This album, released in 1968 on the Flick Disc label, constitutes most of The Boston Tea Party’s recorded output, apart from a few singles. The cover suggests a psychedelic (or at least colorful) affair, but the record, production- and instrumentation-wise, is more straightforward garage pop, with a strong organ presence and murky presentation. Songwriting-wise, though, it’s less straightforward–for a band’s debut album of completely original material, The Boston Tea Party seem to have definitely found their voice or whatever, and only a few tracks later on fall into typical low-production rock fare.

Opener “I’m Tellin’ You” is like a presentation of the band’s manifesto–”We’d like to tell you, you’d better listen, we’ve got that somethin’ that you’ve been missin’”–which is kind of goofy and bland, but the tune is good and it features a cool call-and-response coda and what is probably one of my favorite guitar solos of all time. “Straighten Up and Fly Right”, “Fantasy”, “Free Service” and “Please Be Glad” are the band at their best, at times calling to mind a carparkier Mothers of Invention (particularly on “Fantasy”), but largely defying ready comparison (or at least comparison that would diminish it). “I Found a Way” is the anomaly of the record, an upbeat toe-tapper, as close to breezy as the muddy production would allow. It’s great, though; Mike Stevens (guitarist, songwriter) had a gift for chord progressions, and the rhythm section keeps it particularly lively. “We Have Already Died” is the most psychedelic track, owing to some feedback and studio trickery; the melody and lyrics are great, and the track would be right at home on a Nuggets comp.

A couple of the b-side tracks are forgettable, mainly the straightforward rocker “Just Pretend You’re Sherry” and the six and a half-minute jam “The Time Being”, but by and large this is a great record. The dominant opinion about this one, though, seems to be that it doesn’t really merit having an opinion about, which stance I don’t understand at all and recommend ignoring. The popsike/Ebay Stores value for this one is pretty inflated–if you keep an eye out for Ebay auctions you can probably pick it up for less than $20. Their film appearance (mentioned below) would be in 1969′s The Cycle Savages (“The leader of a biker gang takes exception to an artist sketching them, so he makes plans to crush the artist’s hands”).

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Sleeve notes: “A new historical fact has come to light which is destined to shake up teachers of history, writers of textbooks and unshakeable New England traditionalists: The Boston Tea Party didn’t take place in Boston in 1775. At least not in the musical sense.

The Boston Tea Party actually happened in beautiful, downtown Burbank, where five young guys got together in 1963 to strike out for their own brand of musical independence. Truly revolutionary in spirit, the group is unique in that it has no “leader”. Each of the members, all accomplished musicians, contributes his share of musical ideas. The result of this communal effort is an infinite variety of messages with more precise musicianship, more exciting performances, than might have happened under the tutelage of a single driving force. Richard DePerna, bass guitarist and arranger, insists that the group’s in-person sound be as excellent as their recorded performances. Mike Stevens, lead guitarist, writes much of the material which is original, topical and abundant in richly poetic imagery. Organist Robert DePerna and Drummer Dave Novogroski are the men responsible for holding together The Boston Tea Party’s tight ensemble sound. Travis Fields, lead singer–who also writes material for the group–has that rare gift of addressing the listener in a very personal way. He cares. As does every member of the group.

Visually, The Boston Tea Party is a knock-out (you’ll see them in a forthcoming American-International film) in costumes of the 1775 era. But there the gimmicks end. After all is said and done, it’s the music–a pure, unique, accomplished sound–of The Boston Tea Party that’s going to make history.”

1. I’m Tellin’ You
2. Straighten Up and Fly Right
3. I Found a Way
4. Fantasy
5. We Have Already Died
6. Free Service
7. Just Pretend You’re Sherry
8. In Their Shoes
9. The Time Being
10. Please Be Glad

The Hobbits were Jimmy Curtiss(exhaustive bio/discography here)’s project who released three records on Decca between ’67 and ’69 (the third as The New Hobbits), and Down to Middle Earth is their debut. It’s an amateurish and occasionally bewildering record, obviously kind of shameless psychedelic bandwagon exploitation, but the most bewildering thing about it is how completely brilliant some of it is somehow. The single “Daffodil Days” is pretty much a highlight of the sixties as far as I’m concerned–it sounds almost like a novelty record for the first few listens, with its alternating falsetto and goofily drawled vocals, airheaded verse lyrics and orchestration consisting only of “plink” and “beep”, until its thorough strangeness starts to sink in and it becomes clear that it’s near-perfect in most ways that matter.

