Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 161

Record label: RCA

Produced: Charles E Daniels with Bob Cullen and The Youngbloods

Recorded: RCA Studios, New York City; RCA’s Music Center of the World, Hollywood; autumn 1967–winter 1968

Released: April 1969

Chart peaks: None (UK) 113 (US)

Personnel: Jesse Colin Young (v, b); Lowell Levinger, aka ‘Banana’ (g, ps, p, k, o, harpsichord, v); Joe Bauer (d, pc); David Lindley (fiddle); Victor Feldman (vibes); Plas Johnson (s); Joe Clayton (t); Richie Schmidt, Hank Cicalo, Mickey Crofford (e)

Track listing: Darkness, Darkness (S/US); Smug; On Sir Francis Drake; Sunlight; Double Sunlight; Beautiful; Turn It Over; Rain Song; Trillium; Quicksand; Black Mountain Breakdown; Sham; Ride the Wind

Running time: 39.51

Current CD: Beat Goes On BGOCD741 adds: The Youngbloods and Earth Music albums

Further listening: The Youngbloods (1967) contains the band’s two biggest hits, Get Together and Grizzly Bear, while Best Of The Youngbloods (2002) is a good introduction despite being a little thin at 10 tracks.

Further reading: Jesse Colin Young raises coffee in Kona, Hawaii. The web page for his business – www.jessecolinyoung.com – also has some music information.

Download: HMV Digital

In 1967, two years before a television ad promoting brotherhood turned it into a national smash, The Youngbloods’ Get Together had been a regional hit on the West Coast. Excited by its success, the New York City-based quartet headed west, settling in bucolic Inverness, California, 30 miles up the coast from San Francisco. The dominant feature of the landscape was Black Mountain, which resembled an elephant’s back, so when it came time to name the ambitious album they seemed to have been working on forever (two years, in fact), The Youngbloods did not hesitate: it was Elephant Mountain.

‘Recording actually began in New York,’ says Lowell Levinger, who played just about every instrument on it except bass and drums, and also wrote arrangements. ‘When we were all living out here, we would fly down to LA for two or three weeks at a time to work on it. We’d stay at the Tropicana Hotel and go to the studio every night.’ The commute cost them their second guitar player, Jerry Corbitt.

‘Just about when we first began flying down to Los Angeles, Jerry developed an aversion to flying,’ says Levinger. ‘Then he developed an aversion to a lot of other things.’ The Youngbloods’ sound was always distinguished by the soft, airy tenor of founder Jesse Colin Young, ‘the Golden Throat’, as Levinger calls him. But they were actually one of the more eclectic, adventuresome bands of their time, with a repertoire of styles ranging from folk and upbeat country to jazz, blues and even ragtime. Inspired by the ambitiousness of Sgt. Pepper and their own live shows, which often sprawled over three hours, the band conceived Elephant Mountain as an organic whole. Its 13 tracks flow into one another with the help of short instrumental segues and studio banter.

‘We used to do a lot of improvising in the studio with the tape running,’ says Levinger. ‘Joe spent a lot of time going through those tapes and finding good snippets.’ One amusing snippet is Turn It Over: an obsolete 12 seconds since no one needs to be reminded to turn a record over in the CD age. The album’s centrepiece is Darkness, Darkness, a minor-key meditation on the seductiveness of oblivion. ‘Producing that song took forever,’ says Levinger. ‘I played the echo on Jesse’s voice the same as I would any other musical instrument.’ Levinger’s raw, intense guitar solo is just one high point of this beautiful, ambitious record.