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Brown Acid: The Seventh Trip Set for Halloween Release

Posted in Whathaveyou on August 7th, 2018 by JJ Koczan

It’s kind of hard to keep up with RidingEasy Records and Permanent Records‘ ongoing Brown Acid series, and it’s damn near impossible to write about it without having the kind of scholarship behind you to actually, you know, put it together — you’ll note below they have a catalog of dates and figures; to review it would require rewriting half the press release — but the truth is I find the project deeply admirable. Digging up old albums for reissue is one thing, and that’s great so long as you’ve got the rights to do it, but these guys are not only putting out the most obscure of the obscure heavy ’70s singles, but they’ve actually gone as far to chase down the people who actually made the music way back when and get their okay for it. Imagine you’re like a 65-year-old dude and someone drops you an email or gives you a call to talk about some track you cut almost 50 years earlier? That’s gotta just about be the best feeling in the universe.

Anyway, Brown Acid: The Seventh Trip is out on Halloween, and you can stream a track from it at the bottom of this post. Copious PR wire background follows:

va brown acid the seventh trip

Brown Acid: The Seventh Trip compilation out on Halloween

Rare 60s-70s pre-metal, hard rock singles series curated by L.A.’s Permanent Records & RidingEasy Records

The forthcoming seventh edition of the popular compilation series featuring long-lost vintage 60s-70s proto-metal and stoner rock singles, Brown Acid: The Seventh Trip is set for release on Halloween 2018. Hear and share the first single, “Peace of Mind” by Blizzard from 1973 via Loudwire HERE. (Direct YouTube.)

The Brown Acid series is curated by L.A. label RidingEasy Records and retailer/label Permanent Records.

About Brown Acid: The Seventh Trip:

Everybody’s favorite source for the hard stuff is back in business, with ten more lethal doses of rare hard rock, heavy psych and proto-metal! These obscure tracks have all been licensed, the bands have been paid, and the sources are all analog. The quality of tracks seems to increase along with the number of Trips and this cohesive collection comes outta the gate with both guns blazing!

Pegasus recorded one single in Baltimore in 1972 and they made it count. “The Sorcerer” is a throbbing ripper that prior to this was basically unknown. However, it doesn’t seem too far fetched to speculate that Black Flag lifted the riff for “No Values” from this track eight years later. Unlikely, but possible, especially considering how big a Black Sabbath fan Greg Ginn is. Pegasus was lauded back in the day for “how much they delivered that Black Sabbath feel.”

You may not already be familiar with Schizo, but you should know at least one of the French freaks behind this short-lived group. Richard Pinhas was the co-writer and uncredited, wah-wah abusing guitarist in Schizo after his stint in Blues Convention. Schizo recorded just two singles, the first being the heavier of the two, before Pinhas went on to record with Heldon and then going solo. The band had a unique vibe that didn’t sound unlike Lemmy fronting a gang of stoned Martians.

Youngstown, Ohio is the most commonly referred to city of the entire Brown Acid series. This town of just under 150,000 people may’ve had the highest (literally and figuratively) per capita output of heavy 45s. Blue Amber recorded this in 1971 at Gary Rhamy’s analog Mecca, Peppermint Recording Studios. This two-riff boneheaded banger sounds like a caveman protest song with an extraordinary amount of delay on the vocals. No wonder this 45 fetches three-figures on the rare occasion it comes up for sale.

Batting clean-up, we have Negative Space, the only LP sourced track on this album. This crunchy jam comes off the band’s 1970 record entitled Hard, Heavy, Mean, & Evil. At over six and a half minutes, “The Calm After the Storm” is the longest track included on this volume, but it never gets dull. Fun fact: before changing the name to Negative Space, Rob Russen called his band Snow and released the “Sunflower” 45 in 1969 – you might recall that groover from the First Trip.

We generally stick with American artists for this series, but every now and again something foreign grabs us and shakes us to the core. One example is the Schizo record from France, another is this Swedish 45 by Zane. These crazy Swedes did one incredibly damaged (hence the title) record on the MM label in 1976. These proto-punkers relied heavily on synth for this tune and mixed the drums so obnoxiously loud, you might think the kit is in the room with you. This is a weird one that somehow sounds like Zolar X covering Wicked Lady. Brown Acid material all the way!

