I don’t remember who first recommended I check out Californian heavy proggers Dragonfly, but I’m going to give credit to Rock ‘n’ Roll Gina Brooks, who’s so rock ‘n’ roll that it’s in her name. And if it wasn’t her and it was you and you’re reading this, take it as a compliment that your recommendation would have kicked so much ass that I’d credit it to Gina. She’s been around the NYC rock scene longer than most of the bands, and knows her stuff second to none, so when she says, “You should check these guys out,” I listen. Hence Dragonfly‘s Dragonfly.

This past weekend was the Second Saturday Record Show in Wayne, NJ, which I know I’ve written about before, but from which I always seem to come away with something cool. Working one of the tables was Brian Hulitt of Void Records, who turned out to be a purveyor of all kinds of heavy/psychedelic obscurities, and though I stopped myself at five records — Dragonfly, Assassin by Pinnacle, The Human Beast‘s Vol. 1, a Void sampler, and Homer‘s Grown in U.S.A. (Hulitt also gave me a copy of Mushroom Palace by his band Ferguson Hulitt) — Dragonfly was the band I’d most been looking forward to hearing. They’d been on my Amazon wishlist for a while and were one of those “get there eventually” kinds of bands, so it was cool to stumble on “eventually” like that.

It’s not as dark or punkishly abrasive as the Pinnacle record, but Dragonfly has that classic buzzsaw guitar sound that stands a precursor to modern fuzz, and there are a couple genuinely killer tunes. Willie Dixon‘s “Hootchie Koochie Man” gets a rocking revisit, and the druggy psych of “Enjoy Yourself” makes it sound like even better advice than it otherwise might. “Crazy Woman” and “She Don’t Care,” together comprising just over five of the album’s 36 minutes, are two of its brightest moments, and the guitar solo on “Time Has Slipped Away” alone basically makes the album worth the price of admission, which, for the 2003 Progressive Line remaster I found at Hulitt‘s table (it’s the white cover as opposed to the greener one, which I believe is the original), was a whopping $10.

Dragonfly‘s Dragonfly was released in 1970, and I honestly don’t know what if anything the band did after it. The liner notes hint that Dragonfly may have been called Legend either before or after making this record, and all there is for lineup info are first initials and last names. How many dudes named R. Russell do you think there might have been in SoCal in the early ’70s? My guess is plenty. It’s a take it for what it is kind of situation, but with the heavy rocking “Blue Monday” for an opener, I’m more than happy to do just that, and though the recommendation’s origin is as much a mystery as the “where are they now,” I’m glad someone told me to check out Dragonfly, and thought, if you had the chance to do so, you might be too.

Tags: California, Dragonfly, Hollywood, Progressive Line

This entry was posted on Monday, November 15th, 2010 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Buried Treasure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.