Sopwith Camel

From the fertile San Francisco ballroom scene, the Sopwith Camel emerged in 1966 with a refreshingly melodic spin on the overamplified electric kool-aid coming from their psychedelic peers the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. The band's name was almost snatched by Bay Area concert impresario Chet Helms, who was looking for a catchy moniker to promote the new blues-based group being fronted by Janis Joplin and eventually settled on Big Brother & the Holding Company. Unfortunately, the band has suffered the double indignation of either being cast in the same lot as its trippy hippie counterparts or as sunshine pop lightweights - neither of which is wholly accurate. Their one hit - the title track, "Hello, Hello" - did reach the Top Ten…

Sopwith Camel was a rock music band associated with the San Francisco psychedelic rock scene of the late 1960s. Formed in 1966, the Sopwith Camel was the second San Francisco band to be signed by a major record company -- right after Jefferson Airplane and before the Grateful Dead. They might also have been the first San Francisco group to break up, disbanding after only one album and a "wildly commercial" single "Hello, Hello." Sopwith Camel reformed in 1971 and recorded their second album, 1972's on Warner Bros. Records' Reprise label. The band broke up again in 1974. After sitting in the Warner Bros. vaults for 30 years, the Camel's 1972 album, , was issued on CD in 2001. It was called, The Millennium Edition. In 2006, the second CD release of the , was called Remastered 2006.

Sopwith Camel released their first album (and only album recording during the 1960s), the eponymous Sopwith Camel, in 1967 on the Kama Sutra Records label. The band's only hit single, "Hello, Hello", became the first hit title to emerge from the San Francisco rock scene and reached No. 26 on the U.S. pop music charts in January 1967 and No. 9 on the Canadian RPM Magazine charts in February. The band's first album, and the vaudevillian "Hello, Hello" in particular, had more in common soundwise with earlier songs by The Lovin' Spoonful than typical 1960s psychedelic rock; producer Erik Jacobsen produced for both Sopwith Camel and The Lovin' Spoonful. The band was unable to follow up the success of their first album and hit single and disbanded later in 1967.

Some refer to The Miraculous Hump Returns from the Moon as the greatest album of all time! The story behind this LP, according to legend, is that when Hello Hello from Sopwith Camel's debut lp was used for a TV commercial, the band became inspired to make a new record. They supposedly went to Hawaii, enjoyed the herbal splendors the island is known for, then returned to California to record The Miraculous Hump Returns from the Moon. The record does indeed sound like a band drifting through clouds, as the cover illustration suggests. The lead track, Fazon became a minor FM radio hit, (when FM radio was still underground). It sounds like Traffic's Low Spark meets Steely Dan's Dr. Woo meets Flying off of the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour…

The Sopwith Camel gained some passing mentions in rock histories as one of the first San Francisco psychedelic-era bands to record for a national label; in fact, they were the first to have a Top 40 hit, with the vaudevillian "Hello, Hello" in early 1967. They were not, however, one of the best San Francisco bands, nor were they even very good or psychedelic. Usually they sounded like a second-rate Lovin' Spoonful (with whom they shared producer Erik Jacobsen), emulating the more unfortunate camp aspects of that group with sleepy, good-timey pop-folk. Personnel changes delayed completion of their first album until nearly a year after "Hello, Hello" was a hit.