Sitarswami. His name is uttered in hushed, awed tones wherever the Now Generation gets it together. You'll hear it whispered at an Amsterdam coffee house. Intoned in the back room of the City Lights bookshop. Called across the rustling depths of an Afghanistan hemp field. Accidentally amplified during a Grateful Dead soundcheck. Chanted at a Rishikesh ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas. Sitarswami! A mantra for seekers after truth, for the Love Children and freethinkers who are welcoming the dawning of the Age of Aquarius! Yet few have seen his face. His internet presence is no more than a fleeting shadow. He remains a myth, a mystery.
False Memory Foam© eventually tracked him down at an undisclosed location on the outskirts of Steubenville [Ohio - Ed.]. On the intersection of Meat Street and Eleanor Roosevelt Ave. Above Manny's Thirty Day Dry Cleaners. At the back. It was here, in his fun-fur conversation pit, bathed in the shifting glow of a lava-lamp, that Sitarswami gave his first ever interview.
S: Dude! Get outta here! Split, man! I don't do interviews. I'm not doing this one.
FMF: Tell us about your None More Sixties comp.
S: If you make up stuff I never said, like this what I'm not saying now, and put it on an internet, that will be your bad karma, man. You will die.
FMF: I did a cover for it, just like it's a real album!
S: You ripped off somebody's artwork and added some cheesy typography.
FMF: Yeah. Make it sound easy. [grabbing hit from bong] Your face is, like, blue, man! Green!
S: Hihihihihihihih!
FMF: [snork] What makes your compilation so far freaking out? Which it is.
S: By now, seemingly every 45rpm released between
1965-1969 has been compiled/re-issued legally or illegally and it's
harder than ever to find something new to share. Hopefully this comp
includes a few songs you haven't heard before (or too often) but I've
tried to provide a bit more context by presenting four songs by an
artist rather than one song by somebody and then one from someone else
onto the next and the next until you lose track of who's who. All of
these songs were issued as singles while only two of the groups
represented managed to release a full album at the time, and only three
or four others have been retrospectively comped. The other dozen artists
released only a few singles. The one cheat I allowed myself was
including all five of the Joyride songs (while cutting the barely
listenable fourth Charlotte Russe track). For all Doors fans: make sure
you catch the sunshine-pop cover of The Crystal Ship by the
aforementioned, beyond fantastic, The Joyride!
FMF: Wupes. I screwed that up, then. When I beat the tracks down to an ozone-friendly bitrate, I had to retag them all and they arranged themselves in alphabetical order.
S: [sobs] Oh, man! All my work! A lifetime!
FMF: But hey! If anyone downloads it from here, which isn't likely, because he's probably out. At the library or something. He can always re-order them in iTunes or whatever. Do your own thing!
[Sitarswami hurls bong at FMF's head]
Well, shit. Look at this cover what I did. Go on, look at it. Look at these guys. It's a style graveyard. No wonder the only groupie they could pull between them was elderly Frau Mittengrouperschnellgeschaft [at left - Ed.]. Jazzrock was never the genre for attracting the nubile, pouting lovelies in fuck-me shoes so highly prized by the rock, pop n' roll industry. So here the Softies are in Bremen or somewhere [Breda - Ed.], performing material from their party-pooping albums Third, Fourth, and Fifth. A neat trick, because Fifth wasn't even out yet. I used to turn up at parties with Third. It was all I usually left with, too. I couldn't understand why I wasn't pulling hot chicks with my challengingly speccy musical tastes. Then I learned to pretend to like Motown and got lucky. Unlike the Soft Machine, who never as far as I know played any Jimmy Ruffin hits, and had to suffer the consequences. Still and all, this is a fine set. Just don't play it at parties and you'll be fine.
It's well known that Donovan invented folk music, punk, jazz, and psychedelia. He was perhaps the major influence on Bob Dylan ("I owe it all to Donnie") and without him, music as we know it would simply never have happened. What is less well-known is that he invented the seed-drill, bendy straws, fat-free yoghurt, those little plastic tripods they stick in delivery pizzas, the genome string, Poughkeepsie, moveable type, and Tuesday. Modestly, the Don [Donovan - Ed.] shrugged it all off when I quizzed him about his achievements in an exclusive poolside interview for False Memory Foam© yesterday.
D: Inspiration is a gift from the gods. I never claim credit for it, just humble gratitude for being chosen as a divine vessel. And others too numerous to mention. Such as the addition symbol, the little cross used in mathematics. That's mine. Do I ever get credit for that?
FMF: Could we talk about the Liquid Sunshine Donovan album?
D: [laughs] That was quite the scandal at the time! We dosed the butterfly on the cover with a microdot of LSD. I invented LSD, you know.
FMF: Is that what led to the album being withdrawn?
