiers, ring modulators and other devices. Craig Woodson pioneered electronic drums, and Gordon Marron played an electronically adapted violin. But what distinguished them was their distinctive sense of pop featuring the twisted lyrical intelligence of Dorothy Moskowitz.

Given its title, their only album had to aim high and it did. The opening track parodied Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with The American Metaphysical Circus which is loosely based on Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite. The American Way Of Love observed homosexual prostitutes on New York’s 42nd Street, while radio favourite I Won’t Leave My Wooden Wife For You, Sugar adeptly sent up the straight suburban family cut off from the world in their ‘split-level house with a wonderful view’ (this track became their best known via inclusion on CBS’s key compilation/sampler album The Rock Machine Turns You On).

If some of The United States Of America’s enthusiastic phasing, echo and channel-swapping date-stamps it, it endures nonetheless through solid merit – musical verve and imagination, the melodic appeal of the trippy The Garden Of Earthly Delights and gentler pieces Love Song For The Dead Che and Cloud Song. Thirty years on, Moskowitz, who moved on to Country Joe’s All Star Band before becoming a music teacher, commented on the web: ‘I have no regrets about the electronic excess under which my voice was buried. It was part of the aesthetic and I was the one who insisted on singing through a ring modulator.’

Byrd later worked with Phil Ochs and a relatively unimpressive band called The Field Hippies (1969) and also produced Ry Cooder’s Jazz (1978).

Flat Earth Society Waleeco

Teenage prodigies create Willy Wonka-style curio.Record label: FleetwoodProduced: Quinn & Johnson, Inc. and Charlie DreyerRecorded: Fleetwood Studios, Revere, Massachusetts; 1968Released: April 1968Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)Personnel: Jack Kerivan (p, o, v); Phil Dubuque (g, recorder, v); Rick Doyle (g, pc, v); Curt Girard (d); Paul Carter (b, v)Track listing: Feelin’ Much Better; Midnight Hour; I’m So Happy; When You’re There; Four And Twenty Miles; Prelude For The Town Monk; Shadows; Dark Street Downtown; Portrait In Grey; In My Window; SatoriRunning time: 32.16Current CD: Arf-Arf AA-042Further listening: There’s nothing at all, unfortunately. But the Arf-Arf label has lots of similar curiosities in its catalogue.Further reading: www.arfarfrecords.comDownload: Not currently legally available

For some bands obscurity seems almost inevitable: for the Flat Earth Society it was assured. When the Boston-based FB Washburn Candy Company decided to promote their tasty new Waleeco candy bar by holding a competition amongst local groups to write a radio jingle, the prize they offered the winning band was the chance to cut an album. After submitting the chosen song, the Flat Earth Society, a group of talented teenagers from Lynn, Massachusetts, assembled at Fleetwood Studios. With no previous recording experience they found that they had only rehearsed enough songs for half the album and so the rest had to be written on the spot. Time was at a premium and the studio facilities were crude, but with considerable ingenuity the results were remarkable. Paul Carter recalls that in order to give his bass more definition he had to place his amplifier in the studio’s bathroom: in Feelin’ Much Better, a phasing effect was achieved by spraying an aerosol can into a bucket!

The band were heavily influenced by Jefferson Airplane and, of course, The Beatles, but also by folk music, which comes to the fore on When You’re There and Prelude For The Town Monk. There’s a beautiful electric piano rendition of Midnight Hour – the only non-original track – but it is on the second side that the group, forced to improvise, really show their talents; the atmospheric Dark Street Downtown; Portrait in Grey is an extended instrumental with haunting recorder playing; Satori, the album’s mysterious, psychedelic climax, a wash of backwards piano spiked with sitar-like guitar. As the hype on the back cover put it: ‘Their bag is that they’re in no particular bag at all.’

Unfortunately, anyone who wished to hear the album was required to send off $1.50 together with six Waleeco wrappers. Few bothered and, with little else in the way of promotion, the record was destined to become a land-fill. Happily, now that it’s reissued on CD, everyone can hear it without rotting any teeth.

