Earth Opera - Earth Opera 1968

The stylistic explorations pursued by the Beatles in 1966-1967, and the commercial success the group continued to enjoy, inspired other popular musicians to be similarly ambitious and persuaded record companies to take chances on more daring music. Earth Opera is a good example. The Boston-based group's self-titled debut LP featured a heady mixture of pop, rock, folk, jazz, and classical elements in involved arrangements played on such unusual instruments as mandocello and harpsichord. Less a rock band than a highly eclectic chamber orchestra, Earth Opera played in an arty style that suited singer/songwriter/guitarist Peter Rowan's songs, with their complicated structures and highly poetic lyrics. Rowan sang those lyrics, which dealt here and there with anti-war and more generalized sentiments of social dissatisfaction, in a distanced, somewhat artificial tone of voice, using an accent that sounded vaguely British, even when he was mentioning the Red Sox. But he was rarely so specific, more often concerning himself with "the stage inside my mind" or "the picket fenceposts of your mind," internal landscapes in which wordplay and allusions substituted for specific meaning. It was a psychedelic language matched by the music, which hurried and slowed, making room for sudden solos and unexpected juxtapositions of instruments. The result ultimately may have been too ornate and inaccessible for a pop recording, even in 1968, but Earth Opera was very much of its time. AMG.

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Akira Ishikawa & Count Buffalo - Uganda (Dawn of African Rock) 1972

Akira Ishikawa had a mission. He wanted to find the eternal now of rhythm. After a mind-blowing trip to Africa in 1970, the Japanese percussionist had a goal — true Afro-delic Acid Rock. He hooked up with composer Muroaka Takeru and this album was born in 1971. Awash in minimalist percussion — at times sounding like a field recording of a commune or some street performers — the album devolves into primitive heavy acid rock and throbbing seriousness. Ishikawa's intense personal vision and mission is no record-collector curiosity. This beauty deserves our attention.
Long known to collectors of bizarre Japanese psychedelic/heavy rock (see Cope, Julian), Uganda became something of a mystery and a holy grail. The album screams, too. It stumbles into that same primal early rock, excuse me, RAWK place that bands like Leaf Hound, The Edgar Broughton Band, and Australia's Buffalo ended up. In fact, this record comes off like a recording of the jam sessions that led to the riffs and beats of the James Gang's "Funk #49" but without all that familiarity from FM radio. Famed guitarist Mizutani Kimio trades monster licks with rambling percussion, an impressive drum kit (Ishikawa) and lots of moaning and throb.

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Bill Plummer and The Cosmic Brotherhood - Bill Plummer and The Cosmic Brotherhood 1967

The Cosmic Brotherhood was conceived and led by multi-instrumentalist and sitar master Bill Plummer. Plummer was born in March, 1938 in Boulder, CO where he trained on piano, string bass, trumpet, marimba and vibraharp. At the age of 20, he moved to L.A. to pursue a career in jazz and picked up the sitar under the instruction of Ravi Shankar.

In 1966, Plummer toured with Tony Bennett and Miles Davis and formed the Jazz Corps, an experimental ensemble that included Maurice Miller and Lynn Blessing. His love for Jazz and Eastern music came together on the 1967 LP ‘Bill Plummer And The Cosmic Brotherhood’ where he blended the sitar with wind instruments, drums, stings and bells. Highlights on the record include the trippy ‘Jouney To The East’ and a cover of the Byrds’ single ‘Lady Friend’. The band featured a plethora of musicians including Hersh Hamel (sitar, tambura, vocals), Milt Holland (tabla), Ray Neapolitan (sitar, tambura), Jan Steward (sarode, tambura), Ray Anthony (guitar), Lynn Blessing (vibes, bells), Dennis Budimir (guitar), Mike Craden (transceleste, duo vigong, American tree bells, boo bams, surrogate vithara, which stand), Bill Goodwin (drums), Carol Kaye (bass), Mike Lang (piano, harpsichord), Maurice Miller (drums) and Tom Scott (saxophone, flute, electronics).

In 1969, a scaled down version of the band released a single on A&M, which includes the fabulous ‘Sunshine World’ b/w the sitar saturated instamental ‘Yentra II’. Plummer went on to become a very successful session musician, performing on a slew of movie and TV scores including ‘The French Connection I & II’, ‘Bullitt’, ‘I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!’, ‘Mission Impossible’, ‘The Bionic Woman’ and ‘Mannix’. Plummer still happily performs and teaches music to this day in Idaho. Ray Neapolitan went on to play session bass for the Doors on the LPs ‘Morrison Hotel’ and ‘Other Voices’.

