Spirit In Flesh – II (1979)

Artist: Spirit In Flesh
Title: II
Year: 1979
Format: LP
Label: Private Pressing

Here’s the second recording by the Massachusetts communal band Spirit In Flesh released as a Private Pressing at the end of the seventies. On this album the group progressed into a matured Country Rock outfit, which is a bit of a departure from the more rock oriented sounding debut of eight years earlier.

Among the album’s twelve tracks are three remakes from the that first LP, “Fine Line“, The Jack Baker Song and “Flesh & Gut” here titled “Flesh & Guts” and has been transformed into a beautiful Country/Gospel track which closes the album. For more info, see the first album’s post of June 18, 2010. (Max Collodie)

Spirit in Flesh…1971…took some finding on the phone….having been first posted in one of its earliest incarnations on June 16, 2009….ahhhh…now where is that old red phone logo…..

In my search for SIFlesh, I got sidetracked by giving Spirits And Worms another spin…now there’s a record…goat on the grave and all…and before realising that S&Worms ain’t SIFlesh….Worms took me back into an olive grove on the island of Crete listening to Grace Slick type licks…hmmm finding the correct wave-length….a play of SIFlesh, 1971 will take you into the heart of “communal hippie psych” being played at blistering pace and full of power riffs, and well worth seeking out……a mammoth album from that pivotal year. The album never gives up, never runs out of steam and there ain’t a ballad to be had. A good place is to compare the two S’sIFlesh are the three tracks that double up from 71-79.

1971’s ……“Fine Line” is rocking C/W with blasting electric guitars and head-shaking organ work……“Jack Baker Song” is full of punching power, searing guitar with heavenly girlie chorus and our gruff singer veering from macho-posing into falsetto…. “Flesh and Gut”….is pyche n psuch in spades of swirling singers and stone swamp rock all a bit like having Meatloaf round for afternoon worship…..wow….how any of these guys and guys got through 71-79…oh of course they were part of a “Hippy Commune”….thank God for tomatoes and butter-nut squash….and crystal clear water from a mountain stream….

1979’s……. “Fine Line” is in another place….our noble singer is upfront and accompanied by banjo, a strolling bass and neat stick work by the drummer….oh yes the girls are still with us and their heavenliness is wholesome…..we get a “ye hah” and our banjo gives us a Hobart Smith workout……I may say that the lyric here is in your face not a bit like the rock n roll from 71 blasters…… “Jack Baker Song”….aha…this too is all about the singing….the band are in fine form….but they are more Xian C/W than psyche n psuch….

I missed the Bible quotes first time around….now they are upfront and that is not a bad place for them to be…… “God in me, God in you”…… “Flesh & Guts”…completes the trio of cross-over tracks…..confirming the transformation from rock group, into two ton solid country rockers…..and brings home the spirituality of the band….they may have veered towards the Xian side of the road….but enter with no fear, this band are not on a recruitment drive rather they have had to go Private Pressing to enable others to hear of their joyful existence, down on the farm, and “Flesh and Guts” clocks in at 5.17, double the time spent on the 1971 rockers……

Spirit In Flesh II contains songs of testimony…..they may be finger pointing, but firmly at the band pointing at themselves, thereby somehow, making them Universal.   Spirit in Flesh, clothing all on show, in strikingly good Country Rock comes over not just as Gospel/Xian…rather the band truly live up to their name…..Spirit in Flesh. The songs are not about personal salvation, they are about placing a focus on Our time ‘here and now’…rather than the ‘Hereafter’….

The two openers “Greater Than Man”, “I Have Walked”, are straight in your face Country rock with the guitars and pedal steel to the fore….. “Cold Winds” is a song Johnny Cash should have recorded?“Riverside Song”….dwells on ‘animism’, certainly not Xian…… “Bury My Body” does veer off into the ‘hereafter’ and the more cynical may find this a giggle….be assured these boys mean business, and Marty Robbins or Hank Snow could have had a real good go at this….. “Heaven Don’t Allow”….continues the theme of spend your time here wisely….be wholesome as you rock and roll and stay away from the cess-pit…..again many may find the theme/songs simply a gas….however, it takes one to know one…

So if you prefer the blasting 1971 Spirit in Flesh ‘power-house’ then stick with it…however, if you want to see what clean living does to your ability to communicate straight to the heart (as against the head-banging or foot-stomping) then grab yourself a sack and head off to Spirit and Flesh’s farm someway downs the road….. “Yellow Wings”…..is a gentle acoustic folk rock ballad….and we are on Steve Cash Land’s front porch with just the empty sky and far away mountains within reach….gorgeous…..and it all swirls up into the lands beyond flight….

