Perhaps more a interesting curiosity than an actual enjoyable album to a lot of people, I fall firmly in the "it's fascinating enough to hold up to repeat listens" camp, because, despite how weird it is, I find it well-done enough to be genuinely listenable, once your ear simply learns to let go of everything it's ever been taught. The man knew his way around a collection of musical pitches, even if they were far different ones than we're used to hearing.

I was eating lunch in a sandwich joint up in Northbeach when I noticed the background music. Complex swing jazz compositions that would pivot off into jagged, squawking atonal horn stabs, momentarily droop into impressionistic piano melodies, or suddenly stop on a dime and pivot into classical-sounding passages before soon veering back. I had to ask the waiter what it was.

I feel like this is one of those albums that *had* to exist. It was out there somewhere, waiting, until Mingus discovered it and brought it to us. There's parts of it that are conventional—at least to the extent that Mingus's genius could be conventional—but as a whole, nothing else is quite like it.

I later read that Mingus considered this his best album. It makes sense. It's a real showstopper.

This is one of my favorite albums, full stop. Like it or don't. I'm not going to try to defend it.  I've heard other recordings of the Trio Organ Sonatas; there is none that I like as much. Something about this one is like magic: independent melody lines—played one with each hand and one with the organist's feet on the pedals—pulse and snake, laugh and skip and dance around each other as if they have a life of their own. It's incredibly lyrical. Along with perhaps only Mike Oldfield's "Hergest Ridge", this is one the pieces of music that I love so much and identify with so closely I would almost think it is as close as another person will ever get to the experience of being inside my head.

According to YouTube commenters, at one point this album was regularly available on Amazon for a penny. I found my copy in the cutout bin, too. It didn't belong there.

So obscure, most of the songs aren't on YouTube, none of my favorites for sure. Still, here's a taste.

I suppose this album is considered by some to be psychedelia—and with the driving acoustic guitar acoustic guitar and Indian instruments, you can practically hear bell bottoms flapping in the breeze—or even krautrock due to its drawn-out, linear and insistent nature. But, besides the facts that krautrock was never this patchouli-scented, and that this came out in 1972 where psychedelia had been deader than a doornail for several years everywhere except Turkey, stylistically I consider "Crawling To Lhasa" to be less like those and closer in spirit, and even perhaps a direct acoustic precursor to, something like Magma's 1973 "Mekanïk Destruktïẁ Kommandöh". Like MDW, this album is almost just a single long rock raga, and also like MDW, it seems to exist in a world of its own, like it's a relic of some parallel dimension where popular music had forked off onto just a slightly different path. I'm sure it must be 15 or 20 minutes before there's even a chord change on this album. Only Germans ever made music like this, and only for a few years around this time. And with the post-hippie vibe and dominance of acoustic instruments here, this doesn't even sound like any of those. If Neu! had been brainwashed to join a hippie cult in San Francisco, maybe they would have made something like this.

This works FAR better than it should, and—despite some occasional hokey drawled vocals that tax my suspension of disbelief—is a 100% enjoyable, if wholly improbable, reimagining of "The Wall" from start to finish, which absolutely succeeds as an extremely listenable bluegrass album.

Next time Luther Wright and The Wrongs toured, I was lucky to see them play at a very small club near me. I introduced myself to Luther after the show and he proved to be one of the most personable guys I've ever met. We talked for quite a while. I was effusive in praising "Rebuild The Wall", and he told me, "Well, my parents are bluegrass fans, they don't like rock at all. I decided at the beginning I wouldn't release the album until they liked it. Besides, Dan wouldn't let it be released unless it was perfect." His guitarst Dan Curtis, an absolutely commanding player, was one of those savants, one of those ultra-geeky people who seem to speak music at least as fluently as they speak English. In addition to songs from "Rebuild The Wall", they had played one very cool song I didn't immediately recognize during the show, but it was so familiar it drove me crazy—I definitely knew it, but just couldn't place what it was a bluegrass cover of. I asked them, "What the hell was that? I know that I know it. It's driving me crazy" and they seemed pleased to have flummoxed me. "It was the Cantina Song from Star Wars". Bam! Wow! It was a really, really great cover, an inspired choice, a very hot jam, and as improbably well done as everything else I've heard from them. "Dan is a huge Star Wars fan", Luther told me. "He has every Star Wars figure." I really liked those guys. And, against all expectations, love this album.

My ex-friend Rick used to run a small underground FTP server for our circle of diehard music fans to turn each other on to things*, and one night I uploaded this. The next day, the login welcome notice on the server said, "To whoever uploaded 'Rebuild The Wall', THANK YOU."

*Sorry, Luther and Dan. I do not support piracy. If you like it, buy it. It was decades ago. Nothing I say on this site is true. For entertainment purposes only.

I do love the "Tubular Bells", but to me, "Hergest Ridge" is his quiet masterpiece. A very unusual instrumental tapestry of droning textures and odd but beautiful melodies, on which he played something like 18 rock and orchestral instruments himself, including numerous layers of quiet and highly processed electric guitars, and, just, one of those things that's hard to explain in words. It was written when he lived in a cottage in the English countryside, and sounds like it. Pastoral, airy, spacey, strange, intimate yet huge, this was one of the seminal albums of my adult taste in music, having bought it on a whim when I was 14 and had my head absolutely turned around. It still hasn't stopped spinning.

