The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
two whistles and drums all at the same time. Waltz Of The New Moon had a harp player on it, and we had Dolly Simpson’s flute organ on Water Song, but otherwise it was just us overdubbing the other parts.’ Williamson’s contributions were written in a disused railway carriage in the garden of his friend Mary Stewart’s house near Glasgow. It’s Stewart’s children who appear in the Hangman’s hugely influential cover picture, an image (taken on Christmas Day ’67) that so perfectly captured the album’s mystic appeal and sent kindred spirits scurrying for the hills in search of a rural retreat. There was instant critical acclaim, along with loud endorsements from Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.
‘A very pleasant surprise,’ says Williamson, ‘but I felt it was something special even while we were making it. The whole of London had this fantastic atmosphere at the time, particularly Chelsea. A wonderful feeling of optimism after the 1950s, a tremendous flowering of the notion that the war was actually over and that life and love could be obtained. Hence the name of the album – The Hangman being the death in the war and The Beautiful Daughter being the coming age. Look at that misty gleam in our eyes on the cover: we were standing back and looking in amazement at what was going on!’
Tom Rush
The Circle Game
Pivotal bedsit folk album that – though largely built around covers – helped herald the arrival of the singer-songwriter.
Record label: Elektra
Produced: Arthur Gorson
Recorded: Century Sound, New York and Sunset Sound, Los Angeles; autumn 1967
Released: March 1968
Chart peaks: None (UK) 68 (US)
Personnel: Tom Rush (v, ag); Bruce Langhorne, Hugh McCracken, Don Thomas, Eric Gale (g); Jonathan Raskin (classcial guitar, b); Joe Mack, Bob Brushnell (b); Paul Harris (k, a); Herbie Lovelle, Bernard Purdie, Richie Ritz (d); Joe Grimm (s); Buddy Lucas (s); Brooks Arthur, Bruce Botnick (e)
Track listing: Tim Angel; Something In The Way She Moves; Urge For Going (S/US); Sunshine Sunshine; The Glory Of Love; Shadow Dream Song; The Circle Game; So Long; Rockport Sunday; No Regrets (S/UK)
Running time: 38.36
Current CD: WEA EA740182
Further listening: The Very Best Of Tom Rush: No Regrets 1962–1999 (1999)
Further reading: www.tomrush.com
Download: Not currently legally available
Exactly when folk singers became known as ‘singer-songwriters’ is hard to pinpoint, but this 1968 song cycle is certainly a milestone in that journey. The Circle Game was among folk rock’s first fully orchestrated albums, recorded at roughly the same time as Phil Ochs’s Pleasures Of The Harbor and Love’s Forever Changes (though both beat it to the street by a couple of months). As a true concept album, it bettered the framing devices of Sgt. Pepper and The Who Sell Out; it also just happened to introduce the world to the work of no less than three singer-songwriter icons: James Taylor, Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell.
The seed was planted when Cambridge folk star Rush met the unknown Mitchell in a Detroit coffee house, and she taught him her song Urge For Going. A tape of Rush’s moving six-minute demo of the song was played on Boston Top 40 powerhouse WBZ in the spring of 1967, where it became the radio station’s most requested song for the next six months. Urge For Going would obviously be a centrepiece of his next album, but Mitchell’s contribution didn’t end there. ‘I got a package in the mail from Joni,’ Rush recalls. ‘It was a tape she’d made in her apartment, wonderful songs like Tin Angel and Moon In The Mirror. At the end she did this little spoken disclaimer: “Gee, here’s a song I just finished. I’m not sure if it’s any good, but here it is.” That was The Circle Game.’
Rush had always been an open-minded folkie – his previous album had featured a side of Al Kooper electric arrangements – and he conceived this record as an orchestrated song cycle that would trace the arc of a relationship from hello to goodbye; side one would be the upside, side two the down. Mitchell’s tape had given him a title song (though The Circle Game was originally written for her old Toronto friend Neil Young) and a place to start in Tin Angel (‘In a Bleecker Street café/She found someone to love today’). The narrative was fleshed out with songs from unknowns Taylor (Something In The Way She Moves and Sunshine Sunshine) and Browne (Shadow Dream Song), both still in their teens. And though Tom Rush was known primarily as an interpreter, the two songs that cap The Circle Game were his own: the melancholy instrumental Rockport Sunday running into supreme break-up song No Regrets, which The Walker Brothers would spin into gold six years later.
The United States Of America
The United States Of America
The electronic rock revolution starts here.
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