In a thread entitled Band You’ve Had NO Success Turning Friends Onto, Townsperson Petesecrutz bemoaned:
I have faced much difficulty in turning friends on to Amon Düül and Amon Düül II.
I believe this is the band I’d seen small, mail-order ads for in ’70s magazines like Trouser Press. Wasn’t there always something a bit pathetic about this band’s attempts at selling their music? I seem to recall them having a proto-Dungeons & Dragons luster that made critics snigger. However, as I often find while reading Comments on Rock Town Hall, I became intrigued by Petesecrutz’s very personal plight. Shortly thereafter, I figured I’d give this band another try.
I’d sampled some of their songs in the past, but they didn’t click. I can’t recall which album I started with, but this time I went on eMusic and started with something called Wolf City by version II of the band.
I sampled a number of tracks and, among others, downloaded the following:
Amon Düül II, “Jail-House-Frog”
Let’s face it, for a fan of The Doors‘ “Peace Frog”, the title was highly appealing. Before this number peters out into peaceful frog sounds and then an early Roxy Music-style jam, it’s got that slightly awkward twin-guitar attack I love on The Pretty Things‘ SF Sorrow album. I have a friend who gets mad at me for liking that album. “They can’t write a song to save their life!” he yells at me. I could care less with that twin-guitar fuzztone they get. “Jail-House-Frog” was not the revelatory slice of hippie-psych I’d hoped for, but it was worth trying some more downloads.
Amon Düül II, “Sleepwalker’s Timeless Bridge”
All right, now here’s some of the smelly, hippie, communal-living, psych-rock that I’d been hoping to hear! Many moons ago, when I dated a hardcore Deadhead girl who surprised me by owning a bunch of Gong albums among her Dead boots and the Dead Package Deal of assorted albums by The Band, Van Morrison, and Little Feat – and James Taylor’s Greatest Hits. I borrowed a stack of Gong albums, certain to find enlightenment. It was not to be. Have you ever heard that band? They’re all the in-my-face, look-at-the-trails-maaaaaan, hackey-sack kicking nonsense that turns me off about the Deadhead sideshow. Gong did not deliver, but had they delivered way back when, they might have sounded like Amon Düül II playing “Sleepwalker’s Timeless Bridge”.
For those of you who know me well, as much as I can enjoy the unintentionally funny stuff and guitar tones of such music, these two songs from Wolf City did not exactly strike paydirt, but they held promise for getting me to the next level, the Cult Admirer stage of a rock nerd’s life. The album Yeti, which I downloaded in full, might be the bridge I sought!
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