Marc Bolan was one of the best known musicians of the 1970s and he'd hardly be characterized as a cult figure if it were not for his early, tragic death. But before he hit number one and became a household name with his electric glitter glam persona, an early non-abbreviated Tyrannosaurus Rex released a string of "fantasy folk" records in the late 60s that gradually progressed toward psychedelia and perfection. Tyrannosaurus Rex was comprised of Bolan and percussionist/multi-instrument alist Steve Peregrin Took. Together with producer Tony Visconti (of Bowie fame) they recorded Unicorn very quickly in 1969, [...]
Ticket's Awake is one of the best classic rock/psych albums from a surprisingly fertile late 60s/early 70s New Zealand scene. Ticket's roots trace back to several late 60s blues rock and pop groups: the Challenge, the Blues Revival and the Jamestown Union. Despite hitting the top 20 with the funky rural rocker "Country High" and recording two albums, Ticket's popularity never broke out of the Aussie/New Zealand territories. Awake's contents were made up of several single sides issued in 1971 and some new studio material that date from 1972. Hendrix, Cream and Traffic [...]
Running Time: 59:00 | File Size 81 MB Download: .mp3 To subscribe to this podcast: http://therisingstorm.net/podc ast.xml [ ? ] 1. Yukon Railroad - The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band - 1970 2. That's Alright By Me (Previously Unreleased) - Gene Clark - 1968 3. Southbound Train - Graham Nash & David Crosby - 1972 4. Just Yesterday - Weird Herald - 1967 5. Rosana (Previously Unreleased) - Hearts And Flowers - 1968 6. Little [...]
Running Time: 59:00 | File Size 81 MB Download: .mp3 To subscribe to this podcast: http://therisingstorm.net/podc ast.xml [ ? ] 1. Yukon Railroad - The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band - 1970 2. That's Alright By Me (Previously Unreleased) - Gene Clark - 1968 3. Southbound Train - Graham Nash & David Crosby - 1972 4. Just Yesterday - Weird Herald - 1967 5. Rosana (Previously Unreleased) - Hearts And Flowers - 1968 6. Little [...]
Open Road was Donovan's first album of the 1970's. Here he was backed by a sympathetic group of the same name (Open Road) and this change made all the difference. Gone are the psychedelic trappings of previous years and in their place are a collection of sharp Celtic influenced folk-rock tracks. The lyrics and backing band are straight forward and direct, giving this album a back to the basics feel (there are no sitars, horns, harpsichords or elaborate studio productions) - so in the case of Open Road , less is more. While there are no [...]
Here's another genuinely "lost" sixties psych album, laid down in 1967 but not seeing the light of public exposure until forty-three years later. Coming together in '66 at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, these six students and alumni must have thought they had a stellar musical career in store, because not only did all the undergrads drop out of their courses but they took as their name the astronomical designation of the Sombrero Galaxy in the constellation of Virgo. This didn't exactly roll off the tongue, but in the trippy atmosphere of the times it conveyed a [...]
This record is like a river, ebbing and flowing. That may sound vague, but it's probably the best way I can think to describe the music contained on the 1964 recordings that make up Terry Callier's debut record The New Folk Sound of Terry Callier. Every time I put this music on I drift away, caught up in the slow, rolling rhythms and sad, rambling lyrics. Though Callier is best known for his run of unique psychedelic records in the early seventies, it's his earliest material that has taken the strongest hold on my soul: a molasses-thick concoction [...]
The Freeborne were a youthful Boston-based psych outfit whose five members, despite their tender years, all had considerable experience of playing a wide range of styles in earlier combos. Adapting their name from the movie Born Free and discovering the freewheeling creative delights of LSD, they signed to Monitor in early '67 and concocted a set of highly psychedelic originals which were laid down at A&R Studios in NYC. Peak Impressions sold only modestly, probably because of a dilatory campaign of live appearances to support it. After [...]
No one can blame you if you dismiss Slade's Play It Loud out of hand. After all, Slade was the original hair metal band, launching a thousand ill-begotten covers, their originals just as bombastic, screeching and spelling-challenged. Yet, the Slade catalogue is full of buried treasures; nearly every one of the band's 70s albums contains at least one song worth the price of admission, from "Gudbye to Jane" to "How Does It Feel," and in the case of Play It Loud , an entire album's worth of great songs. Released in 1970, Play It [...]
Rick Sings Nelson , Rick Nelson's first studio album with the pioneering Stone Canyon Band, really does deserve the reputation of "stone-cold classic". Expanding tenfold upon the razor-sharp music and harmonies of the Stone Canyon's debut record, In Concert , Rick Sings Nelson was actually the singer's first album of wholly original material (hence the title). It's unbelievable that it took him this long start laying his songs on the public like this, because they're pretty great, and certainly miles above lots of the crud he had been running through for the preceding [...]