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Agape - Agape 1969

An obscure band that has nonetheless attracted attention from record collectors (more for the fact of their obscurity than any other reason), Agape was a hippie-era psychedelic hard rock act that used the music of youth rebellion to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. Fred Caban was a young guitarist from Azusa, CA, who became a born-again Christian shortly after graduating from high school in 1968. In an effort to help evangelize his peers, Caban formed the band with bassist John Peckhart and drummer Mike Jungkman. They were one of the earliest Christian rock bands, established in a time when the music they played was still being shunned by established churches (the few they approached for concerts rejected the loud music they played, despite the message). Agape performed wherever they could, on beaches, in schools, and in parks, and released their debut album (Gospel Hard Rock) in 1971. Their sound was typical of the era, blues-based hard rock in the tradition of Cream, though the group's garage band level abilities lent the music a raw, clumsy appeal that nicely matched their lyrical sincerity. The band added keyboardist Jim Hess and released Victims of Tradition in 1972, which featured a more progressive approach, as well as a front cover that pictured the group performing in a graveyard. Several lineup changes occurred as the years progressed, but Caban kept Agape going in one form or another throughout the decade. Original copies of Agape albums are very rare today, and can fetch as much as 300 dollars from collectors due to the unique appeal of their "hippies at Sunday school" vibe. In 1996, Hidden Vision Records released a CD, called The Problem Is Sin: Live and Unreleased, that compiles demos for an unfinished third album, live performances taken from a promotional eight-track cassette that was distributed to local radio stations in 1973, and a brand new instrumental track performed by a reconstituted version of the band. AMG.

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Alrune Rod - 4-Vejs 1974

Alrune Rod (formed 1968) was a Danish psychedelic rock band.

Alrune Rod appeared in the 1971 concert film Skæve Dage I Thy. The film whose title loosely translates as Stoned Days in Thy documents the Thylejren, the first rock music festival in Denmark which took place in Thy in 1970. Alrune Rod played at the festival, sometimes called the Danish Woodstock, alongside contemporaries in the Danish music scene at the time to an audience of 30,000.

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Billy Paul - Going East 1972

Billy Paul's Philadelphia International label debut boasts few of the hallmarks of its breakthrough follow-up 360 Degrees of Billy Paul, let alone Philly soul as a whole -- if anything, the album hews far closer to jazz, with a potent spiritual dimension that defies expectations even further. Apart from theGamble/Huff composition "Love Buddies," the material draws from sources outside of the Philly International sphere, spanning from Rodgers & Hart's "There's a Small Hotel" to Gene McDaniels' "Compared to What." The arrangements are complex but deeply funky, perfectly suited to Paul's sagelike vocals. A fascinating, genre-defying record, finally reissued on CD in 2007 as part of a two-fer with the subsequent War of the Gods. AMG

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Bees Make Honey - Music Every Night 1973

Although the pub rock explosion is remembered as a distinctly U.K. -- and, more specifically, London -- based phenomenon, more than a handful of its greatest practitioners actually hailed from considerably further afield. Eggs over Easy and Roogalator's Danny Adler were Americans, the Winkies' Phil Rambow was Canadian, Little Bob Story was French, while Bees Make Honey, one of the most fondly regarded of the genre's originators, was founded on the remains of one of Ireland's most popular showbands, the Alpine Seven.

That band's leader, string bassist Barry Richardson, moved to London in the late '60s, performing with both the jazz act the Brian Lemon Trio and a country-rock group Jan & the Southerners. Fellow Alpine Seven members Ruan O'Lochlainn, Deke O'Brien, and Mick Molloy soon joined him in England and, with the lineup completed by American-born drummer Bob Cee, the unnamed quintet settled into a residency alongside Eggs over Easy at the Tally Ho pub in north London.

They officially became Bees Make Honey in January 1972, the name was suggested by O'Lochlainn's wife, Jackie. Under the inventive aegis of manager Dave Robinson, whom they shared with bothBrinsley Schwarz and, informally, Kilburn & the High Roads, the band graduated to other venues on the fast exploding pub rock circuit; Robinson also oversaw their first recordings, cut at Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire during 1972.