“One Little Thought”…is a gentle strolling ballad delivered in world-weary tones…this is the most finger-pointer on show…… “Reason for Living” finds the boys picking up their electric guitars again but this is simply to add bounce and tone to the message…..

What you have is what you find and I recommend this to all those who have grown tired of ‘downer-folk’ like Dave Bixby etal…..this will get you up dancing to a whole new outlook? (REVIEWED BY AYE-AFLOAT)

Track Listing

1. Greater Than Man
2. I Have Walked
3. Cold Winds
4. Fine Line
5. Riverside Song
6. Bury My Body
7. Heaven Don’t Allow
8. Yellow Wings
9. One Little Thought
10. Reason For Living
11. Jack Baker Song
12. Flesh & Guts

The Hindu Kush Mountain Boys Plus One – The Hindu Kush Mountain Boys Plus One (1979)

Artist: The Hindu Kush Mountain Boys Plus One
Title: The Hindu Kush Mountain Boys Plus One
Year: 1979
Format: LP
Label: Cliff Hanger

The Hindu Kush Mountain Boys Plus One were a spiritual bluegrass group consisting of Larry Siegel (vocals-guitar-mandolin), Jim Queen (vocals-violin-fiddle), Rich Miller (vocals-guitar-piano) and Rhonda Mattern (vocals-banjo).

The album is always described by record dealers as psych, but it is standard bluegrass with philosophical spiritual lyrics based in Eckankar, the religion of Light and Sound. Its teachings emphasize the value of personal experiences as the most natural way back to God.

According to the album’s liner notes, the LP “contains some of the liveliest, happiest music this side of Tibet” adding… “This group managed to kick up a new breed of spiritual music that doesn’t belong to the world of time-weary tradition and religious ritual. Instead, their songs have grown out of a joyous realization that death is a myth, and that during this lifetime each person can consciously experience worlds which lie beyond the range of the physical senses. ”

Larry Siegel has performed for over thirty years on guitar, banjo, mandolin, ukulele, harmonica and as a singer/composer/producer. He has been a featured instrumentalist with Dolly Parton, Lester Lanin, and others. His national television appearances include Rosie O’Donnell and Breakfast Time with Tom Bergeron.

Jim Queen had a 30-year career in the U. S. Air Force Band, the first 20 of which were spent in its Strolling Strings. In 1993, he founded Silver Wings, the U. S. Air Force’s country band. Since retiring from the band in 2004, he has freelanced extensively as a violinist/fiddler/guitarist/banjoist, and recently completed a run in the Ford Theater’s production of Shenandoah.

Rich Miller has performed around the world, playing bass, guitar, piano, and saxophone, and has been a featured performer with Jack Jones, nationally acclaimed guitarist Al Bruno, and others. He is best known for his clear, deep voice that brings out the full harmony that the Hindu Kush Mountain Boys Plus One use so well.

Rhonda Mattern Stapleton, a former editor of Sing Out! The Folk Song Magazine, is the “One” female in the group. Her songs on the joys and struggles of spiritual awakening have won numerous awards in national songwriting competitions, including the prestigious Billboard song contest.

The group recently reunited and are currently in the studio recording a new collection of songs that are due for release this year. For more info please check the Cliff Hanger Records website at http://mca3.com/ls/index.cgi  (Howard Hales Broom)

Track Listing

1. HU MAHANTA
2. Give The Master The Nod
3. If You Wanna Be Happy
4. The Eye
5. Little Willie Gee
6. Ain’t It Amazing?
7. The Sound Of The ECK
8. Is It True, Necessary, Kind?
9. Peddar Zaskq
10. Life Is Only A Dream

David Patton – David Patton (1971)

Artist: David Patton
Title: David Patton
Year: 1971
Format: LP
Label: Wooden Nickel

Contributed By Eliot W.

