Their lyrics were often inspired by the author of the same name. Er, can we talk? In truth, what little Lovecraft I’ve read didn’t do that much for me. My literary correctness may suffer for saying so, but this guy wasn’t nearly as hot as his reputation would have you believe. Anything by Stephen King could eat him for breakfast. H.P. had great concepts, but for a horror writer to go on for pages at a time telling you how unspeakably horrific something is, rather than getting off his ass and showing you, just doesn’t make it. Lovecraft The Band thankfully weren’t under quite the same obligation, and for two LPs (both of which were too short, as I’ve been known to growl about a lot of great albums), they delivered the goods.

Their sound incorporated the rollerball instrumentalism and massed harmonies of the Jefferson Airplane (sans Grace on one hand, but in tune on the other), but with the added plus of keyboards. Brilliant keyboards. And top-notch vocals as well--one of their several lead vocalists had opera training, and while all were extremely competent their live sound was just raw enough to make them fun. Unlike the Airplane they were much more multisonic; they could write in a wide variety of styles. In fact (again unlike the Airplane) almost every cut on their two albums was a real song, with a recognizable melody an’ ever’thin’!

Their very, very best was “The White Ship,” on the first album; it wasn’t at all necessary to have read the Lovecraft story to appreciate the recording. Every second of it is invested with the craftsmanship that forged the 1811 ship’s bell that strikes the first notes of the intro. Add a french horn, slow martial drums, a Farfisa, three-part harmony, tidal guitar, and a lyric about exactly what the music evokes: the sensation of endlessly sailing upon the white ship--and the remainder of a doomed lifetime is compressed into three minutes of vinyl.

But all is not lost; for ten cents one could board “The Time Machine” and be anywhere, anywhen, so long as you didn’t mind the advertising jingle: they called this stuff “jass” back around 1917, and we’d probably call it dixieland today. Ragtime of a sort; nothing Scott Joplin would have stopped to spit on, but more than good enough for Irving Berlin. Whatever, I call it better than “When I’m 64,” notwithstanding such gratuitous crap as “it’s really keen!,” “yasssssir!,” “23 skidoo” and “voh-de-oh-de-oh-doh.” It’s not as if novelty tunes were all this band was good for, either--their covers were outstanding. Their take on “Let’s Get Together” (that old “smile on your brother, try to love one another right now” riff, remember?) came out like something you’d hear on a Belafonte record! “High Flying Bird” on the second album was perhaps the definitive version of that tune as well.

All these are fairly minor compared to things like “Wayfaring Stranger,” “It’s About Time,” “The Drifter,” “The Mountains Of Madness” (the other magnum opus), the haunting “Black Jack of Diamonds,” even the pompous “Keeper of the Keys” (the operatic vocal’s so over-the-top it’s positively thrilling). As with “The White Ship,” having read the original story might open another dimension of appreciation (it might--we’re not talking book-vs.-movie here), but it’s not necessary. All of these are very strong, heartfelt, urgent (even “Black Jack” is urgent, quietly urgent) songs, the kind that stick with you for days you’ve stopped playing the record. And those of them on the Live CD take on yet another dimension of appreciation. Unlike so many acts who’d just go out and jam for an hour, these guys were an incredibly precise machine, as much a drill press as a rock band--the entire ensemble deadly accurate down to the last paradiddle of 32nd notes. Check out the live “It’s About Time”--they can launch into a contrapunctual fugue, with guitar, keyboards and percussion playing off of each other for minutes on end, gradually increasing the dynamic tension, building to a whirlwind crescendo that --BAM!-- stops on a dime, plops you right back where the song had started from and (to astonished applause) nonchalantly picks up the next verse as if the last several minutes of activity had been a mere whim. And for all that, there was none of the solemnity or even politeness one normally associates with such rococo interludes--indeed, the secret word for the night is “arrrrrrrrrgh!!”

Back in the studio, there was no shortage of strange moments; there are a few stray observations that come to mind every time I play these albums, the how or why of them never to be explained. For instance, on the first album their lead guitarist (who had had plenty of time and no shortage of ability to work up any sort of lead he wanted) ripped off the first few bars of the “Taxman” solo--several times. In different songs, even! Some of the vocals in “Spin Spin Spin” (particularly during those very words) sound spookily like David Byrne. And no less a luminary than Mr. Word Jazz himself, Ken Nordine, has a cameo on “Nothing’s Boy” (his main accompaniment being a 16rpm tape-looped chant of “zero-zero-zero-zero”). Their producer could do things with an echoplex that...well, more people should do with echoplexes. It was used for keyboards and vocals rather than guitar, and at settings and speeds at which lots of producers today (the mediocre ones) would turn up their noses. Employing it to create the aural equivalent of 3D, time-travel and strobelight is considered unsubtle and therefore cheesy, or so these by-the-book guys will tell you. Neophytes all. If I want “subtle,” I’ll play a Yanni record.

Hmpf. I guess I don’t want “subtle.” When I put it that way, neither do you.