This lineup toured in support of the album, but was extremely short-lived. Within three months, Morleyhad quit to join Welsh rockers Man; even more damaging, however, was the spring 1974 departure of founders O'Brien and Molloy. Richardson recruited new members Willie Finlayson and Ed Dean(guitars), plus pianist Kevin McAlea -- the latter pair had most recently been working together in a short-lived revival of legendary Irish hard rock band Skid Row.By 1973, Bees Make Honey was widely regarded as the most likely band on the entire scene to make the transition into the big time; they attracted enthusiastic press coverage across the media spectrum and, by summer, the group had signed with EMI. Their first single, "Knee Trembler," followed, but even as the band prepared their debut album, fall's superlative Music Every Night, the original quintet began to splinter. Both O'Lochlainn and Bob Cee quit, the latter heading off to Supertramp, appearing under his full name, Bob C Benburg; they were replaced by drummer Fran Byrne, former Wheels guitarist Rod Demick, and keyboard playerMalcolm Morley, ex-Help Yourself.

In this form, Bees Make Honey cut a second album for EMI, only for the label to reject it and drop the group from the roster. A move to the DJM label proved similarly disastrous, with another album's worth of material cut and then shelved. By fall 1974, Bees Make Honey had broken up, with Richardsongoing onto his own Barry Richardson Band. Demick and Finlayson subsequently resurfaced in Meal Ticket and Byrne moved onto Ace. AMG.

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Bob Despers - New Sounds 1974

Accidentally blinded at adolescence, the Portland-based Bob Desper released just one record-- in 1974, and limited to a 500-copy pressing on a local Christian imprint-- before fading into the woodwork, leaving only this tiny morsel of music behind for anyone to find and follow back to its source. Which, inevitably, someone at Discourage Records belatedly did, discovering in the process that Desper is alive and relatively well at age 60, and that this modest forgotten record floats from the past to the present with an undeniable insistence, pulling attention to itself until you can't pay attention to anything else.

Indeed, New Sounds is a classic lost record, though whether it counts as a lost classic is pretty relative, considering that even folk heavy hitters Nick Drake or Bert Jansch were once tagged as totally obscure by all but the most ardent followers of the form. New Sounds isn't the sort of record that would appeal to casual toe-dippers, anyway. Rather, it's the kind of recording, like Gary Higgins' similarly recently unearthed Red Hash, pretty much designed to be lost and rediscovered decades later. It benefits from the mystery, and even if Desper himself (sadly no longer able to play guitar, thanks to a recent injury) has been found, it's almost better to listen to the record imagining Desper was lost as well.

It's not that much of a stretch, as Desper already sounds pretty lost circa-1974 singing songs such as "Lonely Man", "Liberty", "Don't You Cry for Me", and "Time Is Almost Over". With their quiet mix of strumming and finger picking paired with mournful, reverb-laden vocals, tracks such as these are private and personal, as if Desper recorded them addressing his reflection in a mirror he could no longer see. They're certainly a far cry from the lusher "Dry Up Those Tears" and "The World Is Crying Out for Love", Desper's formative recordings, originally released as a 7" and included as bonus tracks to this reissue.

It's on those two early songs that we can hear the link not just to other forgotten folkies but to such haunted troubadours as Big Star's Chris Bell, similarly ambitious writers who in the end may as well have been recording songs strictly for themselves. That Desper, too, has finally found his way out from the dustbin will impact the world only a bit more than New Sounds did 36 years ago, but on any given night when you may feel just a bit like Desper did the day this album was recorded (reportedly in just a single take), it's the kind of record that can pull you out of your mood by drawing you wholly into his.

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Air - Air Raid 1976

The critical success of Air's debut album, Air Song, dictated both more of the same and a difference in approach on Air Raid. While there are only four tracks, just as on the first album, here they are broken up between two long pieces -- the title track and "Release," and two mid-length, seven-plus minute works, "Midnight Sun" and "Through a Keyhole Darkly." The concept of group improvisation was the same, but Henry Threadgill's compositional notions began to come through in his solos. He's a born leader and his charge-taking feels natural and wonderfully amorphous, though it reveals itself more often than not. The structure of soloing on "Release" is breathtaking in that it makes a case for the notion of an interval in free improvisation. Threadgill's use of the breath as a rhythmic technique here brings out the most adventurous side of Steve McCall's drumming. Likewise, his engagement with thematic variants creates new and wildly textured terrains for Fred Hopkins to articulate a vision of the bass as an instrument for song as well as rhythm, and one where depth and resonance offer a palette for group searching. Another fine effort. AMG.

