Lotti Golden: 'real and deep and touching'

One of the more interesting singer-songwriter albums of the late 60s was Motor-Cycle by teenager Lotti Golden, which has been memorably described as 'abstract cutting-edge drugged-out blue-eyed soul jam-jazz pop-rock'. In her native New York this summer I bought a copy of the LP containing the press pack Atlantic sent out with promos in April 1969. It consists of a custom envelope, a 4-page biography by June Harris, a glossy photo, a photo-card and a poem. Here goes:

 

In September 1969 Atlantic issued a cool funk 45 by Golden, which came in a promotional picture sleeve, and isn't on the LP: 

According to an interview Golden gave to Look magazine, dated September 9th 1969, she was working on a follow-up album to be entitled Blood Ring. That never happened, sadly, and her second, lesser and last album eventually crept out on GRT Records in November 1970. You can read the full article here:
http://thedirtymindofmistermark.blogspot.com/2010/11/lotti-golden.html

Kak: 'uneven but enormously promising'

Along with Morgen, Kak made arguably the best one-shot US psych LP of the late 1960s. Despite having clear commercial potential and being one of the truest early representations of the West Coast sound, it crept out in February 1969 and sank without trace. Here are the only references to the quartet that I've ever seen in the contemporary press.

But first, here's the album itself:

Two ads appeared, one in Rolling Stone and one in Go. Here they are:

In addition, Epic included a small picture of them in a round-up of its new releases in Billboard at the same time:

Go, meanwhile, ran a very brief interview with the band's wah-wah wizard Dehner Patten:

Somewhat amazingly, the album was also promoted via a promo film, which has surfaced on youtube, and from which the outstandingly hip album cover was extracted:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ43oz_qVxc

I've only encountered two reviews of the LP. The first appeared in Stereo Review in July 1969. I have stupidly thrown away the relevant issue, but it ran thus: 'Kak is one more group with a kooky name and more than a bit of debt to The Beatles. Yet their vitality is infectious, and they can sing and play up a storm. Their Electric Sailor, for instance, is a navvy from outer space with a "double-wide grin" and "sparks flyin' off his electric feet", and a positively galvanic personage, the way they sing of him. Everything's Changing is delivered with such conviction you begin to suspect maybe it really is. The quartet of white boys who make up Kak are not above helping themselves to whatever mannerisms are around and handy as grist to their mill, including a liberal dose of soul - as in a bluesy ballad called Disbelievin' - but they manage to assimilate what they borrow, and give it back as their own. High point of a fast-moving programme is a 'Trieulogy' of three contrasting moods, in each of which they open all the stops and really take off. A lively disc.'

The other review was in the UK underground paper International Times, penned by the great Barry Miles (later to become Paul McCartney's official biographer). As if Miles wasn't already hip enough, note how he casually refers to the 13th Floor Elevators, whom most critics in Texas had never even heard of at the time:

Three 45s were extracted - firstly the promo-only Everything's Changing (mono) / Everything's Changing (stereo), then promo and stock copies of Everything's Changing / Rain (Epic 5-10383, produced by John Neel), and finally I've Got Time / Disbelievin' (Epic 5-10446, produced by Gary Grelecki). The 45 performance of Rain is different to that on the LP, with white labels being stereo and the rarer yellow-label stock copies being mono.

Kak split almost as soon as the LP appeared, having played only a meagre total of five concerts, with leader Gary Yoder issuing a so-so solo 45 before joining Blue Cheer. They weren't entirely forgotten, however - a couple of years later Lester Bangs praised them highly in his Rolling Stone review of Blue Cheer's Oh! Pleasant Hope (July 8th 1971):

In the decades since, many others have come around to Bangs' way of thinking, and the album is now widely regarded as a classic. The CD reissue on Big Beat has excellent liner notes and photos, and a great interview with Dehner Patten can be found here: http://www.rockandreprise.net/kak.html.

Rendell-Carr: 'the greatest force in jazz this country has ever known'

The 1960s wasn't only a time of amazing development in British rock music, but British jazz too. As the decade progressed, composers, bandleaders and musicians such as Mike Taylor, Joe Harriott, Michael Garrick, Stan Tracey, Mike Westbrook and John Surman recorded masterpieces that would have been unthinkable at the dawn of the decade. Unfortunately, it was in the face of indifference both from record companies and the public, who were fixated on American jazz. Compared to the explosion in pop releases, a tiny number of homegrown jazz albums were issued at the time - I would estimate that a connoisseur's collection would only number about 100 albums. Nonetheless, then as now, barely anyone listens to British jazz, and several of the greatest albums in the genre have still never made it to CD.

One of the best-regarded bands of the decade was co-led by Don Rendell and the late Ian Carr (who later formed Nucleus), but surprisingly little hard info about them is available online. I therefore thought I'd reproduce here the fullest overview of their work I've ever encountered. It's by P. John Sullivan and originally appeared in the June 1968 issue of Jazz Journal, so pre-dates the release of Live and the recording of Change Is. Nonetheless, it gives a fascinating insight into their background, intentions and work.