David Patton made two countrified albums for Chicago-based Wooden Nickel, the successor to Bill Traut’s Dunwich label of the 1966-67 era. Distributed by RCA, Wooden Nickel was owned by Traut and Jim Golden and Jerry Weintraub and it lasted from 1971 to 1977.

But for all intents and purposes, it stopped real operations when their star group, Styx, left for A&M in 1975. Patton’s first self-titled album was produced by James Lee Golden and had such players as Larry Carlton, Larry Brown, Tom Hensley, Bill Perry, and Buddy Emmons. (Eliot W.)

Listening to David Patton…. makes me hungry to hear Alex Harvey and his “Delta Dawn” from the same era…. oh what a rich vein David taps into…. that side-saddle position that took such singers out of the rhine-stone shine into a slightly risqué outlaw stance…. yet holding on, hanging on actually, to all the trappings that Nashville had to offer? (most clearly demonstrated by the likes of “I’d Rather Be At The Grand Old Opry”), a track that takes us out to Nam where our trooper is dodging bullets and raindrops yearning to back home in the home of ‘Country’……a great track.

For starters David has one fine set of singing chops…. and secondly he is ably backed throughout, by players who can really sweetly play over the tortured songs on offer here and the torture is fully placed where it belongs….. woman trouble presaged by the passage of Time. So piano, guitar, banjo, drumming first rate and a world-weary voice years removed from Jim Reeves, (though both celebrate the same lonliness) …. aha…. one way question the occasional use of saccharine strings…. obligatory of course…. just ask Jesse Winchester.

One of the niggles, which may be one of the albums strengths, is David has not found his own style…. veering as he does from Glen Campbell sound-alike to Doug Kershaw sound-alikes’ and all stopping off points in-between.
Many a fine singer has been swallowed by the Nashville machine…. was David Patton? ……. just not sure how Nashville, Wooden Nickel or Dunwich were….. but RCA as distributor….. hmmm…just what is David doing these days?

The album is a sweet mixture of rumpity bumpity shoogling slightly upbeat tunes and wandering, meandering melancholy ballads……listening to it makes me think of “Paint Your Wagon”…. now go light up your pipe to that one.

The album closes off with a couple of tunes that sum up this album: one a reflective pointer to a future, where our intrepid David will be a fit and able match for HER……and a yucka chucka boom beat rear-view glance to “That Girl”…aha…just about time for David to tightened his belt, button up his denim shirt and git on that horse and head off to anywhere else?

Recommended to lovers of soft country Americana with one hand firmly hanging onto Nashville? (REVIEWED BY AYE AFLOAT)

Track Listing

1. You Are Gone
2. The T. V.A.
3. The Devil In Me
4. Lincoln Freed Me Today
5. I’d Rather Be At The Grand Ole Opry
6. Bourgeoise Woman
7. Winter’s Comin’ On
8. Only Yesterday
9. Back To Atlanta
10. Sweet Little Baby I Care
11. That Girl

David Patton – Buckeye (1972)

Artist: David Patton
Title: Buckeye
Year: 1972
Format: LP
Label: Wooden Nickel

Contributed by Eliot W.

David Patton’s second album, “Buckeye,” featured many of the same session musicians as the first album, continuing in the same mellow but funky vein, a sound that’s not so far off from Joe South or a rootsier David Gates.  (Eliot W.)

David kicks off with a slightly higher range on show on “Her”…. now just how tight did he hitch that belt? ……before launching into a brillo-pad breeze of a Ralph Stanley hip hip hooray race home on a train, with his horse firmly locked in the goods wagon? on “Hear That Whistle Blow”….. what a wheeze of a start to Buckey, the second David Patton album on show here in the redtelephone.

The strings wrap their golden syrup round “Lookin’ Good” while “Goodbye to Goodbye” is a throwaway, worth hearing…. some pretty chirpy guitar picking on show kick the strings into the stands, and David takes us out with a pretty standard outro.

In “Swamp River Queen” David shows he’s not left Doug Kershaw etal with his discarded socks at the last Motel Room……makes me want to seek out some serious Redbone music? The track has some real good harmonica…shook a shaking going on…. and David is joined by some distant vocal accompaniment….