Magic Sam West Side Soul

The record that announced a new generation of American electric blues.Record label: DelmarkProduced: Robert G KoesterRecorded: Sound Studios, Chicago; July 12 and October 25, 1967Released: April 1968Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)Personnel: Magic Sam Maghett (v, g); Mighty Joe Young (g); Stockholm Slim (p); Earnest Johnson (b); Odie Payne (d); Odie Payne III (d); Mack Thompson (b)Track listing: That’s All I Need; I Need You So Bad; I Feel So Good (I Wanna Boogie); All Of Your Love; I Don’t Want No Woman; Sweet Home Chicago; I Found A New Love; Every Night And Every Day; Lookin’ Good; My Love Will Never Die; Mama Mama Talk To Your DaughterRunning time: 45.52Current CD: Delmark DLM6152 adds: I Don’t Want No Woman (alternate take)Further listening: Follow-up Black Magic (1969); Easy Baby (1990), a collection of his early sides reissued by CharlyFurther reading: Living Blues magazine, issues 125 (January–February 1996) and 127 (May–June 1996); www.laze.net/magicsam/ (fan site)Download: Not currently legally available

In the early 1960s, no fresh African-Americans were breaking out from the Chicago blues bars, and it seemed that the music might one day become a museum piece until a young entrepreneur named Robert Koester began a talent hunt for his small label. He found it. Samuel Maghett was young yet already an experienced performer, easy on the eye, a gentleman in his dealings, charismatic, an incredible guitarist with his own style, a dramatic singer and the author of some bruising blues songs. Sam had already recorded for Cobra in 1957, Chief in 1960–61 and Crash in 1966 when Delmark signed him, but this time around he was promised a free hand. Thus, on a sticky summer’s day, he entered a small Chicago studio to make blues history.

Sam knew to appeal to the young Caucasian college fan just discovering blues music as well as to his regular crowd: the album had to hang together musically, had to be of one piece like a rock album. Maghett lived on Chicago’s West Side where he and his cohorts were much more ready to embrace music beyond the blues – rock’n’roll, soul and Latin – than his contemporaries on the South Side, the Chess Records crowd who were blues purists. It was this distinction that gave the album its uptempo drive and its title.

Sam’s staccato lead guitar (he played with his fingers and thumb, forcefully plucking the strings) pushed through a Fender amp with reverb on full was a new sound in blues, and after West Side Soul’s release Sam briefly toured with The Grateful Dead, wowing Jerry Garcia when his Stratocaster was heard through a state-of-the-art PA system.

‘Looking Good, his show-stopping boogie, blew guitar players’ minds,’ remembers ex-manager Denny Bruce. ‘Ry Cooder came to my house to meet Sam and learn a few finger-picking tricks from him. Sam never showed him. He never got his due as a singer but his Mama Mama Talk To Your Daughter and Sweet Home Chicago are role models for so many out there.’

Alas, it was not to last. After two years of growing fame, Magic Sam Maghett called to his wife one morning complaining of heartburn. It was a cardiac arrest, and within minutes Sam was dead. He was 32.

Billy Nicholls Would You Believe

Long-lost harmony-laden psych-pop rarity.Record label: ImmediateProduced: Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane and Andrew Loog OldhamRecorded: Olympic Studios, Barnes, and IBC Studios, London; late 1967–early 1968Released: April 1968Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)Personnel: Billy Nicholls (ag, v, bv); Steve Marriott (g, bv); Ronnie Lane (b); Ian MacLagan (o); Kenny Jones (d); Big Jim Sullivan (g, ag); Caleb Quaye (p); Nicky Hopkins (k); John Paul Jones (b); Joe Moreti (g); Denny Gerrard (bv); Barry Husband (bv); Jerry Shirley (d); Arthur Greenslade, John Paul Jones, Denny Gerrard (ar)Track listing: Would You Believe; Come Again; Life Is Short; Feeling Easy; Daytime Girl; Daytime Girl Coda; London Social Degree; Portobello Road; Question Mark; Being Happy; Girl From New York; It Brings Me DownRunning time: 33.33Current CD: Castle CMQDD1358 adds Would You Believe (Mono Single); Daytime (Mono Single) plus a second CD of demos and outtakes.Further listening: Love Songs (1974); lone, self-titled album by a group that included Nicholls and White Horse (1976), both available on Nicholls’s Southwest labelFurther reading: www.billynicholls.co.ukDownload: HMV Digital; iTunes

