STALK-FORREST GROUP - St Cecilia - The California Album

Back in 1970 a five-piece band from Long Island, New York, inexplicably changed its name from Soft White Underbelly to Stalk-Forrest Group and made the journey to Los Angeles and the offices of Elektra Records, then riding high with their two rock-psych bands Love and the Doors. It is widely believed that Elektra viewed the band as a potential East Coast Doors, and the label wasted no time in getting them into the studio to record an albums worth of psychedelic tunes, rich in high harmonies and fluid, accomplished guitar interplay and trippy-hippy lyrics, under the watchful eyes of the co-production team Sandy Pearlman and Jay Lee although Elektra had originally intended for Don Gallucci (formerly of Don And The Goodtimes) to produce the album. Gallucci, however, slipped away without informing the label or the band of his departure. Around the same time bassist Andy Winters was replaced by drummer Albert Bouchards brother Joe, and sensing the project had all the hallmarks of an ill-fated venture, Elektra promptly dropped the band, but not before releasing a paltry 200 copies of a single taken from the unreleased album session. Obviously not deterred by this setback, the band promptly changed its name to Blue Oyster Cult, signed for Columbia and retuned its musical style to heavy metal. The rest, as they say, is history! This reissue of the unreleased Calfornian session, bearing the name of the 90s German bootleg, has been re-mastered to a particularly high standard, as befits one of the best West Coast-style psych albums ever made. - Radioactive.