Point Blank (1967)

Various Artists - Last Of The Garage Punk Unknowns, Volumes 5 & 6 (2016) {Crypt Records CRYPT116 rec 1965-1967}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 329 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 167 Mb
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© 1965-67, 2016 Crypt Records | CRYPT 116
Rock / Garage Rock / Psychedelic

2016 release containing the fifth and sixth deluxe installments of Crypt's Last Of The Garage Punk Unknowns series. 28 prime slabs of mid 60s USA garage punk aceness from LPs five and six with liner notes, band photos, label scans. (NOTE: This is an entirely NEW series and none of these tracks were on the old series Garage Punk Unknowns, so wise up!) Featuring rug-cutters from The Thunderbirds, The Kinetics, The Edges Of Wisdom, The French Church, The Symbols, The Scurvy Knaves, Purple Virus, The Ebb Tides, The Plague, Caedman & The Nobles, The Starfyres, The Uniteds, The Greg Stokes, The Torments, Kenneth & The Yorkshire Coachmen, The Sires, The Riots and many others.

The final album of an (unintentional) trilogy, Crusade is most notable for the appearance of a very young, pre-Rolling Stones Mick Taylor on lead guitar. Taylor's performance is indeed the highlight, just as Eric Clapton and Peter Green's playing was on the previous album. The centerpiece of the album is a beautiful instrumental by Taylor titled "Snowy Wood," which, while wholly original, seems to combine both Green and Clapton's influence with great style and sensibility. The rest of the record, while very enjoyable, is standard blues-rock fare of the day, but somewhat behind the then-progressive flavor of 1967. Mayall, while being one of the great bandleaders of London, simply wasn't really the frontman that the group needed so desperately, especially then. Nevertheless, Crusade is important listening for Mick Taylor aficionados.

TOTAL ECLIPSE was conceived in 1993, well into Great Dane's ambitious "Pink Floyd Project." Great Dane had wanted to put out a box set that would appeal to the fans who had been terribly dissapointed with "Shine On," Pink Floyd's official release. It's purpose was to attempt to bring to the fans a comprehensive overview of the band's career, substituting rare material and alternative tracks wherever possible. This is the reason why many of the early singles and B-sides were included. Much "Top Gear" material was also included because not only were the sound sources believed to be the better than on any previously released RoIO (RoIO = Record of Illegitimate/Indeterminate Origin), but also because it seemed that these tracks should also be represented in the band's history. TOTAL ECLIPSE was meant to be chronological (although a few tracks are out of order) and comprehensive; something that could be listened to from beginning to end.

The Jefferson Airplane opened 1967 with Surrealistic Pillow and closed it with After Bathing at Baxter's, and what a difference ten months made. Bookending the year that psychedelia emerged in full bloom as a freestanding musical form, After Bathing at Baxter's was among the purest of rock's psychedelic albums, offering few concessions to popular taste and none to the needs of AM radio, which made it nowhere remotely as successful as its predecessor, but it was also a lot more daring…

Mellow Yellow is actually more diverse in its sounds than Sunshine Superman, drawing on some of the same era's better follow-up material but also reaching back somewhat further for repertory. It was, as one could rightly guess, a by-product of the late-1966 hit title track, but the songs dated back in some instances as much as a year, to a point prior to Donovan's having made the leap from folk to pop artist. "Mellow Yellow" itself was cut after "Sunshine Superman" and boasted one of the earliest arrangements by John Paul Jones to achieve international recognition (although not without some resistance from Donovan himself), with its broad, biting brass sound. The next two tracks, however, reached back to the singer-songwriter's earlier acoustic/folk songbag, and a very different point in his career - the reflective, somber "Writer in the Sun" was written in Greece during the spring of 1966…

When the Doors were playing at the Matrix club in San Francisco on March 7 and March 10 of 1967, unofficial tapes were made of their performances. Music from four sets (two each night) of these gigs has long been available on bootleg, and a couple tracks did show up on the Doors' 1997 box set. This two-CD package, however, marks the first official release of material from these shows in bulk…