Often touted as the Japanese Black Sabbath by blowhards and those who’ve not actually heard the music, the excellently named Too Much hailed from the large city port of Kobe, where the band members grew up sucking in all kinds of western influences from the LPs and 7” singles that came in on the boats.One of the band – guitarist Junio Nakahara – had spent the late ‘60s in the blues group The Helpful Soul, whose sole LP features in this book’s Top 50 on account of its deeply inspired 10-minutes plus plodathon ‘Peace For Fools’.However, as its audience could never have perceived The Helpful Soul as anything more than another Group Sounds act, guitarist Nakahara decided to jump on the burgeoning New Rock bandwagon by forming the more appropriately named Too Much.Nakahara’s inspiration came from the TOO MUCH concert that The Helpful Soul played with the newly-formed Blues Creation, in Kyoto at the end of February 1970.
The hippy phrase ‘too much’ was already utterly cliched in the West by this time, but it was iconic and easily pronounceable to Japanese.In the process, Nakahara hooked up with hard rock singer Juni Lush, changed his own name to the more substantially New Rock-sounding Tsomu Ogawa(!), and dragged high school mates Hideya Kobayashi and Masayuki Aoki along as the rhythm section.They signed a deal with Atlantic Records in the summer of 1970, and wrote a whole slew of mindless proto-metal anthems, including the excellent ‘Grease It Out’, ‘Love Is You’ and ‘Gonna Take You’.These were duly recorded and sounded mindlessly, monolithically, perfectly suited to the lowbrow audience Too Much was aiming to please.
Unfortunately, the Atlantic businessmen saw in the be-afro’d Juni Lush another potential star in the mould of Flower Travellin’ Band’s Joe Yamanaka, and they pressured the band into adding several mawkishly sentimetal ballads to the debut LP in order to widen their audience.The results were disastrous. No one needed yet another version of Bobby Dylan’s ‘I Shall Be Released’, particularly the Nipponashville abortion that Too Much delivered. Hey, but neither did they require ‘Song For My Lady’, the arduously phlegmatic 12-minute album closer which arrived replete with megastring sections, Michel LaGrande pianos, Moody Blues flute solos and nere a six-string razor in sight.Too Much was just not enough, and they split soon after the album was released...
Yet another Japanese hard rockers with their only one album. It opens with monstrous "Grease It Out" with typical Sabbath's riff and vocal manere (but not with such voice) "like Plant". The second track is so funny - "Love That Blinds Me" - free cover "Since I've Been Loving You" (begins with the words "“Working from early in the morning Till late at night everyday...” :)) with similar melody. But if not keep in mind this curiousity the rest of material is not bad - and tuff songs ("Love Is You ? Gonna Take You") and power-ballads ("Reminiscence" ? "I Shall Be Released"). And the last composition that ends the album is very good - sympho-prog 12-minutes long "Song For My Lady (Now I Found)" with flute, acoustic and mellotron.
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Source: Japan SHM-CD Remaster
Tracklist
01.Grease It Out
02.Love That Binds Me
03.Love Is You
04.Reminiscence
05.I Shall Be Released
06.Gonna Take You
07.Song For My Lady (Now I Found)
01 - Fire Fire
02 - Vacuum
03 - in my life
04 - Low Love
05 - Stardrifing
06 - I Was Once Aware
07 - Could It Be Forever
08 - Fantasy Moods
09 - Angel
10 - Alone
11 - Afterthought (Original version)
01 - Albert's Shuffle
02 - Stop
03 - Man's Temptation
04 - His Holy Modal Majesty
05 - Really
06 - It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry
07 - Season of The Witch
08 - You Don't Love Me
09 - Harvey's Tune
Road to the Sun 05:37
Jac Mool 00:44
Fantasy in Fiction 01:35
Jac Mool 00:16
Crystal Tunnel 02:57
Three White Horses 02:43
Catatonia 01:33
Suffering Wheel 01:40
Guido the Magician 02:45
Powis Square Child 02:30
Old Maid Prudence 05:21
Humble Chortle 01:52
Jason's Ennui 03:52
110° East + 107° North 03:21
A Weekend in Mandraxia 06:08
Life Is a Circus 06:14
Falling Ships 03:20
In the Future 03:29
Lin-da's Jukebox 05:58
You and I 03:43
In Love with You Babe 04:24
Up for Grabs 05:47
Info:
Nowadays we're all fans. Or at least we're told we should be. We need to be entertained and demand new familiar or not-so-familiar sounds to satisfy our consumer instinct. For many, music is more about selling and buying than creating. Looking back at "psych" music we can check any number of musical commodities and ask ourselves, "Was it pop with ornamentation or something heavier and far-out?" In our disposable age it's hard to see the effect that an album could have artistically, especially in retrospect. Bands now are happy to ape each other with ironic glee or frustration for a time when pop music seemed very important. The frustration also seems to be with the overwhelming entertainment directive that guides so many of our lives.