“Dakota” boasts some electric guitar licks…. and David is in danger of being outdone by his musical buddies choogling along on this little tune.

However, don’t worry, David is back on top….. voice sounding at his expressive best on “Like Tonight” and they double whammy together on “Los Angeles Leavin’”….a pretty radio friendly tune and the strings grab the tune and give it extra texture and depth.

“Fool’s Hall of Fame”…is snuck in two from the end…. perhaps that’s the best place for it? and “People in Dallas Got Hair” closes off David’s second platter…another attempt by David and band to try gain a heavier edge.

What next for David?

Buckeye, like David’s other offering will not disappoint those seeking out easy on the ear country tunes, however such tunes that will not bend one’s mind or take us to pastures new? (REVIEWED BY AYE AFLOAT)

Track Listing

1. Her
2. Hear That Whistle Blow
3. Lookin’ Good
4. Goodbye To Goodbye
5. Swamp River Queen
6. Dakota
7. Like Tonight
8. Los Angeles Leavin’
9. Fool’s Hall Of Fame
10. People In Dallas Got Hair

The Oxpetals – The Oxpetals (1970)

Artist: The Oxpetals
Title: The Oxpetals
Year: 1970
Format: LP
Label: Mercury

The Oxpetals consisted of Benjamin Herndon (vocals-guitar), Steven Pague (guitar-vocals), Guy Phillips (bass), Robert Webber (keyboards) and Daniel “Ace” Allison (drums).

Laid-back with pleasing harmonies, this is uplifting soft rock that incorporates boogie, folk and country influences. Likely to be labeled “hippie-rock” but that’s not to denigrate it, (Shyney)

Track Listing

1. Don’t Cry Mother
2. I Still Remember
3. Doin’ It
4. What Can You Say
5. The Lazy Station
6. March 22
7. Declaration Of Oneness
8. Down From The Mountain
9. Silent Partner
10. Stephanie
11. You Can’t Hide From The Rude Owl
12. Glory To The Skies
    

The Deadly Nightshade – The Deadly Nightshade (1975)

Artist: The Deadly Nightshade
Title: The Deadly Nightshade
Year: 1975
Format: LP
Label: Phantom

On our first album, The Deadly Nightshade, released in 1975, the producer was Felix Cavaliere, who had been the keyboard player and creative leader of The Rascals. They’d been one of our favorite groups from the days of their energetic, passionate first album (before the mellow later hits), when they were still called The Young Rascals, and Felix’s trademark was dramatic slides up and down his Hammond B3 organ, with his elbow.

We were thrilled at the prospect of having Felix’s elbow on our album. And we also felt that as a producer, he’d understand our own live energy, and be able to translate that into an exciting recording.

Felix did play on the album. But he was past his elbow days and Hammond B3 melodrama, into more tasteful Fender Rhodes jazzy/Latinesque stylings. (Think “Groovin’” rather than “Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore”.)

The Deadly Nightshade had not, very deliberately, progressed beyond melodrama. Still, we felt that Felix could capture our kamikaze live sound and spirit in the studio. Unfortunately, however, between Phantom/RCA and us– pulling in opposite directions and with very different concepts of what The Deadly Nightshade’s recordings should be– he was in an impossible position.

We did try to compromise on the issues. It was clearly a given, for instance, that there would be many studio musicians playing on our album, and some—drums replacing my tap boots stomping on the backbeat or downbeat; real horns supplementing or replacing our kazoos; keyboards added in places—seemed reasonable ideas.

But since a big part of what The Deadly Nightshade was about was inspiring other women to play in bands, and proving women could cut it, we wanted as many of the studio musicians as possible, preferably all of them, to be female.
It was a simple concept that no one got, and it caused constant conflict. With the hottest studio guys in town eager to work with

Felix, and RCA happy to pay for them, it seemed incomprehensible to them that we wanted to hire lesser known women.
Since the players we found were both excellent and appropriate for our musical style, we found it equally incomprehensible that they persisted in acting like we were prioritizing gender over musicianship.