D: That and the title, apparently. Epic didn't like it. Don't know why.
FMF: Liquid Sunshine Donovan ... L,S,D?
D: [thinks] Hmm. Nope. Not getting it.
FMF: Anyway, John Peel wrote the sleeve notes, didn't he?
D: Dear old Peelie! He doesn't come by my yurt much any more.
FMF: What was going to be on the album?
D: It was the most groundbreaking thing I ever did. It was so far beyond what mere humans call music it transcended time and space. Unfortunately it was also beyond the limited consciousness of anybody who heard it. It was recorded during intensive all-night sessions with the Stromberg Twins, channeled directly from the spirit world via my astral connections with the Old Gods of Mu and Atlantis, the Celtic archetypes manifested in this earthly realm. Om shanti the noo, och aye.
FMF: No songs as such, then?
D: Just the pure tantric spiral of the groove, traveling ever inward to the ineffable center of the cosmic void. Are you going to finish those fries?
FMF: Help yourself.
D: [belches] I invented French fr- [tape ends]
Anyone in possession of a master's degree in Applied Psychedelic Research will be familiar with the two albums by HP Lovecraft. The first [HP Lovecraft - Ed.] is a superb example of folk-rock pushing the envelope into psychedelia. The second [HP Lovecraft II - Ed.] was apparently - obviously, really - recorded while the band was tripped out of its collective skull. From the day-glo disrupted mosaic of the cover through to the powerful contact high contained in that innocent-looking groove, it's the album I will play for the Martians, when they land and want to learn all they can about psychedelia while their flying saucer refuels for the long trip back to the Red Planet. There is simply none more. After that, it's difficult to see where they could have gone. The band broke up, partially got back together, then Michael Tegza, after a stint with the unfairly ignored Bangor Flying Circus, formed a band called Lovecraft with him as the sole surviving member of the original line-up plus musicians from the faaaahbulous Aorta and Marty Grebb from The Buckinghams (yay!). If you were anything like me you probably curled your lip at it in the racks and moved on past its throat-slashingly dull cover, tut-tutting at such a cheap and blatant cash-in. And you'd have been wrong. So very wrong.
It's a great album. In fact, if you didn't know its story, it seems exactly like the third album they never made. Even with only the drummer remaining. The glory days of psychedelia were pretty much over by 1970 (some would argue three years earlier), and this album is as representative of its time as the previous two had been. So what you get is a bunch of great songs, sung and played by a bunch of great musicians. In a shit cover. The harmonies, the guitars, the drums ... everything is a joy. Although it's sadly true to say that we will not hear its like again (what with music being made by algorithms running the Instagram likes of an entire generation of phone-stroking fools) we didn't hear it at the time either, or most of us didn't. It's not too late, though. You can grab it here and pretend to your friends that you always dug it, man. Like I do!
EDIT: The FMF postbag has been bulging with requests for Tegza's previous album. "You better of post that Banger Flying circus ablum" writes a Mr Schneider from Los Angeles, "I know where you live. Shame if something happen to them dogs a your's." It's a pleasure to oblige, sir!
As ever, the French have a word for it. Or in this case, two. The phrase means "to listen in Dolby", or something. Who cares? It's just a way to avoid typing the Great Artist's name. There's an abandoned mill outside Ballygawkeycolleen where hundreds of sunlight-deprived orphans hunt down every internet reference to their Employer, and a team of rottweiler lawyers unleashed on the evil-doers. They're not going to find this. Oh no.
Anyway, to the discs at hand. It's not exactly a biblical revelation that Mr Ivan intended Difficult Proboscis The Freeway to be a double album, and recorded all the tracks only to have Warner Brothers [Curly, Moe and Larry Warner - Ed.] insist it be hacked back to a single. Nor is it particularly difficult to gather the tracks together from various sources, and there have been attempts at assembling the original album made available on this very same internet. But this is the best one, and I'll tell you why.
The album as issued [HNTH - Ed.] was never quite the artistic success it should and could have been. It's inconsistent, perhaps over-rich, and the more you think about it the more it seems like it was edited down from a double album. Which it was. Or, if you are poetically-minded, you might liken it to a fruitcake with too many cherries and not enough cake. Okay, you come up with a better simile, you're so smart. Restoring the tracks that were cut from the double allows the HNTH songs to breathe. Gives them a bit of context. But you can't just shovel them all in at the end as "bonus" tracks, you have to sequence them over the four imaginary album sides so the thing works as it should. Which is, if you can summon up the energy to click the link in the comments, what you'll find here. It flows nicely from beginning to end, with a possible single kicking off each side.
Add a contemporary and fashionably brown cover shot featuring a nice pullover, and you finish up with an album which - if you have as much taste yourself - you will agree is better in every sense than the compromised original. Cheaper, too. Free, in fact.
