Virgin Insanity - Illusions LP - De Stijl Ltd 500

$

32

Anyone who was keeping an eye to the flashes of English language print in alla those early issues of PSF’s in-house magazine, G-Modern, might’ve followed the trails to this private press monster, first championed in those pages by You Ishihara, legendary record collector and vocalist/guitarist with White Heaven and Stars. Virgin Insanity’s sole 1971 LP, Illusions Of The Maintenance Man has been termed “the fucking king of American folk privates” and one spin of this supremely bent session will have you heading for the hills with nothing but a microphone in your hand, a gob of star-seed in your hair and a tuning-fork up your ass. Virgin Insanity were a ‘project’ of one Bert Long, an (at the time) itinerant musician who had just returned from a bust of a trip to Laurel Canyon Blvd, where he had unsuccessfully tried to hawk a bunch of original songs to alla the manicured hippies then making the scene. Crashing back to earth/Dallas, Long and his wife Eve decided to take things into their own hands and turned their apartment into a primitive home studio with the intent of nailing the muse before it escaped via their third eye for good. After recruiting two friends, Wayne Lamar Boogs the third (vocals/madness) and Jud Chapin (drums/vocals), Bob and Eve set to recording Illusions Of The Maintenance Man while the first gush of anything-could-happen was still upon them, building up Bob’s songs by bouncing down track by track. The results were beyond anything they could’ve hoped for, beautiful teenage-tribe-in-America anthems that would’ve sat just *there* on The Velvet Underground’s Loaded or Hackamore Brick’s One Kiss Leads To Another, the same lost/utopian garage band spirit that animated holy grail sides by The Bachs, Index and The Rising Storm and a creepy sunblinded/cultic edge that tastes of acid and neural backroads in a way that brings to mind the Manson Family Jams. Originally pressed in an edition of 200 in 1971 – copies of which are now impossible to score – this beautiful one-time pressing from De Stijl is an authorized exact-repro with stuck-on/stickered sleeve, insert and label repros. Edition of only 500 copies. Highest recommendation..

Listened to several times. Vinyl is somewhat dusty though otherwise near-mint. Cover is near-mint