As it worked out, we used everybody on some song or other. But the grrrls were generally relegated to the songs that the powers that be considered lightweight. The boyz seemed mainly interested in impressing each other. Nobody was happy.
The most astonishing war story came out of a weekend when we went up to Massachusetts to do a couple of gigs. In the cats’ absence, the mice came out to play. On one country song we’d recorded earlier, the jazz drummer Susan Evans had played. We loved the tracks.

Susan had gotten a hard-hitting, rowdy bar band feel that few jazz drummers can manage. But our production team decided that one of the album’s engineers, a guy who had drummed for the Blues Magoos six or seven years before (but hadn’t played since), could do better. So he played over Susan’s tracks, erasing them.

His drumming was out of sync in roughly a zillion places, naturally; laying rhythm tracks after the fact is difficult even for players who aren’t rusty. So imagine our delight when we got back from our road trip. We ended up using the single scratch track onto which the guys had mixed all of Susan’s tracks. Actually, even with the customary individual EQing of each drum rendered impossible, she sounds damned good.

All in all The Deadly Nightshade finished up the album feeling like The Dead Nightshade. The songs are our originals/our choices. The vocals are all ours. And we are playing on all the cuts, buried under there somewhere. [PRB]

Track Listing

1. High Flying Woman
2. Nose Job
3. Something Blue
4. Losin’ At Love
5. Dance, Mr. Big, Dance
6. Keep On The Sunnyside
7. Sweet, Sweet Music Shuffle
8. I Sent My Soul To The Laundromat
9. Someone Down In Nashville
10. Blue Mountain Hornpipe
11. Onions

The Deadly Nightshade – F&W (1976)

Artist: The Deadly Nightshade
Title: F&W
Year: 1976
Format: LP
Label: Phantom

The title of the second album, F&W, stands for “Funky & Western”. It’s a play on “C&W”, Country & Western… a side of The Deadly Nightshade that Phantom/RCA definitely wanted to downplay on the second album.

It seemed (and still does seem) strange, since RCA had a huge country music division in Nashville. I guess the key word is “division”. The way the mainstream music industry then divided up music was that artists were either one thing or another.

Our cross-genre identity, where we wrote (or picked, in the case of covers) songs in several styles—limiting ourselves only by what we/audiences liked, and by whether or not each song’s style was a good fit for us so we played it well– worked great for us. But it didn’t work at all for the mainstream marketing machine, because an album like that didn’t fit the pre-categorized bins at Sam Goody.

And when it came down to a choice between our crunchy country/bluegrass side and our rock/power pop side, Phantom/RCA wanted the latter. The reason, as it was explained to us, is that country music was a sort of cult music with minimal crossover possibilities. An album perceived as country wouldn’t get played on rock radio or sell to rock/pop buyers, whereas a rock/pop album could cross over to the country charts.i.e. Phantom/RCA essentially saw rock/pop sort of like  “O positive” blood, the universal donor for everyone. Country was more like A blood—a big category, but one with no way out.

How set in stone was this perception? Well, during a later tour that The Deadly Nightshade opened for Billy Joel, to support “F&W”, we did a gig at the Nashville Civic Center. The thousands of people were definitely there to see Billy, not us.
It was the sort of classic situation where the most an unknown opening act can hope for is that the main act’s loyal fans will sit on their hands, rather than throw rotten tomatoes. But our set went so well that we got an encore, lit matches, even some pretty wild dancing in front of the stage– the whole thing.

Now RCA’s Nashville marketing guys had been very skeptical about The Deadly Nightshade before the concert. In fact when we first hit town, they’d taken us out to lunch at a female strip club, to see if they could gross us out. But immediately after the concert, they called RCA’s national office in NY and said they wanted to put more money into promoting The Deadly Nightshade as a C&W act. Note: that was their own money, not the NY office’s money.

RCA said no. i.e. it was pretty clear that if they couldn’t market us as a rock/pop act, they didn’t want us at all.
Frankly, The Deadly Nightshade’s success was not based on trying to fit ourselves into some pre-existing category. We did badly at that. Rather, our success had been based on taking the pulse of the times, then making up our own new category that fit what people seemed to want/need/love—and fit our own strong points, of course. So we still hoped to sneak out a weird fusion album. But we realized that, for marketing purposes, we needed to label the weird fusion.