The lyrics, it must be said, are often pretty stupid, but in a kind of adorable way, often incorporating turns of phrase that sound like grade school poetry: “Treats”, which, actually, is definitely another of the highlights of the album, centers, for example, around the chorus “Treats / Little itty-bitty treats that groove your head / Treats / Little itty-bitty treats that you can never buy for bread”. (This tendency carries over into their next album as well, as, I think, is made pretty evident by the album’s title being Men and Doors, which hardly even sounds like three words successfully put next to each other.) In spite of all of which “Treats” is great, with an unexpectedly huge and crunchy bass sound in the verses, and a chorus melody that is entirely treasurable.

None of this is to say that this is a great record, because I guess it isn’t. Most of it is good, and AMG’s bit about how “not every lost psych gem is worth its weight in gold–some are scarcely worth the vinyl they were pressed on” is garbage when said in reference to this album, but a lot of it is unremarkable. Worth picking up if you find it for significantly less than its Popsike value though. The “Daffodil Days” 45 is pretty cheap, I think.

1. Down to Middle Earth
2. I’m Just a Young Man
3. Daffodil Days (The Affection Song)
4. Break Away
5. Treats
6. Hands and Knees
7. Let Me Run My Fingers Through Your Mind (Buy My Flowers)
8. Out of My Mind
9. Clap Hands Til Daddy Comes Home
10. Funny Day Girl

Lou Christie is a young man with a remarkable talent and even more remarkable career. He is an individualist who, unlike many of his contemporaries on the popular music scene today, records what he likes, when he likes. No one has been more responsible for the collestion of hits that he has enjoyed than Lou Christie himself. It is this individualism that gave him his very first hit on his very first try, “The Gypsy Cried”. It was this same approach to his career and the songs he sings that gave him his most recent top selling record “Lightnin’ Strikes”. Lou Christie knows what he wants to record and how he wants to record it.

The Christie sound is one of the most popular sounds around in today’s frenetic, sudden-death record race to the top of the best-seller lists. Lou’s ability to sing in a falsetto range gives him immediate identification in a market that is burdened by repetition and the sameness of sound. It is this, plus his unerring ability to choose the songs that he believes the younger set wants to hear that sustains his success. His smash selling single hit of “Lightnin’ Strikes”, and this all new album once again confirms this fact. Listen as Lou Christie Strikes Again…

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Definitely the best Lugee Sacco record I’ve come across to date, featuring nine Christie-Herbert originals, including “Big Time”, whose melody Christie would plagiarise three years later for “Are You Getting Any Sunshine” off the I’m Gonna Make You Mine LP; “Guitars and Bongos”, featuring backing vocals from The Tammys, Christie’s girl group responsible for recording his “Egyptian Shumba” which everyone rightfully loves nowadays; “Pot of Gold”, the brief “Stand beside me” bit from which is probably one of Lou’s absolute best moments; and “Cryin’ On My Knees” which is huge and great and Brian Wilsony.

There is another Lou Christie Strikes Again on Roulette records with a different (creepier) cover and completely different tracklist. It is a completely different album, and this one is entirely superior. Not gonna host any mp3s ’cause it’s available on a CD, but there’s that youtube link which is clickable anyway.

1. Big Time (Herbert-Christie)
2. Guitars and Bongos (Herbert-Christie)
3. Pot of Gold (Herbert-Christie)
4. Why Did You Do It Baby (Alfred-Farrell)
5. Make Summer Last Forever (Herbert-Christie)
6. Too Many Miles (Herbert-Christie)
7. Cryin’ On My Knees (Herbert-Christie) [youtube]
8. A Teenager in Love (Pomus-Shuman)
9. Don’t Let Me Catch You Running Wild (Herbert-Christie-Alfred)
10. Have I Sinned (Herbert-Christie)
11. Back Track (Herbert-Christie)
12. If Wishes Could Be Kisses (Alfred-Farrell)

Antheil’s “Ballet Mecanique” is a really fascinating footnote to the development of atonal music, a 1924 piece composed for percussion that apparently spawned fistfights at its debut. “[Antheil] was considered an iconoclast, an audacious experimenter,” read the record notes: “The ballet was not meant to glorify the beauty and precision of machines, as was erroneously charged; it represented his personal effort to escape ‘the iron grip of the tonal principle’ …. When he wrote the ballet, Antheil was developing a new principle of musical construction, based on rhythm alone. He called it ‘time-space’ and compared it with a canvas on which tunes and chords were applied like colors and shapes. The version on this record includes a recording of an airplane engine, two doorbells of different sizes, and four pianos (replacing the original pianolas) on which occasional tone clusters are banged with the palm of the hand.” Initial outrage against the piece has dwindled to the following sentence in Eric Salzman’s ‘Twentieth Century Music”: “His sensational ‘Ballet mecanique (1925) for percussion, player pianos, and airplane motors now seems mildly attractive, overlong, and rather tame in a manner obviously derived from Stravinsky’s ‘Les Noces’”. Regardless, it’s excellent.
 