B must be short for Bangers, ‘cuz this side is full of ’em! The flip of this Trip begins with a virtually unknown Oklahoma record from 1973. Blizzard was Rod McClure’s high school band, but you couldn’t possibly guess that teenagers recorded this heavy slab on the Token (should’ve been Toking) label. It’s one of the best we’ve comped and it sounds like a hypothetical MC5/Hendrix collaboration. The “Under the Ice” level drum fills will knock your socks off if the heavy shred doesn’t first.

OOOOk-lahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain and apparently where the fuzz goes seepin’ in your brain! Third World is the second Okie inclusion on this Trip and we couldn’t be more stOOOOOked to be sharing this very obscure single with y’all. If the heavily distorted two-note riff doesn’t grab ya, the apocalyptic Grand Funk vibes will. Once they get their mitts on ya, Third World will take you back to 1971 and leave ya there. Can we hitch a ride too?

Ever heard of Virginia, Minnesota? We hadn’t either until we got in touch with Calvin Haluptzok and got the back story on his band Sweet Wine. This bitchin’ one-off 45 must’ve melted the snow off the roofs of the households brave enough to play it when it came out in 1970 and it’s still red hot nearly 50 years later. This vino may be sugary, but it packs an incendiary punch! Sadly, Calvin passed before we could get his music re-released, but it was nice to have reached him before it was too late. The Sweet Wine legacy lives on thanks to the Brown Acid archivists.

C.T. Pilferhogg wins the award for most puzzling band name in our series. What’s not puzzling is how righteous both sides of their self-released 1973 single are! Featured here is the A-side “You Haul” which is one of the best examples of a poor man’s Deep Heep (Deep Purple meets Uriah Heep) we’ve ever heard and the demonic Echoplex-laden laughs mixed into this track are out of control. The band was touted as “Southwest Virginia’s Finest Boogie Band”, but don’t let that fool ya.vThey could bang heads with the best of ’em.

The closer on the Seventh Trip is one we hold very near and dear. Not only is this record the one that’s taken us the longest to secure the rights to, it’s also one of the very best examples of heavy psych you’ll ever hear. The track rings your bell (literally) straight out of the gate and the dank psychedelic vibes kick in immediately. Summit’s “The Darkness” was recorded in a basement studio in Kansas City in 1969 when the lead guitarist was only 16. The band was from a rural Missouri town, played only one impromptu gig in Clinton, and pressed only 125 copies of this, their only single. It should come as no surprise that it sells for hundreds of dollars when it’s offered. That’s a small price to pay for such greatness.

Artist: Various Artists
Album: Brown Acid: The Seventh Trip
Label: RidingEasy Records
Release Date: October 31, 2018

01. Pegasus “The Sorcerer”
02. Nobody’s Children “Good Times”
03. Blue Amber “We Got Love”
04. Negative Space “The Calm After The Storm”
05. Zane “Damage”
06. Blizzard “Peace of Mind”
07. Third World “End of Time”
08. Sweet Wine “Things You Told Me”
09. C.T. Pilferhogg “You Haul”
10. Summit “The Darkness”

http://www.ridingeasyrecs.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ridingeasyrecords/
https://twitter.com/EasyRiderRecord
https://soundcloud.com/easyriderrecords/

Blizzard, “Peace of Mind”

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Track Premiere: Brown Acid: The Fourth Trip Sampler Megamix by Ben Westbeech

Posted in audiObelisk on April 11th, 2017 by JJ Koczan

brown-acid-the-fourth-trip

It would’ve been really easy for the Brown Acid compilation series to go the way of many, many others in either becoming academic retreads or simply fizzling out. Much to its credit, it’s done neither. Brown Acid: The Fourth Trip, out April 20 via RidingEasy Records, is as the title suggests the fourth installment in the collection focused on the years immediately following the heyday of psychedelia — circa 1970-1975 — which it has alternately called the “comedown era” or, as on the cover here, the “Underground Comedown.”