So “Funky & Western” was our soundbite for a made-up musical style (and an album) that encompasses both a fiddle/washboard song and a cover of the old Motown hit “Dancing in the Streets”. We hoped that the word play– “funky” almost rhymes with “country” (close enough for a rap artist, anyway)—would make the soundbite sound familiar enough to make the weird mix of styles understandable.

To be honest, the inclusion of the disco song (”Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”) made the album as a whole a bit hard to understand even for us. But we had to include “Mary Hartman” because it was a semi-hit. And it was our own idea to do the song, so we can’t pin that bit of accidental commerciality on the record company. It’s all explained below.

Anyway, the second album was released late, about a year and a half after the first album, mainly because we and RCA/Phantom had a hard time settling on a producer.

The first one we agreed on was Richard Greene, Seatrain’s violin player, who we’d long idolized. We also loved that Richard seemed to favor our most eclectic newly-written songs, particularly one washboard number (called “I Know What I Like”) that we mainly wrote to give me a chance to sing as low as possible; the result was much like Kermit the Frog, had he been a baritone-type bullfrog rather than a tenor.

But after several months, it seemed like Richard had too many Seatrain commitments. Phantom/RCA wasn’t as pleased as we were with choices like the frog song, anyway.

Next was Paul Rothschild, who’d produced The Doors and was then starting to work with Bonnie Raitt (another of our idols, and, btw, as wonderful a person as she is a singer and bottleneck guitar player). Paul signed on, and was supposed to do our album after he completed Bonnie’s “Home Plate”. We were psyched. But ‘Home Plate” ran very late, and after another several months, Phantom/RCA got terminally antsy.

Then came a series of other possibilities, including one fellow who insisted on having studio hotshots play for us. (The explanation that particularly endeared him to us: “They’ll sound just like you, only better.”) We and our label finally agreed on Joel Diamond and Charlie Calello.

Joel, who was the name producer, showed up at the studio sometimes, to be Joel Diamond. But otherwise, I don’t think we registered much. (His discography includes two albums, both called “The Deadly Nightshade”; one is on Atlantic, one’s on his own record company Silver Blue. We never recorded for either company.) Charlie, who was primarily an arranger– much of it for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, for whom he’d also played bass briefly– did the actual producing work.

The studio experience was initially much more positive than the first album. For one thing, though Phantom did insist on instrumentally supplementing the three of us with studio players, Charlie found us three regular players—drummer Allan Schwartzberg, pianist Jon Stroll, and extra electric rhythm guitar player Lance Quinn—who played with us on every cut, rather than album one’s rotating superstar cast of thousands.

Obviously they were not women. We didn’t feel up to fighting that fight again. But they were nice guys, who, before playing, actually listened to the three of us play each song through once, to try to get our feel, instead of jumping in after the second bar and taking the song over.
So laying down the basic tracks went unbelievably fast. We nailed them all (except for one late add, a cover of “Dancing In the Streets’) in two days.

Unfortunately, that encouraged the record company to change our release date from October to September. Admittedly, September is a much better sales month, because of the new school season. So it made marketing sense. But to make the deadline, we’d have to complete the whole rest of the album—one more basic track, all instrumental overdubs, all vocals, mixing, and mastering—in ten days. The two-day basics made a 12-day album seem feasible.

We did make the deadline. But it was, in my opinion, at the expense of many vocals. The harmony parts are as good or better than on the first album. But in terms of vocal quality, our signature blend doesn’t sound as distinctive, or as carefully done, as on the first album.

The difference: On the second album, if someone’s voice was slightly out of tune or scraggly, instead of singing till we got it right, we used a time-saving trick of Charlie’s: We not only doubled and then tripled ourselves, but often also doubled each other’s parts. (I.e. if Anne’s part sometimes sounds like Anne plus Helen and me, it probably is.) When such tripled tracks are blended together, imperfections smooth right out, so the trick works. Still, it is just a trick, not getting it right.

