'74 WATER INTO WINE BAND LP Hill Climbing For Beginners RARE XIAN FOLK PSYCH

$

50

Myrrh Records MSA-6543 (U.S. pressing, stereo, 1974) Cover is mint minus, in it's shrinkwrap with no holes, sawmarks, cut corners, splits or hand-writing. Small tear in the shrinkwrap bottom right. One tiny (1 /32 of an inch) scratch on side 1, band 1. Otherwise, vinyl  is mint minus. Includes the original lyrics insert (see 4th scan). Plain white generic inner sleeve. This is the U.S. edition, with a different (than the U.K. release) cover, and re-mixed material. See below 3rd paragraph for critical review, and notes. Additional information on this rarity is available on the web.     
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Strangely, the re-recording of 'Hill Climbing For Beginners' for the American market occurred not in the USA but in Britain. Explained Trevor, "We recorded the new version at Wessex Studios in South London with John Pantry producing. The Americans wanted a cleaner sound and a more commercial feel, and more production and so on. So we took the opportunity to respond to that by adding extra instrumentation. So for instance we put a string quartet on one of the numbers and we also had harmonies with that. We added flute, wind and so on so whilst we weren't entirely. . . we wanted to keep it a fairly small, kind of raw group sound and not make it into pop music - we didn't use a lot of drums - we still took the opportunity to do something that we felt made the music more interesting. There were pluses and minuses but on the whole we were able to do something good with it."

The American release version of 'Hill Climbing For Beginners' didn't please everyone. Mark Allan Powell's Encyclopedia Of Contemporary Christian Music reports that "critics consider the American version a travesty, while collectors price the original British edition at £250." The release on American Myrrh did, however, get the band out to the States. Said Trevor, "I think we sold a number of albums in the US. But the thing was the American market in the '70s wanted something much more immediate than the music we were making. We did a couple of tours in the US. They liked some of the music we would do that was very straightforward, less complex - they loved it. But then we'd get into some of our chamber style music that was a bit more complex and they wouldn't know what we were up to really. If you look back at some of the progressive rock of the time it did get very creative and it wasn't maybe everybody's cup of tea and that was particularly so in America."