Rewind: Rhinoceros - Rhinoceros (1968)
With twin-lead guitars and a heavy dose of kaleidoscope blues, “When You Say You’re Sorry” signals something akin to Big Brother & the Holding Company with superior playing and - duh - inferior singing.
“Sorry” is the opening cut on Rhinoceros’ 1968 self-titled debut and finds the band - cobbled together by Elektra Records and which included former members of Iron Butterfly (guitarist Danny Weis, bassist Jerry Penrod), the Electric Flag (keyboardist Michael Fonfara), the Mothers of Invention (drummer Billy Mundi) plus guitarist Doug Hastings and singers John Finley and Alan Gerber - laying the groundwork for much of the music that would follow in its wake.
Fonfara’s omnipresent organ gives the album a touch of the heavy prog Jon Lord would later develop with Deep Purple, while “You’re My Girl” and “Belbuekus” are the prototypes of what would become Sly & the Family Stone’s “Everyday People” and Aerosmith’s “Walk this Way,” respectively.
The closing piano ballad “I Will Serenade You,” meanwhile, was later recast as “Let Me Serenade You” and became a hit for Three Dog Night.
Running 36 minutes, the LP’s 10 tracks feature an untidy, live-in-studio sound where perfection is secondary to feeling and harmonic excellence is jettisoned in favor of pure emotion.
Though it’s decidedly of its time and never achieved anything beyond cult status, Rhinoceros has proven with time to be incredibly resilient; it holds up surprisingly well all these decades later, owing to strong musicianship, arranging and production.
Revisiting the LP after many years of separation, Sound Bites found himself transported back to the early 1980s, to his junior year in high school, when a cool teacher similarly disaffected with what was happing musically at the time hipped the future blog to this record.
It’s been in regular rotation for weeks now.
Grade card: Rhinoceros - Rhinoceros (1968) - B+
1/31/21
