MERRELL FANKHAUSER & HMS BOUNTY - THINGS 68 POP ROCK PSYCH SEALED LIMITED EDT LP

$

28

MERRELL FANKHAUSER AND H.M.S. BOUNTY – Things. Guerssen Records GUESS 049. Spanish release. FACTORY SEALED VINYL RECORD ALBUM. Originally issued in 1968 on Shamley Records. This edition, limited to 500 copies, issued in 2008; comes with remastered sound, original artwork, an insert with liners by Merrell, and a great photo from his own archive. MEMBERS:  Jack Jordan, Bill Dodd, Larry Meyers, and Merrell Fankhauser. TRACKS:  Things (Goin’ Round In My Mind), Girl (I’m Waiting For You), What Does She See In You, Lost In The City, Your Painted Lives, Drivin’ Sideways (On A One Way Street), In A Minute Not Too Soon, A Visit With Ashiya, The Big Gray Sky, Rich Man’s Fable, Ice Cube Island, and Madame Silky. DESCRIPTION:  One of the all-time 60’s classics, coming out from the California desert of Antelope Valley where  HMS leader Merrell Fankhauser lived for a couple of years. This was released on Uni’s Shamley subsidiary in late 1968, and gosh it’s a killer!!!! Flower power psychedelia, great all original songs, this is one of those albums you shouldn’t miss under any circumstance. Do yourself a favor and snap up one of these limited vinyl reissues post haste; remastered sound, original artwork and an insert with liners by Merrell and a great photo from his own archive.

For your further reading enjoyment and enlightenment I offer the following:

A great pop psych folk rock album with influences/similarities to The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Airplane and others of the time. Instrumentally it has some great stoned reverb and fuzz guitar as well as acoustic 12-string on some tracks. One of those albums that gets better with each play. This is an editing from an interview conducted by Jason Penick with Merrell in January of 2000, the part that deals with this album (natch) minus the questions. “Bill Dodd and I formed the H.M.S. Bounty. We had played together in high school in 1961. Our first band was the Rockin’ Titans. He got a job playing in an R&B/instrumental band and I went with the Impacts. We later got back together around the end of ‘67 I did all the writing, Bill helped with the arranging, background vocals and some great lead guitar parts!” (The other members) “Jack Metz (aka Jordan) was a member and sort of manager/ vocalist/sax man in the Impacts. He later became a good bass player. Larry Meyers was a blues-rock drummer who loved Ginger Baker’s playing. The stylistic range of H.M.S. Bounty was really an outgrowth of Fapardokly as Bill Dodd had joined me on some of the last desert recording sessions before we formed the Bounty. We never dreamt the Fapardokly would get released, much less become one of the most sought-after sixties’ LP’s! This was also around the time we started smoking pot. With my musical range and experience from the past, every joint sent me in a new direction. It was like discovering all these new flavors of ice cream and loving them all! Our shows were fantastic! A magic really came over the band live... We turned into other people on stage! Bill was a shy kind of guy but would sometimes really cut loose on stage... It was fun to see. We opened for Canned Heat and played a few very large venues and fairgrounds. We really thought we had hit the big time and the money was getting better, although we never saw any royalties! Bill and I had a great time playing off each other on stage. We really admired each other. We would sometimes talk about how we blew each others’ minds with a certain guitar part after a concert.” (Album singles) “The songs that were released as singles were Things and Girl (I’m Waiting for You). Things made it in the “bubbling under” in Billboard magazine’s Hot 100. Girl (I’m Waiting for You) got a lot of airplay across the country but never charted. Around this time our label Uni/Shamley signed Neil Diamond, who already had a hit on a small label, and all the promotion went to him and the Bounty sank!” (On recording the album at Gold Star studios) “It was great at Gold Star! We recorded in the studio where Buffalo Springfield did For What It’s Worth and many other classics by various groups (this was Phil Spector’s favorite studio). Jack and Norm (the credited producers) didn’t have much to do with the sound. They were more the “exec” types that sat back and said ‘good, that’s a take, now let’s move along to the next song quickly.’ The sound was developed more by the band and a great engineer, Jim Hilton, who went on to produce the Iron Butterfly.” (On some of the album’s songs) “What Does She See in You? was written one day in the car, going to the office to write (Merrell had a job as a songwriter for awhile during this period). Sitting at a stop light, I noticed this beautiful girl in the back of a limousine. She noticed me also. She was with this much older guy. We raced along Sunset Boulevard and she blew me a kiss as she disappeared into the early morning Hollywood traffic... Lost in the City was Bill and I stoned, trying to get to a gig and then getting lost in the building trying to find the stage, right out of A HARD DAY’S NIGHT! A Visit with Ashiya was one of my favorite songs. I had to fight to get it on the album, as our straight producers thought it was just too far-out! It came to me in a meditation. I had already been playing sitar for a year and wrote it in its entirety in three minutes! It came from somewhere else!” 

THIS ITEM IS NEW AND UNPLAYED. Used items will include condition details for the cover, disc, inserts, etc.

If you have any questions or if you have additional information, especially corrections, to the description, please e-mail me. I particularly enjoy when an artist, band member, or someone who has personal background knowledge of a particular album/artist and offers their insight/information of that recording, which I will include with the description for future listings of that release. As a collector of many years, part of the hobby side for me is to learn about the background of the artists and music that I collect. Hopefully, sharing some of this information in my descriptions will help educate and enhance your listening experience.     

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SS or SLD:  Still Sealed or Sealed (or some variation of sealed depending on how many characters I have left in the title line). This item is new and unplayed. Also appears in the listing description as Sealed LP or Factory Sealed LP.

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RE:  Reissue

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