Tom Pohlman's magical Prayer for John, USA 1970

A mystically beautiful folk record from 1970 from a one-off artist called Tom Pohlman (actually quite similar to the Entourage-related Bob Brown I just posted) thematically addressed to John. (See below for info.)

If you click on the first link there above this sentence you'll notice there's a record available to you for purchase, in the amount of 1600 dollars.  The lowest it sold for apparently on discogs was in the 700s.  So really, be prepared for the fury of your wife.  Or, instead, you can just follow this blog and save yourself a whole load o' cash.  I remember long ago reading Tom Hayes saying that albums described for example on popsike or record collector's guide as 'superb loner folk or psych' really just boil down to simple songs with vocals on acoustic guitar with nothing progressive to get us excited about.  Well this record really does fit the bill here.  Consider how beautiful the instrumental ST opener to the second side is:

The Ganges' soaring emotional grace and beauty just left me speechless:

It's a shame the vocals were so badly recorded (on what is a private pressing I guess) it's very hard to tell what he's saying.

Can you believe it?  After so many albums hunted for, caught and bagged, eviscerated and set up on the wall as trophies?

Thanks be to all those who help in the quest, as always... Please, I beg you, don't let the flow of beautiful gems ever end.... that would surely break my heart... 

(though have the opposite effect on my family...)

PS. Note the following information clearly contemporaneous from this post:

1970 folk music recorded in the Baltimore area, including musicians Tom Pohlman, Bill Campbill, Howie Bloom, Mike Parloff, Jim Queen, Mark Seidelson, and Janet Miller. Corner and edge wear, splits beginning in about 3 places, light rings front and back...

A Prayer for John (U. of Md. Diamondback) by Dave Bourdon 

Tom Pohlman is looking for the right girl. In that way, perhaps, he's no different than any other guy on campus. 

What sets Pohlman's search apart from others is that while he has met the girl he seeks, he does not know her name, anything about her personality or background. In fact, he knows only one thing about her. She is a human being. 

Pohlman met her while walking back to his dorm room. Crossing the mall, he spotted her crying underneath a tree. 

"When 1 saw her," he recalls, "it seemed like the whole tree was crying, too. I went over and said, 'Either you have a very bad cold or you're crying'...she said she was crying and I asked what the matter was. She said 'you wouldn't understand' and I said maybe I would. 

"Then she told me her brother had just been killed in Vietnam. 

"It really set me back. I sat down and said that perhaps I did understand a bit because my father had died last June." 

Pohlman spent about five minutes comforting the girl. Finally, he says, "I asked her if she was religious and she said yes. I asked her if it would be prying if I asked her brother's name and she said it was John. I told her I'd say a prayer for John." 

The chance meeting was still preying on Pohlman's mind that night. An amateur songwritier, he took his guitar, pencil and paper and walked to the floor stairwell. In half an hour he had composed a soft ballad intitled "A Prayer For John." 

But when he woke the next morning, he realized he "could not use it unless it was all right with the girl. It was a personal thing even if it didn't mention any names. It was as much her song as it was mine." 

The search began. Pohlman posted notices in every girls' dorm asking "the girl who was crying for John" to contact him. 

He also advertised in the Diamondback. For his efforts, Pohlman has thus far received false alarms and prank calls. 

At this moment, then, the fate of Pohlman's song is in limbo. Although he is quite opposed to the war, the song has no political overtones for several reasons. Essentially, he says, the song was meant to mourn the death of a human being, to express the sorrow of a close death, whether by war or any other cause. He says it best, "John is a human being. That's all John is. That's all I know about him." Another reason for his political abstention is that "perhaps the girl has feelings about the war. I'm sure she wouldn't like to hear he died for nothing." 

Pohlman still has hopes of finding the lost girl, but he realizes his chances are dimming. "But mainly," he says, "I hope she's not crying anymore." 

published in The Crescent student newspaper, November 21, 1969....by.....idler ...~

Back to Swiss Sisyphos with their long-awaited first album, Way to Express, from 1980

I reviewed these Swiss prog rockers before.  They are most notable for the fact they continued producing records from this original one in 1981 all the way down to the present day, with apparently the same lineup, albeit making use of a great deal of recycling.

The instrumental opening of A Rebel is Not the Devil, despite one annoying skip, is simply superb:





As before some of the harder rocking bluesier tracks are a little paint-by-numbers in the hair metal style with the commonest electric guitar cliches of solos.  Still, there are enough oddball chord changes and unique licks to make this quite an enjoyably spent 2/3 of an hour.  As Caesar would have approved: "Rockituri te salutant!"

Whiplash's Getting to Know Us from 1980, USA

As the fortune teller predicted, we now switch away from the jazz and fusion of the past summer to return to our roots, US-style prog along the lines of Ariel - Perspectives, Spaces - Border Station, Jester, or the much beloved Canadian Machines have Landed, etc.

But similar to the case with Luna Sea where side a was more simplistic and commercialized and side b more driven in the progressive fusion direction, we really have just half an album here.  For those looking for the wonderful banging of a rock rhythm section and dying again for the electric excitement of amplified guitars, this is anyways a blissful change.  Consider the last part of Fugitive (A Suite in Three Movements):





Pretty good, right?

The information here suggests the band only made this LP, not so surprisingly.  Checking the credits on the verso scan makes it clear the other entry in the discogs database is a mistake.

Gabriel Jonáš, Karel Růžička and Emil Viklický ‎in Klávesová Konkláva from 1978

I love the overdoing of the accents, like those millennial females who go overboard with the caked on makeup and thick brown painted eyebrows...  Not sure if y'all are sick of the slavova fusionova and jazzova, definitely I'm gettin' there, but here's some more (maybe return next post when I will give you a totally different taste).

In the course of hunting down the Vikliky oeuvre I encountered this rarity which looked promising, especially when one recalls the magnificence of the Gruntz Klavier Conclaves (not to mention the American version with the many hands...)

Here's Bubliny:





Perhaps not the ideal quality for these pages, especially after mentioning Gruntz, but oh well, this is how we learn what's worthy: one piece of 12 inches at a time.

Zebulon from Germany 1980

A fusion album which is oh so similar to the others from this era in Deutschland, like the exemplary Nimbus though inevitably and sadly not as good,  but with titles like "Opium Haut Opi Um," Pudding Explosion," and "Zombie D' Amour:"






you know there will be some progressive tendencies, at least...