While Haight Ashbury was in full bloom, Laurel Canyon awash with fey folkies and the Sunset Strip a-go-go with guitar bands, Rockford, Illinois was celebrating the opening of a new Chrysler factory. The blue-collar city, situated on the banks of the Rock River and just a short drive from Chicago, was the kind of place the freaks passed through on the road to some other happening somewhere else. Yet, as in every city big or small, if you dug deep enough you’d have found a burgeoning underground music scene turned on to the Beatles and thrashing their guitars along to the Yardbirds and the Who. In fact, at the tail-end of the 1960s, the Forest City had no less than two bands, Fuse and Pisces, toiling away on the toilet-club circuit that would eventually be heard outside the city’s limits. Fuse would, by 1974, change their name to Cheap Trick and rock out to mass worldwide audiences. Pisces, apart from three rare-as-hen’s-teeth 45s on the local Vincent label, had to wait another 40 years to be heard.
Now, thanks to Chicago crate diggers Numero Group, a reissue label chiefly known for their excellent ongoing “eccentric soul” series, we can all have our hearts, minds and ears warped by some of the most exciting recordings to ever bubble up out of the 1960s psychedelic stew. With unfettered access to the master tapes, which have been carefully stored away in founding member Jim Krein’s basement ever since the band’s studio burnt down, Numero has compiled a “best of” 15-song collection entitled A Lovely Sight. It takes a leisurely, tripped-out stroll through inventive, haunting soundscapes of psychedelic pop playfulness, crepusclar garage punk and a handful of bewitching bluesy, psych-folk numbers—the latter menacingly breathed into life by a 17-year-old singer called Linda Bruner who’d initially gone to Krein for guitar lessons.
By the time Bruner had joined the band in 1969, however, Pisces was down to only two members, guitarist Krein and keyboard player Paul DiVenti. And like the Beatles before them, only on a far smaller budget (which they supplemented by recording local acts and jingles), they had retreated into their studio and given up playing live. Nevertheless, it appears that, audience or no audience, Krien and DiVenti’s imaginations burnt brighter than the devil’s own lava lamp.
http://rockasteria.blogspot.co.il/2013/12/pisces-lovely-sight-1969-us-cool-trippy.html
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