Sunday, July 25, 2021

Psychfan's Trip O' Th' Week™ Dept. - Two More From Tom

Tom Wilson [Psychfan writes - Ed.] apparently had a lot of clout in his role as a staff producer at MGM records in 1968. When he wasn't producing The Velvet Underground or Eric Burdon he was creating odd projects like this one, the double-album debut by Harumi.

The first disc sounds like an odd sort of orch-psych interspersed with slightly more conventional psych. The second disc is two sidelong pieces of total freak out, which oddly enough echoes the structure of the unconventional format of The Mothers of Invention debut Freak Out.

Wilson must have had some interesting conversations with MGM's label management about his penchant for debut doubles by weird and uncommercial acts and that may have had something to do with his side career at the time. He had started his own production company, called Rasputin, and was producing more unknown psychedelic bands for other labels.

Today's second album is by one of the best of those bands, a Boston based group called The Ill Wind. They had a female lead singer and two good male singers as well, leading to the inevitable Jefferson Airplane comparisons. Their music also had elements of folk rock and psych, making some of those Airplane references seem justified.

Label mismanagment and lack of support led to the usual dead end and the band never recorded another LP. This version has an additional disc of demos that are largely additional material for proposed future recordings.





9 comments:

  1. Here's Psychfan's links, which he doesn't make youse bums work for!


    https://www.mediafire.com/file/1mz4nabh6n5otft/H@rum!.rar/file
    https://www.mediafire.com/file/ab455gm6t516gav/The+!!!+W!nd.rar/file

    (Incidentally, "I had the Harumi album on vinyl", back when you could pick up stuff like this for pennies, and never warmed to it, but it's certainly got curiosity value.)

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    1. Thanks for this, I have the Harumi on vinyl now, probably nought in in the 90s and can't imagine I paid more than a few dollars. Too weird to get rid of, which is I believe what my wife says about me.

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  2. this album brings back the worst sick headache i ever experienced. i bought it when it first came out as one always had to grab the weirdest looking sight-seen / sound-unknown in the record shop to lord it over one's peers as being FIRST! i headed back to my chicago gold coast basement one room and put it on after donning my primitive headphones while extremely shit faced. i woke up the next morning with the droning drill sound of harumi still on repeat. it had been going non-stop into my brain all night. i made it to the toilet and upchucked. i don't think i ever listened to the rest of the album.

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    1. .............but how do you REALLY feel about it??????????

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    2. Harumi - probably not his real name - disappeared completely from the face of the earth after recording this album. Some say he was Tom Wilson's dry-cleaner, others swear he was a busboy at the Wan-Q Cantonese Restaurant (Pico, just east of Robertson). Whatever, Harumi has left us with something truly special, if not actually good.

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  3. Harumi Ando was his real name. Born in Japan, raised in Forest Hills, Queens, NY. He live in lower Manhattan and became a graphic artist. He died at at 63 years of age in 2007. I spent weeks and months trying to find out who the other musicians are, (the liner notes are anemic), and who is photographed with Harumi for the album photos. The only thing I learned is that Bobby Callander and Don Robertson may be two of the session musicians.

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    1. Thanks UncleRemus! Those are two very interesting additions to the personnel list.

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