Whatever the name given, it’s that vision of the early ’70s that we see Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke explain in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: the darker years that followed in the wake of the Summer of Love when the war kept going and distortion got meatier. Brown Acid: The Fourth Trip basks in this vibe in the heavy blues of “Carry Me On” by Headstones and “Oceans Inside Me” by Stone Garden and groups included like Bungi, Axas and Zekes — the latter who are making their second appearance in the series with the eight-minute, cowbell-infused, Leaf Hound-style raw jam “Comin’ Back” at the outset of side B — set up a flow across the 10-track/35-minute LP span that’s as much about feeding one groove into the next as it is giving its audience of the converted among the converted a “betcha never heard this before” challenge. To wit, the full tracklisting:

VA, Brown Acid: The Fourth Trip:
01. Kanaan, “Leave It”
02. Stone Garden, “Oceans Inside Me”
03. Headstones, “Carry Me On”
04. Wrath, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Fever”
05. Bungi, “Numbers”
06. Erving Forbush, “The Train”
07. Zekes, “Comin’ Back” (previously unreleased)
08. Bad Axe, “Coachman”
09. Ash, “Warrant”
10. Axas, “Lucifer”

As ever for Brown Acid, the prevailing sensibility throughout is one of careful curation made to sound like someone’s just putting on rad singles they found one after the other, like a DJ set where the guy actually out-obscures the room instead of just putting on Atomic Rooster‘s “Death Walks Behind You” and desperately looking around for knowing nods of approval. Working in tandem with Los Angeles’ Permanent RecordsRidingEasy sets up these rarities not to show them off as trophy acquisitions, and not as lessons for their audience in the origins of riffs — because damn it, by now the audience for this stuff knows where riffs come from — but as explorations of cool heavy vibes and songs that kick ass.

I’m not even sure how, but Brown Acid: The Fourth Trip manages to be the heavy ’70s “lost tracks” comp that doesn’t come across as self-important or over-inflating in terms of its celebration of its contents. Nobody’s claiming the wah-soaked leads of Kanaan‘s “Leave It” invented anything. Nobody’s shying away from how much Axas‘ “Lucifer” owes directly to Black Sabbath‘s “N.I.B.” All that stuff is right there for the listener to hear. Whether it’s the motor-chug of Wrath on “Rock ‘n’ Roll Fever” (they have pills for it now), or the crotch-thrust boogie of Erving Forbush‘s “The Train,” the progression of songs wants neither in energy nor flow, and that only serves to emphasize the underlying effort put into making this chapter in the apparently-ongoing series. They make it sound easy. One doubts it actually is.

To herald the comp’s arrival — again, on April 20 — RidingEasy and Ben Westbeech have put together a 12-minute sampler platter of what’s in store on Brown Acid: The Fourth Trip, and today I have the pleasure of unveiling the thing, which runs through the included tracks and ties them together with old biker-movie samples (which are not actually featured on the comp itself). You can check it out in its entirety below, followed by more info from RidingEasy off the PR wire about the process of making this beast happen.

Hope you enjoy:

If you thought we were getting close to the end of the Brown Acid series with our last Trip, you were dead wrong…we’re only just getting rolling. The well of privately released hard rock, heavy psych, and proto-metal 45s is deep and we are nowhere near tapped out. Most of these records were barely released and never properly distributed so they ain’t easy to find, but they’re out there if you’re willing to dig…and we aren’t afraid to get our hands dirty. Hard calluses have formed from handling the shovel and we’ve sifted through a lot of dirt, but we’ve dug up another ten tremendous records to share with all the heavy heads out there. This volume brings together eight insanely rare and skull-crushingly heavy 45s as well as two previously unreleased bangers.

You may remember the Zekes’ jaw dropper “Box” from the First Trip. If you don’t, you better go back and refresh your memory, you stoner. That song rips! And so does this previously unheard recording we legally obtained from the Beverly Hills records vaults. “Comin’ Back” is the longest tune we’ve yet to include on this series and it’s a full-on rager! The only surviving copy of this recording came to us on the original 1/4″ master tape from Hollywood’s long-defunct Demars & Duffy Music. We did our best to preserve the recording and we think you’ll appreciate the rawness.

There have been numerous groups named Bad Axe over the years, but the one you hear here is the baddest. This five-piece fresh outta high school kicked out this jam (and a few others) in a Chicago studio in 1973 just for the hell of it. As a garage band, they were previously named The Burlington Express and they went on to be known as Bitch, but these dudes hit their stride as Bad Axe and “Coachman” is their crowning achievement. It went completely unreleased until 2014 when Permanent Records issued it and “Poor Man, Run” as a limited edition 45 with a killer picture sleeve. It’s long out-of-print and only obtainable now on Brown Acid.

The rest of the records included on this volume vary in rarity, but at least two of them were virtually unknown until we discovered them. You’ll win the lottery before you find copies of all of the original 45s in even the best record stores. Many of the records included in this volume are owned only by the members of the bands and some of the band members don’t even have personal copies. That’s just how hard these guys hit it back in the day! We’re lucky some of these guys are still alive and well enough to give us permission to use their masters.