Immediate Records’ head, Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham was bowled over by the precocious talent of the 17-year-old singer/songwriter, who had been recommended to him by no less a person than George Harrison.

As Nicholls puts it, getting signed was a teenage dream; ‘Getting paid £20 a week, with my own room full of Revoxes, Mellotrons, and the Stones’ guitars.’ Between writing songs for the album Oldham produced for Del Shannon, Home And Away (not released at the time, though tracks eventually turned up on various collections), and doing uncredited vocals on the Small Faces’ classic Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, Nicholls got to make his own single, Would You Believe. Initially produced by Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane, but an overambitious Oldham overlaid it with an orchestra, killing its commercial chances. (One wag called it ‘the most overproduced single of the ’60s’.)

While the ensuing Would You Believe album was comparatively modest, it fell foul of Immediate chaotic management and was left in the can, save for a few promo copies that became highly prized among collectors, some selling for over £1,000. Its reputation was enhanced by the knowledge that its credits included a veritable Who’s Who of British late-’60s rockers: the Small Faces, John Paul Jones, Nicky Hopkins, Caleb Quaye, the great session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan, and Humble Pie drummer Jerry Shirley. Songs like the vibrant Girl From New York testify to what a great time Nicholls must have been having in the studio.

In 1998, Nicholls, by then a successful songwriter and musical director for The Who (and father to Morgan Nicholls of Senseless Things, The Streets and latterly Muse), took pity on those lacking a large disposable income and made Would You Believe available to the masses for the first time, on his own Southwest label. It is greatly to his credit that the result was not a collective sigh of disappointment, as can be the case when long-hyped rarities are finally brought to light, but rather unanimous shouts of praise from critics and fans of song-oriented ’60s pop.

Simon & Garfunkel Bookends

Massively successful breakthrough album for former folkies.Record label: CBSProduced: Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, Roy Halee, Bob Johnson and John SimonRecorded: September 1966; January 1967; June 1967; October 1967–February 1968Released: April 3, 1968Chart peaks: 1 (UK) 1 (US)Personnel: Paul Simon (g, v); Art Garfunkel (v); Hal Baline (d, pc); Joe Osbourne (b); Larry Knechtel (p, k); Jimmie Haskell (ar)Track listing: Bookends Theme; Save The Life Of My Child; America; Overs; Voices Of Old People; Old Friends; Bookends Theme; Fakin’ It (S); Punky’s Dilemma; Mrs Robinson (S); A Hazy Shade Of Winter (S); At The Zoo (S)Running time: 29.13Current CD: Sony 4950832 adds: You Don’t Know Where Your Interest Lies; Old Friends (previously unreleased)Further listening: Old Friends the Simon & Garfunkel boxed set (1997)Further reading: The Complete Guide To The Music Of Simon & Garfunkel (Chris Charlesworth, 1997); The Boy In The Bubble: The Paul Simon Story (Patrick Humphries, 1988); www.simonandgafunkel.comDownload: iTunes; HMV DigitalBookends was the fourth album from Simon & Garfunkel but the first to reach a mass audience. Side one comprised a song-suite tracing the journey from birth to death – all original Simon compositions, aside from Voices Of Old People, drawn by Garfunkel from taped interviews with OAPs, which is the only jarring note in an otherwise seamless sweep.

