I was a student when I was first exposed to the band. I was already well into Neil Young and I think I was expecting something similar when I put this compilation on. How wrong I was. This was something unlike anything I’d heard and didn’t really know where to place it. At times it sounded like country music, at others strange sound collages and with Expecting To Fly, a 100% stoner classic
For What It’s Worth is pretty straightforward but Mr Soul inhabits a different space with its jarring riff, crowd noise and quite sneering vocals. It sounds like a different band. But then it goes all poppy with Sit Down, I Think I Love You and the rest of the first side.
I was thrown by its eclecticism. And wasn't helped by side 2’s opener Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing which I initially thought was more country but lived in an unusual place. And with Broken Arrow it felt like it was the key to opening a door to a new space. What I was hearing, of course, was the sound of drugs. It’s all got that stoned feeling of insight and creation. It feels like a song made of fragments of other songs and hung on a base melody.
There’s more of this sort of roll ‘em and smoke ‘em vibe on closing track Expecting To Fly which is suitably elegiac and ‘out there’.
It hinted at truths unspoken which I only really heard in my dope and mushroom years. Only then could I tune in to its frequency. Obviously, I went back to the original albums to find out more. They are rightly revered as influential records and are subtly quite weird and disturbing in the way the sonics veer around. They certainly laid the ground for my deeper explorations of drug-inspired landscapes.
