not new music this week

St. John Green - St. John Green (1968, Flick Disc)

There really isn't a hell of a lot of information about this record that I have been able to find. It wasn't at all uncommon for artists to have small bios or articles printed on the back of their album covers in the 60s, but the write-up on this one consists of four paragraphs that are more about Topanga Canyon, California than St. John Green. I did, however, get a kick out of the line "These Canyon Groups (as they have come to be known) are not neo-hippies, but serious artists who have fled the music profession's hangers on- all the phonies on the rock scene with their dubious talents and destructive ambitions."

This record truly is one of those 'lost psychedelic gems' that you read about all the time, and it may have been lost forever had it not been produced by Kim Fowley. Fowley looks back rather fondly on the album, telling Mike Stax of Ugly Things magazine in 2001 “[‘St. John Green’ is] one of the great lost records...Somebody will reissue it someday and people will start crying and jacking off and smoking dope to it. It’s a great record. There’s only a handful of records that I’ve made that are great.” While there has not been an official cd release to my knowledge, Acid Symposium issued a bootleg cd of this album in 2001 which may or may not still be available.

I'm not sure if this record has made people cry or jack off, but it has provided (at least for me) one answer to the question: What would it sound like if Johnny Cash and the Louvin Brothers took acid with Arthur Brown and Robert Calvert and made an album?