Deep Purple - The Book of Taliesyn
It’s no secret I’m an admirer of music from the late 60s and early 70s, in fact it’s easy for me to overlook the faults of music from this era, as they’re often balanced by a charming naivete. You could never imagine that the Deep Purple of Machine Head would ever have had the identity crisis the early band did. In fact, if I may be bold, I’d say that the early Deep Purple could have been one of the worst bands of the era. With new styles and fusions spawning by the second, it seems that Deep Purple never had the imagination to do anything but a weird combination of awful covers (at least three that I remember on Taliesyn) and pseudo-classical rock. Seriously, this is an era when Bob Dylan could be outdone by Jimi Hendrix on “All Along the Watchtower” and Santana would be credited even to this day for “Black Magic Woman” when it was an old Fleetwood Mac tune. Yet Deep Purple chooses “Kentucky Woman” and manages to make it worse. It’s a good thing the band went, reinvented and redeemed themselves from this nonsense, one of the more (deservedly) overlooked sophomore slumps of the late 70s. Even singer Rod Evans managed to redeem this work with the fabulous Captain Beyond.
Reign Ghost - Featuring Lynda Squires
There are a host of 70s North American and European psych and early progressive rock groups whose reputations are probably a lot better than they would be had the enthusiasts done a bit of homework and boned up on their Jefferson Airplane. If you’re familiar with that band’s premiere work - Pillow, Creation, Baxters - it becomes pretty clear when you hear a band like Canada’s Reign Ghost where they got their songs, I mean inspiration from. I don’t have the song list with me, but there’s a track about halfway through with a dual male and female vocals lead that’s straight out of the Kantner/Slick shtickbook. However, at times the Airplane they lift from seems to come more from the first album and earlier vocalist, and at times I hear whiffs of more populist groups like the Mamas and Papas. Overall it’s an album I ought to like a lot more than I do, but for a second album this is a band that really didn’t have much of an identity and it’s not a surprise they didn’t last much longer. I am pretty curious to hear the first though.