RidingEasy Records website

RidingEasy Records on Thee Facebooks

RidingEasy Records on Twitter

RidingEasy Records on Soundcloud

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Brown Acid: The Fourth Trip Due April 20

Posted in Whathaveyou on February 23rd, 2017 by JJ Koczan

RidingEasy Records returns in April with another dose of scuzzer-fuzz and proto-everything on Brown Acid: The Fourth Trip. In collusion with Permanent Records in Los Angeles, the latest in the apparently-ongoing series of oh-so-delightfully-obscure 45RPM singles and lost odds and ends from the late ’60s and early ’70s deep-dives once more into the roots of what we think of today as heavy, and comes out with a collection worthy of collectors, as the raw buzz of opening cut “Leave It” by Kanaan — which you can stream below, because it’s a whole past-meets-the-future thing, man — makes as plain as the melting face on yonder assortment of skulls. Vibe, vibe, vibe. How long can they keep the streak going?

Call it ripe for the diggin’, and then dig in. PR wire info follows:

brown-acid-the-fourth-trip

Brown Acid: The Fourth Trip compilation coming 4/20

Rare 60s-70s pre-metal, hard rock singles curated by L.A.’s Permanent Records & RidingEasy Records

L.A. label RidingEasy Records and retailer/label Permanent Records announce the upcoming release of the 4th edition in their celebrated compilation series of long-lost vintage 60s-70s proto-metal and stoner rock singles, Brown Acid today with a premiere of the first track. Hear and share Kanaan’s “Leave It.”

If you thought we were getting close to the end of the Brown Acid series with our last Trip, you were dead wrong…we’re only just getting rolling. The well of privately released hard rock, heavy psych, and proto-metal 45s is deep and we are nowhere near tapped out. Most of these records were barely released and never properly distributed so they ain’t easy to find, but they’re out there if you’re willing to dig…and we aren’t afraid to get our hands dirty. Hard calluses have formed from handling the shovel and we’ve sifted through a lot of dirt, but we’ve dug up another ten tremendous records to share with all the heavy heads out there. This volume brings together eight insanely rare and skull-crushingly heavy 45s as well as two previously unreleased bangers.

You may remember the Zekes’ jaw dropper “Box” from the First Trip. If you don’t, you better go back and refresh your memory, you stoner. That song rips! And so does this previously unheard recording we legally obtained from the Beverly Hills records vaults. “Comin’ Back” is the longest tune we’ve yet to include on this series and it’s a full-on rager! The only surviving copy of this recording came to us on the original 1/4″ master tape from Hollywood’s long-defunct Demars & Duffy Music. We did our best to preserve the recording and we think you’ll appreciate the rawness.

There have been numerous groups named Bad Axe over the years, but the one you hear here is the baddest. This five-piece fresh outta high school kicked out this jam (and a few others) in a Chicago studio in 1973 just for the hell of it. As a garage band, they were previously named The Burlington Express and they went on to be known as Bitch, but these dudes hit their stride as Bad Axe and “Coachman” is their crowning achievement. It went completely unreleased until 2014 when Permanent Records issued it and “Poor Man, Run” as a limited edition 45 with a killer picture sleeve. It’s long out-of-print and only obtainable now on Brown Acid.

The rest of the records included on this volume vary in rarity, but at least two of them were virtually unknown until we discovered them. You’ll win the lottery before you find copies of all of the original 45s in even the best record stores. Many of the records included in this volume are owned only by the members of the bands and some of the band members don’t even have personal copies. That’s just how hard these guys hit it back in the day! We’re lucky some of these guys are still alive and well enough to give us permission to use their masters.

Artist: Various Artists
Album: Brown Acid: The Fourth Trip
Label: RidingEasy Records
Release Date: April 20th, 2017

01. Kanaan “Leave It”
02. Stone Garden “Oceans Inside Me”
03. Headstones “Carry Me On”
04. Wrath “Rock N’ Roll Fever”
05. Bungi “Numbers”
06. Erving Forbush “The Train”
07. Zekes “Comin’ Back” (previously unreleased)
08. Bad Axe “Coachman”
09. Ash “Warrant”
10. Axas “Lucifer”

http://www.ridingeasyrecs.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ridingeasyrecords/
https://twitter.com/EasyRiderRecord
https://soundcloud.com/easyriderrecords/

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