A very cool record that we might well put right up there with Mel Torme's "California Suite" as a musical tribute to the west coast – or the "Manhattan Tower" of Gordon Jenkins as some sort of tribute to a city! The album's a long piece on the glory of San Francisco – with lots of differently-themed tunes that refer to aspects of the city in mid-century – composed by the team of Libby and Stephen McNeil, set to music by David Rose –a nd featuring vocals by Ray Goman, Shepard Menken, Bob Grabot, Bill Thompson, and others. Titles include "Fog Over Frisco", "Meet The Press", "When You Call It Frisco Smile", "Around The Town Sequence", andee "Mission Dolores". Side two features "Four Moods In Memory" – a suite of themes played by Rose, with narration by Don Sherwood. (Soundtracks, Now Sound)LP, Vinyl record album
(Cover has light ringwear and some spotty aging in back.)
A real mind-trip – and an incredible document of the times – not just ideas floating around in the late 60s, but also new ways of making records too! The album is loosely based around ideas and writings from The Medium Is The Massage – McLuhan's important 1967 book, co-written with Quentin Fiore – and represented here as a wild sound collage that blends together music, sounds, media snippets, and readings by McLuhan, Fiore, and a host of other voices! The album's actually much more of a "happening" than a spoken word album – a real studio party that's cut up and messed up by all the added effects, sounds, and music – genius that comes from Jerome Agel, who put the whole project together – and delivered it to the loving hands of John Simon, who produced some other wonderful records of this nature for late 60s Columbia. A real delight throughout – and the kind of an album we wish people still kept making! (Spoken Word, Now Sound)LP, Vinyl record album