(This record review appeared in the SF Weekly and Cleveland’s Scene magazine.)
In the late ’60s, Warner Bros. formed this subsidiary, Straight Records, in order to release albums by that maestro of scatological art-rock Frank Zappa, as well as an assortment of visionaries and eccentrics Zappa was then digging: Tim Buckley, Captain Beefheart, Alice Cooper, and this duo of Judy Henske & Jerry Yester, whose sole title for the label, Farewell Aldebaran, has just been reissued on CD. Now, even for Straight’s liberal standards, Farewell Aldebaran is a bizarre little collection of hard rock, baroque pop, AM-friendly pap, anthemic marches with vital social messages, and uptempo country-folk. What’s more, Henske and Yester (the latter briefly served time in the Lovin’ Spoonful) designed and constructed these tunes in the studio, creating massive musique concrète structures, with Henske’s deep, muscular alto serving as their foundation. I mean, these are bombastic, no-room-to-breathe performances replete with intricately layered electronics and Yester’s primitive use of synthesizer technology. Of course, some of this stuff will drive you batty if your head ain’t prepared, especially such relentlessly plodding wails as “St. Nicholas Hall” and “One More Time.” But, all in all, Farewell Aldebaran is a gloriously freaky trip worth the price of admission — your mind!
In the early ’70s, Rodd Keith was a deadbeat dad who fled his Pentecostal life in Michigan for Hollywood. There, he regularly devoured PCP, claimed he was “God’s chosen,” and composed hundreds of song-poems — cheaply recorded pop tunes produced by sleazy, low-rung recording companies that placed advertisements in the back of magazines persuading ignorant, amateur poets to actually pay the companies for the service of setting their verse to music. In other words, it was a total scam. And Keith was a drug-addled hack composer and singer with a God complex capable of putting dozens of these corny poems to music in just a few hours’ time. So, yeah, much of this 26-track sampling of Keith’s work consists of disposable, not-even-K-tel-quality pop suitable for heavy rotation at your local Woolworths. At the same time, such twisted gems as the psychedelic creep-out “A Soothing Dream, But…,” the ode to a sexy waitress “Lettuce and Lace,” and the — believe it or not — anti-drug statement “Don’t Be a Dope” do possess a certain naive magic, convincing me that Keith was a unique American talent. And by the way, near the end of ’74, Keith fell to his death when he attempted to walk the railing of the Hollywood Bridge.
While recently scouring Amoeba’s oldies vinyl for obscure, Frisco-bred acid rock — preferably Tripsichord’s double LP from ’71 — I stumbled across an Italian reissue of a lavishly packaged triple-LP box set (with poster) originally released in the late ’60s by, according to the liner notes, a “family, a tribe, a band of nomads” known as “A Cid,” or, if you were to go by the confusing cover alone, “A cid Symphony,” or even “Ernie Fischbach and Charles Ewing.” Heads, you see, were not too terribly concerned with creating clearly defined labels for themselves. (It was a form of protest.)
Samara Lubelski is an accomplished singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and recording engineer from New York City, who has spent the past decade playing in a couple of psych-folk outfits (Hall of Fame and Tower Recordings), as well as working with such underground notables as Metabolismus, Jackie-O Motherfucker, and the Sonora Pine. So when crafting her third solo record, Spectacular of Passages, Lubelski knew to surround her softly strummed acoustic guitar and hushed, melancholic voice with a collection of top-shelf indie musicians. And she knew how to expertly blend a breadth of instrumentation (Mellotron, brass, organ, strings, piano, percussion, etc.) into a rich, warm folk-pop sound, which feels as cozy as wrapping yourself up in a wool blanket and contemplatively sipping a mug of hot cider. However, skilled production and veteran accompaniment do not sum up this work, which is lacking in places. Too many of these midtempo tunes are nearly indistinguishable from many of the indie-folk confessionals broadcast across college radio airwaves back in the mid-’90s, which wouldn’t be an issue if Lubelski abandoned her airy, tentative falsetto and allowed her voice to become more of an emotive force. She need not scream; she just needs to inject her vocals (and by extension her songs) with more passion, more suspense.
OK, so I’ll fess up to possessing a real fascination with cults. I once owned David Koresh’s Voice of Fire, but I sold it because Koresh sounded like a second-rate Jackson Browne. However, the same cannot be said of Charles Manson. His Lie: The Love and Terror Cult contains some truly great ’60s folk-pop, such as “Cease to Exist,” a tune the Beach Boys did a gorgeous rendition of and renamed “Never Learn Not to Love.”
Pine Cone Temples is a massive chunk of environmental music — moody field recordings by four nature-loving experimental musicians from California retreating to the woods or a cavernous loft space and freely playing amplified sticks, stones, trees, archaic stringed instruments, and the occasional piano. Wander into Golden Gate Park some night this week, close your eyes, and for five minutes listen intently to the sounds floating about your head. You’ll hear a random “symphony” of industrial culture and natural atmospherics roughly approximating the droning sounds of Thuja (a name borrowed from a type of cypress tree). But that’s only a small part of the picture. Thuja has been working on this aesthetic for about seven years now, and the group has developed that rare ability, in the words of music scholar Dr. Fredric Lieberman, to “suggest by the simplest possible means the inherent nature of the aesthetic object,” meaning these musicians, with meditative, Zen-like intention, discover the very essence of every sound they create no matter how faint. And when all these individual sounds are considered as one — with several of these pieces breaking the 20-minute mark — a powerful collective presence can be felt that is so much more intense than a smattering of random noises.
The widely accepted notion that the mid-’70s were the doldrums of rock is pure myth. Some indispensably bizarre music was created during these years, with the comic book-inspired, electro-psychedelic glam-rock of one Todd Tamanend Clark serving as serious proof. Emerging after the fall of the hippies and before the rise of the punks, Clark — a Native American activist and true outsider from Pennsylvania — forged a unique fusion of wild ’60s-style experimentalism and proto-new wave synth-freakery. Such jams as “Phosphorescence Is the Chamber,” “Within the Zodiac Zone,” and “Last Day as a Whole Person” are lo-fi nuggets smothered in a piercing menagerie of cheap sci-fi zaps, zings, and chirps while multi-instrumentalist Clark spins these very theatrical cyberpunk tales about paranoia, astrology, and modern society. And when this long-haired wonder ain’t dropping precious lines like “Transmutation of molecules over a period of time/ It began as an amoeba” in an echo-laden basso profundo that is as delirious-sounding as Dr. Frankenstein after lightning struck his monster, he’s unloading some snarling axe riffage or funky Doors-influenced organ bits. Clark even managed to record one of the greatest all-out punk jammers, “We’re Not Safe!” Damn. This is classic weirdness.