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Barry Goldberg & Friends - Recorded Live 1976

When and where this live session featuring organist and bandleader Barry Goldberg and his pals was recorded was not part of the information supplied by the Buddah label upon the album's original release. Neither were the names of the musicians other than the leader, although subsequent reissues in the '90s took care of that gaffe. Songwriters for all the numbers remain unidentified. There are plenty of questions: It quite often sounds like only one guitarist is playing, meaning perhaps while hotshot ace session guy Michael Bloomfield is soloing, ace session guy number two Harvey Mandel is waiting in the wings. The tracks themselves could easily come from two different concerts. At any rate, the entire production is pitched at a certain audience whose members would buy anything that had the words "and friends" as part of the credits. After all, we get high with our friends, we get by with our friends, and so forth. What sort of music did Goldberg play with his friends? Musicians from his scene were considered some of the superior members of the white blues scene, wearing their love of roots music as a kind of badge that allowed them to jam with more credibility than some of their other rocker brethren -- at least that was the way rock pundits looked at it in the '60s and '70s. Revisiting these recordings years later, a listener may conclude that while some of the jamming certainly holds up well, the blues playing does not.
This is established immediately by the opening two tracks, "On the Road," a mundane slow blues, and a wobbly shuffle identified as "Chicago My Hometown," which is really the standard "Sweet Home Chicago." The guitarist -- who sounds too aggressive to be Bloomfield and too regimented to beMandel, and so could be either one of them on a bad night -- has no sense of swing and gives both songs a lame bar band sound simply by playing too much. He walks all over what seemed like it would have been a good organ solo on the slow song, an act that by itself might cause a change in status from "friend" to "enemy," depending on the bandleader, and is not a sign of sensitive blues playing at any rate. The track "I Got a Woman (Dedication)," on the other hand, is a straight-out jam that takes off from the barest pass at the original song into a terrific organ solo, some really cooking electric guitar interplay, and finally a drum solo from "Fast" Eddie Hoh that is really fantastic. Here is an example of the type of spontaneous invention that these musicians were really good at, requiring timing and chops that many later rockers simply aren't capable of. Other highlights seem to occur on a gauge related to how far the group strays from blues; fans of organ, for example, will enjoy licking up "A Taste of Honey," subtitled "An Organ Serenade." The guitarists have fun with "Suzie Q" as well, and done to death or not, even a listener who is cynical about rock guitar will find at least one good riff here. The playing time on the sides is extremely generous. AMG.

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Ballin' Jack - Buzzard Luck 1972

A jazz-rock instrumental sextet of the early '70s that charted briefly with its debut album Ballin' Jack and the single "Super Highway." AMG.

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Cano - Tous Dans L'Même Bateau 1976

Sixty-five people formed CANO (Cooperative des Artistes de Nouvel Ontario) in 1971 in Sudbury, Ontario, to unite the music of French and English Canadia. CANO signed with A&M in 1975 and has released Tous Dans L'Meme Bateau (1976), Au Nord de Notre Vie (1977), Eclipse (1978),Rendezvous (1979), Spirit of the North (1980) and Visible (1985). Members include Marcel Aymar,David Burt, Michel Dasti, John W. Doerr, Michel Kendel, Wasyl Kohut, Rachel Paiement and Andre Paiement, the founder and co-leader until he committed suicide in 1978. AMG.

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Art Ensemble Of Chicago - Certain Blacks 1970

A classic, with spicy and frenetic solos one moment, comic overtones and clever melodies and rhythms the next. The Art Ensemble at this point were becoming stars overseas, and finding the going increasingly tougher in America. It's outside or avant-garde jazz with soul, heart, and funk. AMG.

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Glass Family - Electric Band 1969

The Glass Family were a California based band during the 1967 to 1969 period.Uncertain if they were based in the Bay Area but they played at various San Francisco venue during this period. A superb mix of trippy pop-rock songs and ballads,it sold poorly but has earned a major cult reputation since,and makes its long-awaited CD debut here complete with three rare bonus tracks.

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Cass Elliot - Cass Elliot 1972

Cass Elliot's departure from ABC Dunhill Records and their bubblegum marketing of her was probably the greatest career move that this awesome vocalist ever made. RCA obviously had better things in mind for her, treating her with the same sort of care that they bestowed on Harry Nilsson. The company let this pair of world-class vocalists choose their own material and brought them together with great musicians and arrangers. The end result was possibly Elliot's finest solo album. She was certainly more comfortable with the material. One of the best performances is Judee Sill's "Jesus Was a Crossmaker," which is vaguely reminiscent of Laura Nyro's fine work of the period. Elliot's version ofRandy Newman's "I'll Be Home" is also a standout. Elliot's sister, Leah Kunkel emerges as a sensitive songwriter on this record, and Elliot's reading of "When It Doesn't Work Out" is absolutely graceful. Arranger/conductor Benny Golson's work perfectly frames one of the voices of a generation. AMG.

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