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The snow's over, the roads are plowed, time to catch up on some diggin! Great stuff in the bins today @ Jersey! #otisredding #pinkfloyd #gratefuldead #rollingstones #mono #noelredding #lynyrdskynyrd #thelines #ledzeppelin #harveymandel #earthopera #elektra #classicrock #vinyl #JupiterNJ #vinyligclub #davidbowie

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The Great American Eagle Tragedy

The Great American Eagle Tragedy

Earth Opera

Elektra, 1969

Home To You

Mad Lydia’s Waltz

Alfie Finney

Sanctuary From the Law

All Winter Long

The Great American Eagle Tragedy

Roast Beef Love

It’s Love

The bloodstained cover emblazoned with a skull where the Great Seal of the United States ought to be sets a new tone for Earth Opera right out of the starting gate. The core of the old Opera is still there, but the sound has evolved remarkably, as the first track off the record, Home To You demonstrates. Perhaps it has to do with personnel changes, perhaps with changing times, with more aggressive rock music being the order of the day, but The Great American Eagle Tragedy rocks much harder and presents a more diverse sound than their eponymous debut.

Had Earth Opera wanted a surefire hit single, it could have been Home To You, which incorporates ticking maracas to keep time, and sports a slight country feel. The lyrics are emotionally charged devotional ones, as Peter Rowan sings of wanting to get home and the torture of loneliness (“this loneliness is the worst I’ve had”). The impressive, four minute track is followed by a bizarre array of styles. Up first it’s the creepy, melancholy Mad Lydia’s Waltz during which Rowan sings uncomfortably at the top of his range. The song breaks down into disparate elements at the end (think Dreamless from their first album). This is followed by a brief tip of the cap to Alfie Finney, a film character from A Man of No Importance. The pounding rock of Sanctuary From the Law nearly concludes side one, save for the wandering and pointless All Winter Long.

The Great American Eagle Tragedy is where the album gets real real quick. Opening with mourning, dissonant saxophones in a little song-snatch, which erupts into a powerful Jethro Tull groove driven by muted drums and a raging flute. The introduction is more like a separate track by its length and position, but regardless of how it’s categorized, it makes for a lovely set-up. Rowan’s voice during the song is full of energy, mocked by flute and brass which add to a swirling wall of sound. The lyrics to the song, which deal predictably with the Viet Nam War are still relevant today. It describes the disintegration of “the kingdom” while the king is not paying attention, sending his “young lovely boys to die\in a foreign jungle war”. Switch jungle to desert and one has got a relevant protest tune. The song descends into madness (sort of like the war itself) as the track audibly explodes, sending sound flying everywhere. Peter Rowan screams in agony over the fall out, crying in earnest to “stop the war! Oh God, stop this war!” in a chilling reminder of the futility and horror of sending young Americans into combat zones thousands of miles away to be slaughtered. Roast Beef Love comes along next to pull the rug out on the masterful protest tune, its humorous lyrics and whimsical musical accompaniment are far out of place.

Finally, the album concludes with Rowan trying out some hand crafted Dylan poetry on It’s Love.  The straight blues is a little anticlimactic after the fury of The Great American Eagle Tragedy. Rowan’s reedy voice has a slight vibrato to it, making it sound a little like Joan Baez on the track. Overall it’s not a bad song, just as a closer it doesn’t make any sense. Had Tragedy been used to close instead it may have been a far more effective and chilling knockout.

Earth Opera folded as a band following The Great American Eagle Tragedy. Unable to crack the charts, only getting as high (naturally, of course) a number 40, they split up, frontman Rowan going on to form the George Martin produced group SeaTrain, and David Grisman going off to country with Muleskinner. Today, both are bluegrass players. A far cry from the psychedelic rock the band’s albums were inundated with, no?

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Earth Opera

Earth Opera

Earth Opera 

Elektra, 1968

The Red Sox Are Winning

As It Was Before

Dreamless 

To Care At All

Home of the Brave

The Child Bride

Close Your Eyes and Shut the Door

Time and Again

When You Were Full Of Wonder

Death by Fire

There’s literally too much magic on Earth Opera’s eponymous debut to cram into one review, but the basics go something like this. Earth Opera is another Boston psychedelic band, this one specializing in soft, jazzy rhythms and sounds and complex, poetic lyrics. A six man band, fronted by the shaky, unique lead vocals of Peter Rowan, the band never made it big, probably because they weren’t particularly accessible. Their protest tunes (The Red Sox Are Winning and Home of the Brave) are also rather highbrow, but very good.

Earth Opera kicks off with the highly factual The Red Sox Are Winning which chronicles the ongoing Viet Nam War, the dog track at Wonderland in East Boston, and the weird summer weather in Boston in 1967, the year the Red Sox nearly won the World Series, hence the title. All this was compacted into a single track, setting the precedent for the rest of the record as a piece of highly complex listening.

As It Was Before is probably the most ambitious track on the album, starting off with a supple, unified downward tumble into a Mr. Rogers’ style piano tinkle. From its humble, gentle beginnings the song builds to an electric guitar solo that links up in syncopation with the rest of the groove, punching together for a few measures before breaking down again. The piano is the central mover in the track, though Rowan’s reedy lead vocals ably carry the song as best they can. His standout moment comes as the track hisses and shudders to its ending, as if collapsing under its own weight. He performs bizarre vocal acrobatics, a sort of droning chant heard on a track like Free Advice by the Great Society, which is based off of Middle Eastern and Indian rhythms. All these disparate influences come together in a seven minute orgy of musical excess that is purely excellent.

The album also drifts occasionally into Americana-style folk music because some of the influence (according to the band’s 1968 bio) comes from the Grand Ol’ Opry. This twangy kick is found on the album’s third track, Dreamless, which bristles with what sounds like a harpsichord and a mandolin. It ends in a startling disintegration of the song’s elements however, giving way seamlessly to To Care At All, the album’s most morose track. Of note is the adept bass drum work of drummer Billy Mundi (an alum of the Mothers of Invention). The real heart of the album, beyond the flippant folk, is the melancholy mood of tracks like Child Bride, which is downright creepy, and the executioner’s tale told by Death By Fire, the song’s most poetic track that clocks in at over six minutes. Six minutes of pure, macabre poetry.

Home of the Brave is the record’s side one closer and the album’s best protest tune. Like many songs of this period, it urges an immediate stop to the war by telling a story from the perspective of a veteran who has returned, slightly unstable, and missing a hand. The groove is slightly shaky and militaristic at points, with rudimental snare fills mimicking that of a military drummer. Rowan’s vocals carry a great weight and pain as he howls, barely in key, over the booms of a tom tom mimicking explosions as the song closes, wringing down the curtain on a bloody vignette as an American soldier feels the full brunt of the cost of war.

Earth Opera would make one final record following their debut, the powerful and epic Great American Eagle Tragedy, whose core is a 10 minute protest against the horrors of war. It represents an almost total abandonment of style, preferring rock and roll and electric guitars to mandolin and vibraphone, the important instruments of Earth Opera. Overall, though, both albums are excellent, and worth picking up if ever found. Sadly, though, the band’s excellent work did not draw much attention, so finding any of their albums is difficult.