Following which come three less impressive pieces grouped with the first by instrumentation rather than chronological or stylistic relation. Consistently interesting, but less so.
 

1. George Antheil – Ballet Mécanique (1924, rev. 1954)
2. Ronald LoPresti – Sketch for Percussion (1956)
3. Carlos Chavez – Toccata for Percussion Instruments (1942)
4. Alan Hovhanness – October Mountain (1942)

From the record notes: “The solar wind may be viewed as pushing against Earth’s magnetic field, in turn producing an equal but opposite push on the solar wind. The solar wind is not uniform and consequently any changes in it are quickly reflected at the Earth’s surface as changes in the magnetic field …. The Kp index represents the average of the magnetic changes, which are measured at a selected group of magnetic observing stations on Earth and may take on any of 28 distinct values. Every three hours, the observations provide a new value for the index, thereby giving eight values of Kp for each day. As an aid for researchers, the Kp indices are displayed graphically. They look somewhat like musical notation and are popularly called “Bartels’ musical diagrams,” after their inventor, German geophysicist Julius Bartels. These diagrams are largely responsible for providing the motivation for the music contained in this album. In addition to the Kp indices, the graphs indicate the times of occurrence of “sudden commencements.” As the term implies, these are rapid changes of Earth’s magnetic field. The sudden commencements are determined by an examination of the detailed data from each magnetic observatory. In a real sense, then, the music on this record represents the sun playing on the magnetic field of Earth.

“The succession of notes in the music corresponds to the natural succession of the Kp indices for the year 1961. Musical interpretation of the magnetic data was originally conceived by Messrs. [Bruce R.] Boller and [Stephen G.] Ungar and implemented by Carl Frederick; the indices were computer-programmed into a form suitable for music synthesis by Stephen Ungar, This musical interpretation consisted of setting up a correlation between the level of the Kp reading and the pitch of the note (in a diatonic collection over four octaves), and compressing the 2,920 readings for the year into just over eight minutes of musical time. An extended interpretation of the Kp index employed in shaping the music for this record embraces the pattern of sudden commencements during 1961. A graph, plotting the highest reading within each segment between the sudden commencements versus the relative length of the segment, was devised to delineate such attributes of the texture as tempo, dynamics, and register in both the larger and smaller dimensions of the work …. The single-line pitch successions on Side One exhibit the diatonic correspondence described above. The polyphonic settings of sudden-commencement sections which comprise Side Two employ an equal-tempered correspondence, with twelve Kp readings to the octave.

“The musical realization of Earth’s Magnetic Field was accomplished between June and September of 1970. The computer “instruments” for the performance were programmed by Charles Dodge, using a general-purpose sound synthesis program written by Godfrey Winham at Princeton University. All of the sounds heard in this album were computed into digital form using the IBM/360 model 91 at the Columbia University Computer Center, and were converted into analog form at the Bell Telephone Laboratories.”

Is about as thoroughly as it can be put. Dodge studied composition at the University of Iowa and was a student of Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky. This is his album of magnetic field music. It is lovely.

1. Side One [mp3 excerpt]
2. Side Two

I know very little about this album. Neither the front nor spine say anything about either the band or album name, and only on the back in the smack-dab center does it even say MATH BATS, but then nothing else. The label gives a little more information in what looks like Sharpied handwriting: BAT DAY, tracklist, Produced and engineered by Paul Mahern [of the Zero Boys and Datura Seeds, placing Math Bats within commuting distance of Bloomington, Indiana], all songs copyrighted BMI, all songs by Math Bats xcept [sic] by Fulton/Math Bats, the A-side is labeled “Today” and the B-side “Tonite”. No label information to speak of, not even a year of publication (although it’s most likely mid-late eighties maybe early nineties).

This one was a complete whim because I admired the bloody-mindedness of the packaging. It’s surprisingly really excellent, sounding like a slightly harder-edged C86 group, guitar jangle and moderate fuzzboxing, in its more spirited moments evoking Moonshake’s Eva Luna a bit and even on track two “Another Day” crossing same with the mumbled monologues of Slint’s Spiderland, the end result of which combination is really pretty amazing. “Guessing Game” opens side A upbeatly and sounds quite a bit like a slightly more amateurish Bodines or what have you; they seem less at home with this style and the rest of the record is harsher in tone and more downbeat and lovely in melody. Add some samples and a few of the tracks could pass for Disco Inferno B-sides. The flipside of “Bat Day” showcases the band’s skill at locking into looped phrases at maximum impact, particularly the bit in “Made to Melt” that carries the record just past the thirty minute mark and then dumps it off abruptly.

Completely worth picking up. I got it for like $4; it seems to be spottily available online for $15-20.

1. Guessing Game
2. Another Day
3. Samoa
4. Lost Today
5. Heat and Dust
6. Made to Melt