If I had to recommend one album that I really identify with, one album that could come closest to telling you in music what it's like to be between my ears, this would be a strong contender, one of maybe two in all.

I met Oldfield once, I waited for him at the stage door after a very impressive performance when I was in my 20s (which, incidentally, was on my birthday, and interest in Oldfield was so low among my friends that I had to buy someone a ticket to come with me) and he graciously came out and chatted with a small group of us fans for a while. They had something like 18 musicians on stage to recreate an album he'd made all by himself in the studio, including 4 guitar players switching off almost continuously between 25 gifferent guitars set up around the stage, a constant ballet of people getting up to fetch different instruments while others played, then sitting down and playing them for just a moment while someone else got up to get their new guitar. It wasn't even one of my favorite of his albums, but the spectacle of that performance was incredible. Then, meeting him right after he'd done that, he was so unpretentious and down to earth, it was almost anticlimatic. It wasn't like meeting one of my idols, it was just like like meeting some random guy. It didn't stop me from going gaga-starstuck and choking over my words just trying to talk to him, but, he was just a friendly and unpretentious dude. And patient with his starstruck fans, that's for sure.

One night in the late '90s I fell asleep listening to local radio. I was woken up a short time later by a live-in-the-studio set of very impressive smart, quirky pop. My instinct is to compare them to The Cars, who they sounded nothing like, but are reminiscent of in terms of quirky, intelligent pop songwriting with catchy melodies and great hooks. I had to know who it was, and as soon as the set ended and something else came on I called the radio station to ask. The DJ answered, I told him I loved it and needed to know what the hell I had just woken up to, and he told the band—the end of the conversation I heard went like this: "Guys, you have a fan, someone called to say they loved the set." ... [inaudible background speech] ... "No, it's a guy."

Lead singer/songwriter Will Lerner got on the phone and we chatted for a moment. I asked if they had CDs and he said they were in the studio at the moment but not finished yet, and invited me to come to an upcoming show at a local club, which I went to and enjoyed thoroughly. I went up to him after the set and told him I'd loved it, but he was distracted, in that understandable sort of overwhelmed just-got-off-the-stage whir. I was cool with it, I've been there. Later on that night, still in the club, I got a tap on my shoulder, and when I turned around it was Will. He handed me a CDr and said, "This is a rough mix of our album, 'Poison Pen'. The CDr might have some glitches." I never forgot that. What a good guy.

I thanked him profusely, took it home and was thrilled with it. Despite the fact that it did have some glitches. I actually felt good about that, it gave me an excuse to go buy the album when it came out.  Shortly after, the band broke up, Will moved to NYC and the album was shelved. I had a rare gem on my hands.

Eventually 'Poison Pen' did see a limited release on a tiny Portuguese label, and you can still find copies of it on used CD sites. Worth a listen if anything about this sounds remotely appealing.

Mostly creative psychedelic covers of well-known songs, this album succeeds where a lot of similar efforts failed, by virtue of the overall talent of the people involved, and the imaginativeness they weren't afraid to embrace. I never would have guessed that Sam and Dave's "Soul Man" could work as an shaggy psychedelic chamber-rock freakout, but they pull it off, along with pretty much a full album's worth a lot of similar surprises. I wouldn't say it's great, but it's a fun listen, and a small step above what you might expect from this sort of fare. Somebody involved with this album knew a little more about music than most of the people who did this kind of stuff.

Incidentally, most of these same players backed Muddy Waters on "Electric Mud" and Howlin' Wolf on "The Howlin' Wolf Album", the blues legends' respective forays into acid rock. Supposedly Hendrix used to listen to Waters's "Herbert Harper's Free Press News" from that album to get revved up before going on stage, so we may have a lot of classic bootlegs to thank these guys for. "Rotary Connection" is in a more AM-radio-friendly "flower power" gear than "get Jimi ready to rock" overdrive but the psychedelic bonafides are there.

I went to see Sonny in San Francisco's Make Out Room in 2002 or 3. I chatted with my ex-roommate at the bar waited for the uninteresting Bob Dylan wannabe to finish his set and so Sonny could come out, and only when the show ended did I discover that that had in fact been Sonny, having already moved on from his clever, smooth-talking hip hop in one of what I have since learned are his many frequent stylistic changes. Last I heard he was doing garage rock or something, billing himself as "Sonny And The Sunsets".

I talked to Sonny after the show and asked what happened to his wonderful hip hop style, but he hardly seemed even interested. I asked if he could sell me a copy of the already out-of-print "Who's The Monster" and he told me he didn't even have one anymore. He graciously offered to take down my address, and he'd send me a copy if he ever found one. A few months later a CD copy arrived in the mail, with a note saying, "I found this in my uncle's glove compartment." I never saw Sonny again, although his name popped up occasionally in the local entertainment papers for a long time afterwards. Apparently he developed something of a cult following, but if you look at his prodigious recorded output on most sites, including his Bandcamp and Spotify pages, you'll see no sign that "Who's The Monster..." ever existed.

It includes a live track where he directly complains mid-track about someone at a nearby table talking through his song, and the person never even notices.

You're missing out, that's all I can tell you. Wonderful. See if you can find it.

That's all I can say about this one. You just have to listen.