It Came From Outta Th' Crawlspace Dept. - The Fake Watch Band

 

From early 2022, when you were denying the onset of elderliness, comes this lovingly-wrought screed about some music you never bothered to pick up at the time. Or maybe you did but lost it down the back of the couch or just wandered off to find some paint or something in the garage. Well, grab hold of it now with all the strength you can muster in your arthritic old fingers, get Nurse Diesel to tweezer your ear hair, and plug in the buds for a sonic holiday! You certainly won't regret downloading today's re-featured deliverable!

Back when psychedelia was first being rediscovered - immediately post-Nuggets - the correct attitude was to sniff at Ed Cobb's studio additions to Chocolate Watch Band albums. Dey wus fake! The Chocolate Watch Band was a snarling, biting proto-punk combo, and Cobb's dreamy and sophisticated confections were not welcome. They weren't even played by the band! BOO!

Yes, the Choccies (as absolutely no-one was calling them) were one of the great garage punk combos, and it's impossible not to love their Sunset Strip spin on the Yardbirds and the Stones. But I always dug (man) Ed Cobb's Fake Watch Band cuts quite as much - more, if I'm honest. So here's Dark Side Of The Mushroom And Other Trips On Gossamer Wings, the first album ever by the Fake Watch Band.

The three gorgeous numbers that made up the first side of The Inner Mystique (if there's a lovelier album side I've yet to hear it) are here in their perfect sequence, as side two. The six cuts on the first side are the remaining recordings of the Fake Watch Band, and I've snuck in a couple of tracks with original band members that sound more Fake than Chocolate to make up the running time, anticipating the snooty dismissal of the purists who consider them not genuine Fakes at all.

It's a totally groovy 'sixties psych album, a soundtrack to blissing out in the park on a hot summer's day. And credit where long overdue; to Ed Cobb, Richard Podolor, Bill Cooper, Wayne Proctor, Don Bennet, Ethan McElroy, and the nameless session musicians whose contributions created such an evocative - and superbly recorded - piece of work. All thirty delicious minutes of it.

Ed Cobb [Ed left - Ed.] was in The Four Preps before moving to production in the late sixties. He produced Steely Dan, Pink Floyd, and Fleetwood Mac, among beaucoup others. He also wrote Tainted Love, a big hit for Soft Cell, Dirty Water for The Standells, and Every Little Bit Hurts, a hit for a busload of artistes. Major dude. Show him some respect by enjoying this album as the world goes to hell.