The definitive survey of America’s independent 70s soul scene, and a companion piece to Now-Again’s long-running Soul-Cal series.
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Los Yesterdays – Frozen In Time: LA’s Brown Soul Sound!
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L.A.’s Brown Soul Sound!The debut album from Los Angeles duo Los Yesterdays – Sweet Soul music meets Mexican Folklorico.
Contains the LP version of “Nobody’s Clown” and “Love Is A Game For Fools.”
Sixteen Things We Know About Damon – A Short Film By Andrew Gura
Sixteen Things We Know About Damon is a short film from 2014 by Andrew Gura: a voice and music driven story that uses animated archival stills, stock footage and typography, lo-fi textures, left-field sound design to tell the nearly impossible backstory behind Damon’s Song of a Gypsy – one that encapsulates the last bloom of the flower power movement before it decayed into the haze of the ‘70s underground. It traces the arch of a pop hopeful descending into chaos, becoming the tortured soul who would create an LP to file alongside works by other lost greats of the late ‘60s, from Shuggie Otis to Rodriguez.
Filmmaker and video director Gura (Madvillain, Nas, Saul Williams) first collaborated with Now-Again’s Egon in 2002, for a short film he produced about the search for the Omaha funk ensemble L.A. Carnival. Ten years after that film, Gura and Egon traveled to Fresno, California, to discover more about Stephen David Heitkotter and his legendary psychedelic rock album. It was over the course of working on a Heitkotter short that the two turned their attention to Damon and his landmark Song of a Gypsy album. Although no archival footage of Damon’s sessions exist, Gura created a short film that captures the milieu into which this masterpiece was born, and Egon tells Damon’s story in a series of vignettes that opens the door to investigate more about this lost masterpiece.
Song of a Gypsy is out now as a single LP. Previous iterations included a deluxe, 2LP set with a booklet and a hardbound 2 CD casebook with bonus tracks. You can purchase it via our webstore at Bandcamp.
Pale Shades Of Grey – Heavy Psychedelic Ballads And Dirges – 1969-1976
Pale Shades Of Grey- Heavy Psychedelic Ballads And Dirges – 1969-1976, the third release in a trilogy.
More info and links to buy this psychedelic trilogy at Bandcamp.
With Pale Shades Of Grey, we complete the trilogy Egon started with Forge Your Own Chains and followed with Tickets for Doomsday – another batch of rare, largely uncompiled – and sometimes barely heard – heavy psych-rock. Pounding drums, scathing fuzz guitar and morose, contemplative lyrics will bring you up on a downer.
Pale Shades Of Grey, as the title hints, is and perhaps the most contemplative of the series, ruminations dark themes of love, death, pain and triumph, as performed by high school and college bands, Nigerian rockers an Irish pub band from Michigan and, above, a group of somber land-locked Nebraskans dreaming about being by the ocean. A unique and compelling listen, and surely a worthy companion for these times.
The Definitive Vinyl Reissues of Joe Bataan’s Legendary Ghetto Records Catalog
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Joe Bataan’s Ghetto Records catalog includes 7 landmark albums of Latin jazz, deep soul, raucous boogaloo, and heavy salsa. The albums are now available in stand-alone LP format at the Now-Again Bandcamp.
Ghetto Records was Joe Bataan’s way to get over on The Man and out of the ’hood, a bold move by an artist looking for independence and creative control in an industry that had exploited his talents and treated him like chattel.
As Bataan puts it today, “Ghetto Records was part of my journey, a stepping stone to everything else that I’ve done. I learned enough that it enabled me to get out of the box with my thinking, it showed me how to deal with adversity.” Like many dreams and schemes born of the street, this one was audacious, perhaps even reckless to a fault.
Hatched from desperation yet full of hope Ghetto Records came crashing down shortly after its inception. The seven albums in the Ghetto discography languished out of print – until now. These are the definitive reissues of these albums, licensed from Joe Bataan, with his oversight and input into a 15 page oversize book by Pablo Yglesias that details Bataan’s larger-than-imagination life and his little Latin label that could.
“There’s a reason that it took nearly half a century for Joe Bataan to allow these records to be issued again – his label was born out of rebellion and frustration with the music industry. He refused to be burned a second time,” says Eothen “Egon” Alapatt, Now-Again’s founder and president. “It took years to gain his trust, and I knew I would finally earn it – because I, too, wanted to know the true Story of Ghetto Records.” MORE