Quite reasonably described in recent reviews as "acoustic death metal" and "too weird for folkies, too folky for weirdos", it would be hard to identify any album from the sixties/seventies cusp that was more wilfully intended to alienate the mainstream record-buying public than this totally unique progressive folk effort by Comus. First Utterance was, and still is, "difficult". Fortunately today an appreciative audience exists for "difficult" stuff like this. Kent-based art students Roger Wootton and Glenn Goring had played acoustic covers of Velvet Underground numbers in London folk clubs, thereby alienating the contemporary folk audience as [...]
If you ever wondered what the love child of the Bee Gees and Crosby, Stills and Nash would sound like, wonder no more - the pointy-headed creature would sound like Tranquility. The story of short-lived career of Tranquility is a difficult one to track; now largely forgotten, the band has neither a biography at AllMusic or a Wikipedia page. A fairly short history of the band's 1971-1974 duration can be found on a page dedicated to Vanity Fare , but aside from that, little exists on the Internet about Tranquility. The dichotomy of a band [...]
Blue Mountain Eagle is a band with a tediously convoluted history. Though originally construed by former Buffalo Springfield drummer Dewey Martin as the New Buffalo Springfield, they went through a long series of lineup changes during their brief existence, the end result of which was Martin's rather ironic expulsion. A pretty-much-inevitable lawsuit taken out against the band by Stephen Stills and Neil Young effectively barred them from performing under their rather awkward, hand-me-down moniker, so the group took on the name of a newspaper one of the guys had picked up while on tour. What may have seemed [...]
Bull Of The Woods (an International Artists release) is the Elevators most controversial offering. Some fans claim it's their best LP but many, myself included, feel Psychedelic Sounds and Easter Everywhere are the group's finest discs. Frequent personnel changes, drug busts and Roky Erickson's fragile state had destroyed the original core of Sutherland, Hall and Erickson. Stacy Sutherland was the only original member left by 1968 and he made a game effort by putting together some newly recorded "solo" tracks with older, stray Elevator tunes that were cut during the previous year. The excellent [...]
Variously described as "the finest popsike album ever recorded", "a quirky look at British life in the late 60s with tea and cakes on the lawn, budgerigars and balloons wafting in the breeze" and "Georgio Gomelsky's Lonely Hearts Club Band", you might conclude that this definitive whimsy-psych opus was a premeditated attempt to upstage the Fabs and the Kinks at their own game by a similarly professional outfit. In fact it was the more-or-less accidental result of a dissolute R'n'B covers band ingesting lots of pharmaceuticals, reluctantly writing their own material, being impelled by their uber -persuasive manager/producer to [...]
The story of pop music in the 1960s is littered with "bands" that were never truly bands, but were, rather, the creation of record companies and record producers anxious to cash in on prevailing trends. This, too, is the story of The Freak Scene. The Freak Scene was the creation of Rusty Evans, an ostensible folksinger who'd gotten his start recording rockabilly for Brunswick Records. The Kasentez-Katz of psych-pop, Evans was responsible for several albums by "bands" that were, in actuality, Evans and a group of studio musicians. The Freak [...]
Chip Taylor's This Side of the Big River is probably one of the best underground country albums you've never heard. Though the record plays things pretty straight for its genre, it also boasts some pretty solid underground credentials. Not only is Chip Taylor the songwriter behind such Troggs classics as "Wild Thing" and "Any Way That You Want Me" (not to mention "Try," the great kozmik soul shouter made famous by Janis Joplin), but he's also the brother of the Midnight Cowboy himself, actor Jon Voight. In addition, three cuts on Big River feature Chip's friend [...]
With Pink Floyd on an all-out reissue bender, I thought it would be a good time for another one of these discography reviews. I loved the Floyd as a youngster discovering rock & roll, but started to lose faith as I delved deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole. Dark Side is an undisputed masterpiece, but am I too much of a Syd snob to choose it here? What are you gonna go with? Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Q. Do [...]
The Stone Poneys should be much more than a footnote. Forever eclipsed by Linda Ronstadt's latter-day success, the band has found itself set down in history as little more than an early backing group for the singer - hardly a fair assessment, especially considering the strength of the material recorded by the band, of which Ronstadt was only one contributor. In fact, Poneys Ken Edwards and Bob Kimmel were remarkable singers in their own right and actually penned all of the group's original material. The Poneys' self-titled debut is perhaps their strongest statement as a band. Produced by [...]
This 1969 release by Watertown, New York's Wool proves that even when you have strong talent and all the right connections, sometimes it still isn't enough to get your band to break. The group formed in the early '60s, and were originally known as Ed Wool and The Nomads. Ed Wool , who was a master guitar prodigy and excellent songwriter, was influenced early on by the new British Invasion sound and later on by the cream-of-the-crop of soul/R&B. Ed Wool and The Nomads were huge in the mid-60s' thriving Northern/Upstate New York music scene, even sharing [...]
The Rising Storm
Bison - Quill
Neutral Milk Hotel- Aeroplane Over the Sea
Shinichi Osawa – Big Beach Mix 2012
Mr Fogg - Eleven