Save The Life Of My Child reflects the raucous paranoia of America as the Vietnam war tore the nation apart, and parents everywhere scratched their heads and asked, ‘What’s become of the children?’ It was also one of the first pop songs to use a synthesizer, and probably the first to use a sample – Simon & Garfunkel themselves can be heard singing Sounds Of Silence way down in the mix. America is timeless – a weary, disaffected odyssey – and its pristine production, blank-verse narrative and timely state-of-the-nation reflections ensure that it sounds as fresh in the twenty-first century as it did in 1968. Overs is a bleak catalogue of marital breakdown, while the concluding Old Friends finds Simon reflecting: ‘How terribly strange to be 70’ – not a sentiment shared, or cared-about, by many of his contemporaries at the time.

Never one to be rushed by a deadline, Simon didn’t have enough new songs to complete Bookends, so the second side was padded out with previously released singles. Fakin’ It was a dope-induced contemplation of an earlier life; Hazy Shade Of Winter had been a pounding, atmospheric single in 1967; while At The Zoo was an engaging if none-too-subtle parable – human society symbolised by animals – but all matched Simon & Garfunkel’s exacting standards. The two new songs were the quirky Punky’s Dilemma – which director Mike Nichols rejected for The Graduate – and the song about that film’s mature femme fatale, Mrs Robinson.

Simon & Garfunkel only had complete control of three of the five albums they recorded together, and in many ways Bookends stands as their finest moment. The duo stood in charge of the production and overall sound, and were eager to leave the formulas of pop-production and willing to experiment, which may help to explain the album’s timeless quality. It was to be two years before there was another Simon & Garfunkel album, the all-conquering but, by comparison to Bookends, a little sterile Bridge Over Troubled Water.

Harper’s Bizarre The Secret Life Of …

A much underrated vocal group, smooth but perverse.Record label: Warner BrothersProduced: Lenny WaronkerRecorded: Hollywood; early 1968Released: May 1968Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)Personnel: Dick Yount (b, v); John Peterson (d, v); Ted Templeman (g, t, v); Dick Scoppettone (g, v); Gloria Jones, Carolyn Willis and Sherlie Matthews (v, gospel choir)Track listing: Look To The Rainbow; Battle Of New Orleans; When I Was A Cowboy; Interlude; Sentimental Journey; Las Manitas; Bye Bye Bye/Vine Street; Me Japanese Boy; Interlude; I’ll Build A Stairway To Paradise; Green Apple Tree; Sit Down You’re Rocking The Boat; Interlude; I Love You Mama; Funny How Love Can Be; Mad; Look To The Rainbow; The Drifter; RepriseRunning time: 33.52Current CD: Sundazed SC6178 adds: Both Sides Now; Small TalkFurther listening: Feelin’ Groovy: The Best Of Harper’s Bizarre (1997), which includes the magical Witchi-Tai-ToFurther reading: There’s next to nothing available, although the 16-page booklet enclosed with the above CD contains an informative interview with Lenny Waronker. www.sundazed.com/artists/ harp-ers. html is the site for Sundazed, the label who have reissued their back catalogueDownload: Not currently legally available

Marshmallow rock, soft and ultra-sweet. Maybe they shouldn’t have added up to anything much – they didn’t even boast a strong line in harmonies. But Harper’s Bizarre possessed an indefinable something that set them apart from most other groups of the period.

Certainly everyone worthwhile at Warners thought so. Randy Newman pitched in to help them; so too did heavy-hitters Nick De Caro, Bob Thompson, Van Dyke Parks and Leon Russell. In their easy-on-the-ear way, Harper’s Bizarre were ahead of the game, adventurous. They’d started out as The Tikis, a Santa Cruz band. Then, during 1966, they settled down as five-piece Harper’s Bizarre (guitarist Eddie James having gone AWOL). They were still a young outfit – Scoppettone was 21 and Templeman 22 when they cut their debut album Feelin’ Groovy, which gave them an immediate hit with a fizzy version of Simon & Garfunkel’s 59th Street Bridge Song.