Lest we forget the humans standing behind the special effects, let’s tip our hat to Dave Michaels, a truly brilliant keyboardist. Nobody (excepting perhaps Billy Joel--a year or two later at least, when he was in his horrific Long Island garage bands...I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow thy soul, freeze thy young blood...) has played a clavinet with such abandon in a rock context at any point since the demise of the ’Craft. It’s an instrument that lends itself to all manner of funketeering, but Dave couldn’t be bothered. For all his progressivism and all the ten-finger counterpart Bach inventions he’d memorized as a child, he was a rock and roller at heart and he lived to pound that sucker. There’s a theory that most keyboardists are frustrated guitarists. If so, the fact that the clav contains real strings and magnetic pickups under the hood makes the ideal tantalizingly within reach and yet ultimately unattainable. The effect upon a young, hormonal rock and roll keyboardist consigned to such a fate is such that he mutates into a psycho killer, karate-chopping his way through every riff to the point where he can no longer remember whether he’s a frustrated guitarist or a wannabe drummer. But after the 60s end he finds that if he wants to carry on in such a fashion he’d better buy a Moog synth and memorize a few ELP albums, because the poor clavinet is now primarily in the hands of people like Billy Preston. Which makes for some fine music, but none of it is what anybody would call rock and roll. It’s a shame, too, because the clavinet is one of the coolest keyboard instruments extant and deserves a kinder fate.

So did the band. Their demise is rather typical of the era...they did too many drugs, pissed off Bill Graham, had troubles with their record label, spent their money unwisely, and blah de bladiddie blahblah.

They dropped the “H.P.” for their third album, Valley of the Moon. I guess this was what one could call a shrewd career move--it insured that the band would have two entries in various databases a few decades later, as well as two places for the clerks to file their albums in the record store. It’s a dangerous game to play. If (just hypothetically) you happened to work in a record store, a band like this could get you in trouble if you weren’t careful--where the hell do you file them? Under ‘H’? Under ‘H.P.’? Or under ‘L’? Under the counter until you can clear it with the manager? But if you forget to ask about it, they might think you’re planning on stealing the damn thing!

A situation like this can cause no end of dilemma, particularly if you happen to be working for a paranoid schizophrenic control freak named Laurel, which was precisely my situation. We never had any run-ins over Lovecraft (mostly because all the albums had gone out of print and the newly-released Live CD was a special-order item) but I’ll never forget how every week she’d redemonstrate her incompetence by taking Van Dyke Parks out from the “P”s and throwing him in with the “V”s. I never could convince her that he was a person whose name was Van Dyke.

Now that I think of it, just maybe it could have been a gay thing--well, not a gay thing but a paranoid thing. (No no no no no, girls and boys, I am not homophobic. It was a case of working under someone who was heterophobic. I wandered onto the subject not to defame anyone, but simply because this can happen, it did happen, and one never hears such things mentioned. Having said that, I’ll also say: the homophobes I have known have uncountable times made me momentarily ashamed to be straight. Let’s move on.) That the turnover rate in her store was around 90% should tell you all you need to know. On top of everything else she had a persecution complex--she believed everybody there hated her for her orientation. Silly girl--if she hadn’t gotten herself fired for...well, incompetence, besides the fact that control freaks always lose their jobs...I’d love to have sat her down with a hot toddy and told it like it was: we didn’t hate her because she was gay. (Not the guys, anyway. Why should we care?) We hated her because she was Laurel!!! As for the Van Dyke Parks business, it’s not inconceivable she thought that this was my sneaky li’l way of pulling her leg. (“Van Dyke, get it?? Hyuk, hyuk, hyuk!! Hey, get it, Beavis?!”) When in truth the very concept of pulling her leg was nightmarishly unthinkable.

What has this to do with Lovecraft? Not much, really. It’s just one of those little autobiographical digressions we all wuv to see in the middle of a band review. Thank you for putting up with it, love ya, don’t ever change. Unfortunately, it was that very quality--of nightmarishness--that was precisely what was lacking in Lovecraft’s work from that point on. Valley of the Moon showed the effects of several personnel changes; it found them in a pleasant-enough CSNY vein. Nothing special, but not bad either. Still, having shifted gears so radically (pretty much dumping one constituency of fans while going in search of a different one) they should have had the common courtesy to change their name completely. It’s so annoying (isn’t it?) when a band tries to carry on milking a name that (depending on your perception) either they’ve outgrown or they are no longer worthy of trying to live up to. Look at Genesis. If you really wanna blow $30, that is. (I only listen to their first two LPs as well.)

There were further changes for Lovecraft as the 70s ground on, leading them into a funkier direction. Their final album earned them the description “looking and sounding like a satanic K.C. & the Sunshine Band.” That album (We Love You Whoever You Are--at least they had a little fun dreaming up the title) ended up in the $1 bins, and still no takers. I recall my first exposure to H.P.; I gave a tape-trading buddy (who owned all four studio albums) carte blanche to fill the dead air after H.P. Lovecraft #1 & 2, expressing some curiosity over that final album--he opted to give me a mediocre pre-band single or two (one of them a decent Dylan ripoff featuring Steve Miller on slide guitar, pre-San Fran) and tracks by other progressive 60s Chicago bands: Aorta, Bangor Flying Circus. Better to give me crap like that, he felt, than to have to deal with even taking We Love You etc out of its sleeve.

So we’re talking about an album that an unreconstructed H.P. Lovecraft fan refused even to give away! *LLLOL*

Still and all, we can snicker at them all we want but it does no good. It’s not even worth the effort to show up at one of their gigs and douse these flatuli with patchouli, hoping to induce some kind of musical/olfactory flashback within them. There are only one or two original members left, if that. And who are we to tell them what to do? As of the mid-80s at least, this final funk-rock incarnation of the band was still gigging around Chicago (and had gone more years with no personnel changes than the original lineup had ever existed) and they seemed to be reasonably content. Perhaps they deserved better. But don’t we all?