The Association Recovered Dept. (Added Content Advisory!)

 

Stop Your Motor was The Association's last album before the Brothers Warner "let them go" after three hit-free years. They moved to Columbia for their gawjuss swansong Waterbeds In Trinidad! which bothered the charts even less. Nobody - including John and Jane Q. Public - knew what to do with them. They'd always neatly sidestepped being hip, and the possibly imagined reference to dope in Along Comes Mary was perhaps their closest brush with the counterculture. Happier on stage with Andy Williams than The Jefferson Airplane, the band had too much square-shaped musicality and not enough rock-star posture to grow an audience into the 'seventies. But at this late stage who gives a shit about any of that malarkey?

If you've heard this album, I'm guessing it was a while back and you haven't returned to it. The entirely unfair rep of it being somehow dismissable is fueled by a weak cover [left - Ed.] and strangely negative title, with a cumulative effect it's hard to shake. And there's the track order. It wasn't quite programmed for a smooth listening experience. So I shuffled the tracks, and integrated both the non-album single Just About The Same, and a genuine rarity - the totally obscure Once Upon A Wheel from the same sessions (unavailable anywhere except the internet), which fit right in. With a new cover and title from Th' Isle O' Foam©, we have a refreshed album, and if you haven't heard it before, immerse yerself in the lost art of unapologetic beauty; the pure pop that was out of step with the times, and all the better for it.

Ferris Wheel was their production company - it must have seemed their career was on one. And the eclipse - another suitable analogy for their career - is a kind of cosmic ferris wheel.

Second in a series working back thru th' Association's motherlode back catalog.