That first album set the mould. It included new songs from Parks and Newman, plus Happy Talk (from South Pacific) and, even dottier, a less-than-two-minutes-long rendition of Prokofiev’s Peter And The Wolf. Anything Goes (1967) proved similarly diverse – Chattanooga Choo Choo, along with Van Dyke Parks’s much-heralded High Coin. The stage was set for The Secret Life. This time around, the song selection was woven into a kind of Walter Mittyish dream sequence. Set against a recurring backdrop provided by Burton Lane and Yip Harburg’s wistful Look To The Rainbow, the foursome sang of riding with cowboys, the battle of New Orleans, of building a stairway to paradise and other exploits that were hardly workaday and not exactly brimming with the radical spirit of ’68.

The ultimate in melodic escapism, the album did little for the group’s career and, in the wake of Harper’s Bizarre 4 (1970) – which featured contributions from Ry Cooder and Jack Nitzche – the group split, Templeton moving on to become an A&R mainman and significant producer at WEA. In 1976 the original line-up, minus Templeton, regrouped for a fifth album, As Time Goes By. But though some of the old idiosyncrasies remained – a theme from the New World Symphony rubbed shoulders with Back In The Saddle Again – the group’s distinctive sound had, somewhere along the way, evaporated.

Ill Wind Flashes

Boston hippy intellectuals make one-off psychedelic classic.Record label: ABCProduced: Tom WilsonRecorded: Mayfair Studios, New York; February 1968Released: 1968Chart Peaks: None (UK) None (US)Personnel: Connie Devanney (v); Ken Frankel (g, banjo); Richard Griggs (g, v); Carey Mann (b, v); David Kinsman (d)Track listing: Walkin’ And Singin’; People Of The Night; Little Man; Dark World; L.A.P.D.; High Flying Bird; Hung Up Chick; Sleep; Full CycleFurther listening: The Boston Sound (1968) contextualises Ill Wind’s soundFurther reading: www.zvonar.comDownload: Not currently legally available

For every mediocre hippie band that sold a million records, another excellent one barely registered. Ill Wind had a sound of their own, irreproachable chops, excellent tunes and a major label record deal – but were scuppered by the catalogue of blunders that peppered their album’s path to the few shops it ever appeared in.

The seeds of Ill Wind lay at MIT, the extremely competitive university in Boston where four of the band studied and threw themselves headlong into the counter-culture. ‘We were into unusual music and unorthodox behaviour, and actively sought out marijuana and LSD,’ recalls Richard Griggs, their rhythm guitarist. Renaming themselves Ill Wind in late 1966, they were joined by the icy-voiced Connie Devanney, wife of one of their professors, and gigged solidly throughout the new year, supporting Fleetwood Mac, Moby Grape, Van Morrison, The Who and others.

By summer 1967 things were happening in earnest. Demos were cut at Capitol, but an untimely LSD bust put paid to that. Enter Tom Wilson, legendary producer of Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel and The Velvet Underground, who promptly signed them to his fledgling production company. Having signed away their recording and publishing rights, they delightedly started work on an album – but were soon to be disappointed. For all his promises, Wilson made little effort in the studio. ‘We got to record an album’, remembers Griggs, ‘but weren’t at all happy with the recording process or the finished result’.

Despite this, Flashes contains some of the finest psychedelia conceivable. People Of The Night, for instance, centres on an epic five-minute Eastern-tinged guitar solo that never stops gathering momentum over an ever more frantic rhythm section. The song also shows Devanney to have had one of the great female rock voices of the late ’60s, cold yet surprisingly emotive. But the album’s masterpiece is Dark World, one of the most personal and beautiful of all psychedelic recordings and graced with an unusual, sombre fuzz bass solo.

Recording complete, the band were unprepared for the volley of blows awaiting them. The album’s tacky front cover, complete with incorrect song information and poorly reproduced photos on the rear, was injury enough. But adding insult was a pressing fault that necessitated the recall of the initial pressing. By the time it had been corrected, momentum was lost. No interviews were organised, so no airplay was arranged, so no reviews appeared. A promotional tour was cancelled and, trapped in a contract they resented, Ill Wind blew itself out at the end of 1968.

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