Juan Cid Velasco

Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar—also known to historians as El Cid—was an eleventh century Spanish military commander who led both Christians and Moors into battle. In the pages of Eerie magazine, however, writer Budd Lewis and artist Gonzalo May (Vampirella) transform El Cid into a larger-than-life fantasy warrior, battling dragons, trolls, and sirens for his life-and demons for his soul! This deluxe hardcover collects every El Cid adventure that ran in Warren Publishing's Eerie magazine in the mid-1970s, featuring the elaborately detailed artwork of Mayo, plus Eerie's original historical background feature.

She commands a flexibility of language reminiscent less of Regina Spektor or Ingrid Michaelson, artists she is often compared to, but more of Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Plath. Yet there is a Newtonian balance of forces in Reina del Cid’s band: for every droll phrase or inventive image pushing the music toward the realm of the cerebral, there is a corresponding musical contribution from the richly talented Toni Lindgren. The young guitarist is adept at orchestrating and fleshing out the skeletons of del Cid’s songs into an engaging brand of pop rock, equal parts stratified and accessible. These lyrical and musical forces have never combined more compellingly than in the band’s sophomore album, The Cooling.

A 3-CD set, I Said She Said Ah Cid gathers together the cream of Alshire’s late Sixties/early Seventies roster, incorporating key LPs (including The Animated Egg and the extraordinary Astro-Sounds From Beyond The Year 2000) in full, an entire CD of music from scandalously overlooked California psych/rock band The California Poppy Pickers (including a handful of tracks issued in that name by a pseudonymous Wilson McKinlay) and selected highlights from elsewhere in the Alshire catalogue, stretching from obscure UK acts like Autumn and Amalgamation to (almost unbelievably) an attempt to update the music of Hank Williams for the acid-rock generation.