Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 119

Record label: CBS

Produced: Dave Rubinson

Recorded: CBS studios, Hollywood; autumn 1967

Released: March 1968

Chart peaks: None (UK) 181 (US)

Personnel: Joseph Byrd (electronic music, electric harpsichord, o, calliope, p); Dorothy Moskowitz (v); Gordon Marron (electric violin, ring modulator); Rand Forbes (bs); Craig Woodson (electric drums, pc)

Track listing: The American Metaphysical Circus; Hard Coming Love; Cloud Song; The Garden Of Earthly Delights; I Won’t Leave My Wooden Wife For You, Sugar; Where Is Yesterday; Coming Down; Love Song For The Dead Che; Stranded In Time; The American Way Of Love

Running time: 37.07

Current CD: Sundazed SC11124 adds 10 previously unreleased tracks.

Further listening: There’s not much out there that relates to this one-off delight, though Joseph Byrd did cut his own electronic LP of Christmas music, Xmas Yet To Come (1980).

Further reading: www.freakemporium.co.uk

Download: Not currently legally available

A short-lived collective of experimental musicians, The United States Of America created one of the first successful marriages of electronic music and pop. Leader Joseph Byrd was a pivotal figure of ‘serious’ modern music in the mid-’60s as a composer, conductor and producer. He moved to Los Angeles in 1967 to study at UCLA, but promptly got together with four other avant-gardiste students, started the band, tuned up and dropped out.

Every instrument they played was in some way treated through distorted amplifiers, ring modulators and other devices. Craig Woodson pioneered electronic drums, and Gordon Marron played an electronically adapted violin. But what distinguished them was their distinctive sense of pop featuring the twisted lyrical intelligence of Dorothy Moskowitz.

Given its title, their only album had to aim high and it did. The opening track parodied Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with The American Metaphysical Circus which is loosely based on Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite. The American Way Of Love observed homosexual prostitutes on New York’s 42nd Street, while radio favourite I Won’t Leave My Wooden Wife For You, Sugar adeptly sent up the straight suburban family cut off from the world in their ‘split-level house with a wonderful view’ (this track became their best known via inclusion on CBS’s key compilation/sampler album The Rock Machine Turns You On).

If some of The United States Of America’s enthusiastic phasing, echo and channel-swapping date-stamps it, it endures nonetheless through solid merit – musical verve and imagination, the melodic appeal of the trippy The Garden Of Earthly Delights and gentler pieces Love Song For The Dead Che and Cloud Song. Thirty years on, Moskowitz, who moved on to Country Joe’s All Star Band before becoming a music teacher, commented on the web: ‘I have no regrets about the electronic excess under which my voice was buried. It was part of the aesthetic and I was the one who insisted on singing through a ring modulator.’

Byrd later worked with Phil Ochs and a relatively unimpressive band called The Field Hippies (1969) and also produced Ry Cooder’s Jazz (1978).