Lost Classics Of Collegiate Gothic Acid Rock Dept. - Maxfield Parrish

 

Back when I was chiselling screed for Ugly Things magazine (three bucks fifty for a hundred words - not much, but all I could afford), I began a long-distance bromance with staffer David Biasotti, one of the world's swellest guys. He writes beautiful, exhaustively researched and perceptive articles, annotates CD re-editions and is one of the world's pre-eminentest scholars of West Coast music like what we like here at th' Isle O' Foam©. He was taught guitar by Jerry Garcia (me neither), and, most germanely [is this a word? - Ed.] was in the American Gothic-folk-rock-varsity-acidhead combo Maxfield Parrish. Their lone album tanked for two very simple reasons: it was called It's A Cinch To Give Legs To Old Hard-Boiled Eggs and the cover featured - you're way ahead of me here - some old hard-boiled yeggs. Yup.

The cover [not above, nor anywhere - Ed.] and title are absolutely the worst ever in the entire human history of worst ever. It's not like they were lost for words fercrissakes, they had literacy out th' ass; there are songs here called The Lighthouse Is Falling and The Untransmuted Child. The fault lies, as David explains below, with the label.

The music's in a niche all its own - closest I can think of is Mad River's second, possibly the Papa Nebo album - and you can hear the disparate threads of American music coming together like a gothic web spun by a spider on acid. Band members David Biasotti, Perrin Muir, David McClellan and Randy Groenke were helped out by - take a breath - Chris Darrow, David Lindley,  Chester Crill, John Ware, Bernie Leadon, and John London. Wow.

David Biasotti [right - Ed.] and th' band

David Biasotti writes:"Many thanks to my dear friend FT3 for his the kind words concerning myself, and for remembering the Maxfield Parrish album. It's very true that the album title was a bad choice, to put it mildly - imagine me trying to explain it to my grandma, when the family gathered around Mom & Dad's stereo to listen to it for the first time. Imagine explaining it to anybody! The cover art, too, certainly could have been better. We would have preferred a group shot. There were a couple of photo sessions to draw on, both taken by Chris Darrow's sister, including one in that grand old LA central train station, with us & our instrument cases. How much cooler that would have been.

The thing is, the record was recorded in the summer of 1969, and wasn't released until 1972. When we made the record, the first Dillard & Clark and Flying Burrito Brothers albums were fresh. It was a transitional moment in music, and in our innocence we thought ourselves part of that. Happily, the weirdness of our more demanding songs would, I guess, set us apart. Muir and I were fairly distanced from the group concept by the time the record was released; the people that financed the record indulged their own fantasies in the whole thing, from cover art to track listings. But in the end the thing got released, which was kind of a miracle, really. I'm proud of it, zits and all, and I've made friends off the back of it.

We were a college band, and never performed much off-campus. Three of us were undergraduates in Claremont, California, and David McClellan was still in high school. There was a memorable gig at a minimum security men's prison - God knows how that happened (David Muir put it out there in the CD liners that it was a women's prison, but that was a case of him 'embellishing' things.) One of the more prestigious gigs we did was support to John Fahey. He didn't give a fuck about us [or anyone - Ed.], but Chris Darrow was in the audience. That's where we met him for the first time, and things grew from there. The gig I most remember was our very first under the name Maxfield Parrish, at the Smudge Pot, a basement live space at Pomona College. Our first set bombed horribly; we were quite a bit edgier than the kind of folk groups people there were used to. What I remember most vividly is the four of us getting together in the stairwell and working up the spirit to go back out there and slay them. And we actually kind of did. I'm guessing we pulled out some banjo-led crowd pleasers - me and Randy Groenke were always good for those - and the whole band stepped up a notch to deliver some of our own tunes. A stage triumph! Generally speaking, though, people didn't know what to make of us; mixed reactions were the norm."

This is a re-edited piece from th' Vault O' Foam©, incorporating David's comments. MrDave (then a callow youth of some sixteen summers) asked how you give legs to hard-boiled eggs, and D.B. had to Google the answer. You will too! The cover design is new - I think I got closer this time; a mix of Andrew Wyeth, Grant Wood, and Maxfield Parrish. Loaddown is CD with xtry trx, plus scans of original cover art you can squint at.