But in 1969 Roger Bunn put together "stream-of-consciousness" words with jazz rhythms and acid-psych, punctuated by the occasional James Brown horns, to make a unique album. How many albums, even in the sixties, captured the real sense of unknown territory evident in Ken Kesey's "Merry Pranksters" bus rides?
All through "Piece of Mind" we hear songs that have the same mythic sense of exploration that was about more than fashion and drug use. The need to entertain is certainly not just a new phenomenon. Even the Beatles "Magical Mystery Tour" seems pulled between the demands of well-crafted radio-friendly pop expectations and the sense of abandon and new territory suggested by psychedelia. They pull it off pretty well of course (as they tended to do), but one could argue that this split between commercial expectation and artistic development is really what broke up the Beatles in the end. "Magical Mystery Tour" (the film anyway) certainly didn't go down very well at the time, and it seemed to be a possible sign of self-indulgence. But maybe in retrospect we can see that it was just a sign of the complexity of the times and the difficult balance that's needed to recreate an experience that is truly internal and "psychedelic" in a way that can be enjoyed by all.
With "Piece of Mind," we have a real testament to one person's take on many of the influences of the time, and the journey is definitely as inward as it is outward. Looking back, there will be those who prefer more pop with psychedelic tinges in their music, as well as more accommodations for listeners who want their music a certain way. But this is an album that sets its own standard. While the Doors plastered some jazz chord changes onto "Light My Fire," they also couldn't escape the blues background that placed them firmly in a traditional setting. "Piece of Mind" is part jazz as well, but the sound changes from song to song, and it points towards the experimentation of bands like Can, Agitation Free, and the German rock of the 1970's. Listeners may hear cues from folk, jazz and psychedelia, but it's really an album "sui generis" that stands out as an anomaly. People may love it or hate it, but that could well have something to do with where this album points towards, and the listener's attitude about the developments in music and marketing that occurred throughout the seventies.
Regardless, this James Brown meets Arthur Brown meets Pete Brown sort of eclectic style is definitely ahead of its time. Although there is some folk and plenty of acoustic guitar to be heard, this is not a traditional album. The reference guide "Tapestry of Delights" calls Roger Bunn's "Piece of Mind" 'weird but serious pop-sike.' You can hear that in the album along with a whole lot of other sounds. Meeting Roger one afternoon and listening to him weave a conversation from history and religion through politics and music, (the whole time accompanied by gentle improvisation on his electric guitar), I could tell that this was a person who puts a lot of himself into what he does. "Piece of Mind" is definitely of a time, but as a message from Roger himself, it also makes you see the artificial limits of our rush for "new" sounds and things. There is new and old, and then there is truly adventurous music. "Piece of Mind" has some of the sound of a particular time in musical history, but it also has the enduring sound of someone trying something different. And it's that second part that goes a long way towards explaining the difference between commodity-based entertainment and art.
Dead Man's Band - 01 - Follow Me
Dead Man's Band - 02 - Far From The Sun
Dead Man's Band - 03 - Nothing Here
Dead Man's Band - 04 - Lady Fantasy
Dead Man's Band - 05 - Empathy
Dead Man's Band - 06 - Behind Smoke
Dead Man's Band - 07 - In the shadows
Dead Man's Band - 08 - Far Away Ride
Dead Man's Band - 09 - The Last 4 Minutes
Medusa - Autodestrucción
Medusa - Caminando rumbo al cementerio
Medusa - Crepúsculo
Medusa - Después de la tristeza
Medusa - Genes de maldad
Medusa - La sombra de Nieztche
Medusa - Medita sinceridad
Medusa - Momentos en la vida
Medusa - Noche
Medusa - Rompesueños
Medusa - Tan solo lo hagamos
Medusa - Tratando de olvidar