By the twelfth night, everyone was pretty happy, but so exhausted that all those who had lives, including Anne, went home early. Our engineer Kevin stayed with Helen and me to re-mix the previously recorded disco semi-hit “Mary Hartman”, in order to make it sound marginally more like the rest of the album. We finished at 3:00 a.m. and drove out to the 24-hour Clairmont Diner (now, sadly, defunct) in New Jersey.

“Hey, do you know who these women are?” a totally giddy Kevin enthused to our waitress. “They’re two-thirds of The Deadly Nightshade, and they just finished an album. ”The waitress looked us up and down and said, “That’s nothing. Frankie Valli comes here all the time.”   [PRB]

Track Listing

1. Comin’ Thru
2. Show Me The Way Back Home
3. I’m Feelin’ Fine
4. One Day At A Time
5. Murphy’s Bar
6. Little Old Lady From Pasadena
7. Dancing In The Streets
8. Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
9. No Chicken Today
10. Johnny The Rock And Roll Star
11. Ain’t I A Women

Boones Farm – Boones Farm (1972)

Artist: Boones Farm
Title: Boones Farm
Year: 1972
Format: LP
Label: Columbia

Boones Farm consisted of Kent Sprague (vocals, percussion), Gary Stovall (vocals, electric guitar, acoustic guitar), Brad Palmer (vocals, bass, acoustic guitar), Fred Darling (drums).

Produced by Jim Messina (of Loggins and Messina fame), 1972′s cleverly-titled Boones Farm was clearly intended to appeal to the growing country-rock audience (just check out the cover photos that made the quartet look like they had just finished a cattle round up).

Largely written by Sprague and Stovall with the other two members contributing, tracks like the acoustic ballad “She’s So Good”, “The Me Nobody Knows”, and “If You Can’t Be My Woman” had a distinctive country-rock edge, complete with acoustic arrangements and some nice Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young-styled four part harmonies (check out “Love Has A Mind Of Its Own” for a taste of the comparison).

That said, similar to era-competitors like The Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, or Poco their roots were far more diverse and the collection included a healthy dose of  conventional rock.  In fact, over half of the album was straight ahead rock.

Powered by Sprague’s deep, soulful voice, “Good Old Feelin’”, “Play Children Play”, “Livin’ Together”, “The Me Nobody Knows” and the blazing “So Much Wrong” (with a killer Stovall guitar solo) were all first-rate, out-and-out rockers that would have sounded fine on FM radio. (Bad Cat)

Track Listing

1. Good Old Feelin’
2. She’s So Good
3. Play Children Play
4. Love Has A Mind Of Its Own
5. Livin’ Together
6. Mother-In-Law
7. The Me Nobody Knows
8. You Say You Love Me More
9. If You Can’t Be My Woman
10. So Much Wrong
11. Start Today

Coyote – Coyote (1972)

Artist: Coyote
Title: Coyote
Year: 1972
Format: LP
Label: Chariot

Coyote consisted of Rod Arment (keyboards, guitar, vocals), Chuck Beaty (guitar, vocals), Liz Hein (flute), Jim Kestle (bass, vocals), Tim Lloyd (drums), Rusty Steele (keyboards, guitar, vocals).

Country flavored, semi-commercial rock with some prog influences, and very talented musicianship. I’m not normally a big fan of country biased mat’l, so the fact that I like it as much as I do might be a testament to it’s appeal to underground rock fans. (tymeshifter RYM)

Track Listing

1. Farmer Fletcher’s
2. Cowboys & Indians
3. Horney Coyote
4. Jabberwock
5. Flat Chested Woman
6. Ready To Ride
7. Silver Ring
8. Fly
9. People Funny
10. Musician

Timber – Part Of What You Hear (1970)

Artist: Timber
Title: Part Of What You Hear
Year: 1970
Format: LP
Label: Kapp

This album provides a mix of country rock:  Judy Wayne’s and George Clinton’s vocals are timeless.  It is a testament of the times, the early 70′s. I own two copies of this album, and I want to own it on CD. The lyrics and melodies of the songs are some of the best. (mikhaila RYM)

Track Listing

1. Tip Top
2. All But Gone
3. Good Intentions
4. Part Of What You Hear
5. Boat Ride
6. In It
7. She Is My Lady
8. Go On Alone
9. A Sad Song
10. Country Blue/Don’t Hide Tonight