Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 169

Record label: Epic

Produced: Jackie Mills

Recorded: 1969

Released: June 1969

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: David Lindley (g, vn, banjo, v); Solomon Feldthouse (g, o, clarinet, caz, jumbus, v); Templeton Parcely (vn, o, v); Stuart A Brotman (b, v); Paul Lagos (d, v); Max Buda (hm); Bob Breault (e)

Track listing: Lie To Me; Let The Good Love Flow; Tempe Arizona aka Killing Floor (S/US only); Petite Fleur; Banjo; Cuckoo; Seven-Ate Sweet

Running time: 30.58

Current CD: Edsel EDCD 533

Further listening: Side Trips (1967) and A Beacon From Mars (1968) have the same killer combination of acid rock and fearless eclecticism. Do not confuse them with the British psych-pop band of the same name – as record shops often do

Further reading: Very little exists except the booklets that accompany the CD reissues.

Download: Not currently legally available

Jimmy Page once described the American band called Kaleidoscope as ‘my favourite band of all time, my ideal band. Absolutely brilliant’; the influential critic Robert Shelton, who crucially boosted Dylan’s early career, enthusiastically called them ‘super-eclectic’; and pioneering FM disc jockey Tom Donahue hailed them as ‘one of the best groups in the country’. And much good did such acclaim do the band, for Incredible, like the other three albums they released during their original career (they reformed in the late ’70s), sold negligibly. And yet in their adventurousness and their eclecticism, Kaleidoscope were an archetypal ’60s band, creators of cutting-edge acid rock and trailblazers of world and fusion musics, who by rights should now be regarded as legends.

‘We wanted to experiment with a music which could combine various other musical areas with rock … to see if we could come up with something new and interesting,’ asserts guitarist David Lindley.

And Incredible, their third album, triumphantly demonstrates how they achieved their ambition, for the music sweeps up rock, blues, country, folk, Cajun and Near and Middle Eastern musics, all linked by an unmistakeably psychedelic consciousness. Timid souls should however be warned that this is not the whimsical, cutesy psychedelia of the ‘Let’s all go and blow our minds down in Toytown’ variety. Much of the album is possessed by an unnerving strangeness. Cuckoo, for example, the band’s reinvention of a traditional folk song, is permeated with a sense of evil, singer Feldthouse chillingly snarling the line, ‘Let’s make love now,’ an invitation that never sounded less enticing. Or consider Petite Fleur, which ends with a sinister cackle. Or the near 12-minute Seven-Ate Sweet, where the cymbals sound like knives being sharpened, assorted exotic instruments solo eerily, and suddenly, after more than five intense minutes, Feldthouse starts wailing in tongues.

‘He’s singing Turkish obscenities,’ explains Lindley, more prosaically. ‘We didn’t want to be a conventional band.’