We’re technically jumping into the ‘70s with these compilations when there’s still plenty left in the ‘60s worth mentioning. The Procol Harum assortment with the inexplicably celestial cover is from ’73, Spooky Tooth’s set with peeking tiger from ’76.
Further violation: the latter (she’s peeking, right? why else show only her upper half?) wasn’t actually issued by A&M. It comes from one of several UK record labels Jerry Moss and Herb Alpert distributed stateside for a hefty chunk of time, in this case Chris Blackwell’s Island Records.
That business detail is why I’ve chosen these retrospectives to represent the impactful leap into rock Mr. A & Mr. M took in ’68, shortly after Jerry returned from Monterey Pop convinced they desperately needed to catch up with a revolution already fully underway. Soon enough they’d build an A&M rock roster all its own, but to accelerate their ambition they inked deals with several burgeoning British boutiques: Island, Chrysalis, Regal Zonophone and more.
Procol Harum, a prog-rock progenitor that still doesn’t get its proper due, and Spooky Tooth, who have more worth hearing beyond this sampler, are among many English rock bands — Free and the Move are two more, Humble Pie and Fairport Convention two more beyond that — whose US presence was purely A&M’s doing, starting in ‘68-‘69.
Common among all the groups I just named: they’d issued debuts by the time Moss and his team entered the picture.
That masterpiece of psychedelic mumbo-jumbo ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’? Not an A&M release. Yet it leads off ‘The Best of Procol Harum,’ which is — although the collection might better have been titled ‘A History of Procol Harum.’ Half of it is culled from the band’s bona fides (‘Shine on Brightly,’ ‘A Salty Dog,’ the symphonic ‘Conquistador,’ all A&M releases); the rest were pulled off B-sides, never before on a long-player. Useful, but not entirely the band’s very best.
That oft-covered chestnut ‘Tobacco Road’ as remade by Spooky Tooth? Not an A&M release. But virtually everything else on this best-of *was* issued under that imprint, from bluesy early jams like ‘Better by You, Better Than Me’ and their must-hear sludge take on ‘I Am the Walrus’ (I prefer it over their version of ‘The Weight’) to later nuggets like ‘As Long as the World Keeps Turning’ that preview the pop heights keyboardist/vocalist Gary Wright will soon scale with ‘Dream Weaver’ and ‘Love Is Alive.’
Gary Wright, you might recall, just left us in September. Keith Reid, who was to Procol’s Gary Brooker what Bernie Taupin is to Elton John, died in March. Brooker, by the way, as fine a veteran figure of this era as Steve Winwood, if half as celebrated — he passed away in February 2022. Just another reason these retrospectives make such a nice pair. Doesn’t help me overlook those ugly-ass covers, however.